… and finally playing outside some! Whew! Fall is here, right? Ok, maybe not. But it’s possible to imagine it is when we can step outside in the evening and the temperature and humidity are not both still 98 half an hour before bedtime.
Here are the girls playing outside tonight on the tire swing and sandbox:
We took our two kiddos plus one cousin to the zoo yesterday, while we’re having a respite from the 100+ degree heat for a few days. I think we haven’t been since right before Sarah was born. Anna thinks we went once with Sarah in the stroller, and her memory is amazing and she’s usually right about these things; I just have no memory or photographic evidence of it. So we’re not sure.
In any case, it was the first zoo trip that Sarah was aware of and able to enjoy. And she did, mostly (aside from a melt-down when we left the playground area before she was ready). She loves making animal noises, and most things said either “woof woof” or “neigh!”. It was really sweet to see her recognize that something was an animal, even if she didn’t know what it was, and assign it some random sound. We did get her to roar like a lion, though. That’s her newest thing, and it just cracks her up.
I’m afraid I only took pictures one place. Sarah liked the penguins, and the penguins liked Sarah:
I’m on a children’s literature kick. After reading the book Honey for a Child’s Heart, which I highly recommend to anyone with children, I am newly inspired to fill our home and our lives with good children’s books. I tend to go overboard with my inspirations, and I have an overwhelming desire to read every good book out there right now, forgetting that we have a lifetime ahead of us to enjoy them, and also forgetting that I need to cook dinner and do the laundry.
Lately I’ve been wanting to introduce more poetry to the girls, so I checked out Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses with illustrations by Tasha Tudor. (I intend to buy one, but I first wanted to peruse the library’s collection to see which version I liked best).
For a baby gift, Anna was given the CD A Child’s Garden of Songs, which is a selection of Stevenson’s poems put to music. I had planned to read Anna some of the poems from the book this morning. Well, as soon as I explained to her what the book was, she went and got her CD, read the titles off the back, searched for the same poems in the table of contents, found them by flipping through the book to the correct page number, and proceeded to read them aloud to her favorite baby doll, Charity, whom she had retrieved from her room just for this purpose. All by herself. She’s four, for crying out loud! I just stood there watching. Literature, rhyme and meter, art, reading, research skills, counting and number recognition, nurturing role-play—all happening at once. If that’s not education, I don’t know what is.
And I wondered what we’d do all summer while she was out of school.
I think this counts as the first time I’ve “fixed” Sarah’s hair:
She just about has enough to do something with! She wanted it down before very long, though.
As you can see, Anna decided to go all out and fix up her hair and her clothes:
She was getting ready for a party, she said. :)
I sew sometimes. Not very well, and not very often, and definitely not very efficiently. But I had this idea to try to make a swimsuit cover-up for Anna out of a towel, and I thought certainly I wasn’t the first one to have this brilliant idea, so I went Googling… and I found a great tutorial! It’s even cuter than what I had envisioned, and the pieces are all rectangles and the seams are all straight lines, so that’s my kind of sewing!
Next I’m going to make one for Sarah from the other end of the towel. Maybe I’ll even start making them to sell! At the rate I sew, I’d have to charge about $100 each to make a decent hourly wage… you think I’d have any takers? Nah, neither do I. :)
I’ve run a few 5Ks before, but this year I’ve been working towards the Toad Suck 10K. And wouldn’t you know it, they have a “Tadpole Trot” for the little’uns, so we asked Anna if she would like to run in a real race like Mommy, and she unhesitatingly said yes! So I ran my first 10K and Anna ran her first race on the same day!
I finished in about an 11-minute mile pace, which is slower than my usual, but it was hot and VERY humid, so my goal was to keep trotting along at a reasonable pace that would enable me to finish the thing on my feet instead of a stretcher.
Mommy and Anna!
The “Tadpole Trot”:
Getting into the spirit of things with our t-shirts:
This past weekend, we finally got this neglected, overgrown, who-knows-what’s-lurking-in-there corner of the yard cleaned out, edged, and mulched. It looks like a flower bed, but the ground is not prepared to plant anything in it because my intent is to use it as a container garden. If I am to have any hope of growing things successfully, I think my best shot is containers. Containers that are just steps from the back door and right next to the watering hose.
Anyway, Anna said, “I like the new garden!” Aww, thanks honey. “Now we need to plant some flowers in it. You want me to help you do that today?” Well, my eager aspiring gardener had to wait a couple of days, but on Monday, we walked (yes, walked! I love this neighborhood!) down to the hardware store to let her pick out some flower seeds. She chose marigolds. Not my favorite, but I think they aren’t too hard to grow.
Let’s hope something sprouts!
My effort to blog more kept me rolling for a couple of months—I blogged about 10 times in Jan/Feb—and then I blogged once in March. Hmm, what happened? Well, here’s more, finally…
Lately Anna has been wanting to eat her afternoon snack at her little table in the family room. One day I just decided to put Sarah there with her and see what happened. She took to it pretty well! I think she likes having snack with Anna at the big kid table instead of her high chair. After all, she’s just as big as Anna and can do everything she does, right? :) She has trained Anna to break up her crackers for her into little bites (even though she is perfectly capable of biting off of a cracker) and Anna willingly obliges.
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