home sweet home

[warning: lots of text and no pictures!  i'll make it up to you, I promise ;-)]

back to the present!   after a few weeks of indian summer, the fall weather has arrived in a hurry.  yesterday was c's third day of kindergarten.  projected temperature for bus time?  42 degrees =p

a quick summary of post-move life:

in French, there is a non-quite-translatable word: bonheur.  it sits somewhere among happiness, contentment, satisfaction, joy.  it has crossed my mind often in the last few months as i've soaked in the goodness of family life, the wholesomeness of fresh air, the miracle of growing children, and the plain old fun of having all my kitchen gadgets back ;-)  i guess i'm not a city mouse because i absolutely love being able to buy Byron-grown corn out of the back of a pickup truck, raiding our neighbor's garden (by permission) for cherry tomatoes, and counting the herds of cows (4+) and horses (3+) on our way to Target and preschool.  after the initial weeks of 'eww, bugs!', the girls have adapted to their newfound outdoor freedom, and can literally spend all day digging in our neighbor's abandoned sandbox, inventing new ways to play on the monkey bars, water painting on the driveway when i've watered the hanging basket, making leaf soup, playing wheelchair with their scooters (we recently watched Heidi), and so on and so forth.  it just makes me happy to look out the window and see them running down the backyard in their flip flops (it's all i can do to get them to put any shoes on), jumping to pick the tiny crab apples, making dandelion bracelets, all while keeping a close eye out to see if miss r, our sweet teenage neighbor, might come out to play on her trampoline.

of course, this is not to say life is perfect - there are plenty of 'you have to go downstairs if you're going to whine' moments, plenty of 'i can't believe i'm in this power struggle with my 5-year-old' moments, plenty of 'oh dear' (as c would say) moments, like backing into my father-in-law's car (*cringe*), like dropping my beloved camera, causing the touchscreen to stop working for six weeks before it spontaneously recovered - hallelujah!  ;-)  we have a few fledgling friendships, but no real buddies yet.  that is okay - most of the time =)  i can't speak for ben - i think he would agree about life on the home front, but let's just say that his experiences at work are rather less enjoyable.  poor guy!

about the kiddos of late:

c
the most amazing recent development in my mind has been her reading.  she read her first book, Hop on Pop, before Christmas last year, but in the last six months or so, she went from painstakingly working out easy readers to reading the entire first book of The Boxcar Children (no joke).   sometimes i think i can hear those neurons firing as she mouths words along with her pointing finger (reading silently has been a new discovery too ;-)).  the other day, as she built a wall on her house of blocks, she told me her block was going to 'agregarate' (ah-GREE-ga-rate), which means 'to turn' in c-speak.  don't ask me where she comes up with these things!  she will listen to audio books for hours.  sometimes i bribe her into folding laundry by letting her listen.  she still dislikes just about any kind of meat besides bacon ;-), though she can eat her weight in melons and berries.  we've had a few occurrences of screaming-at-the-top-of-her-lungs tantrums, which usually escalate from some trivial disobedience that she is too stubborn to admit (no, she's not related to me, really).  the consequence for this is a week's worth of no treats, which is a major blow to our resident sweet tooth.  thankfully, it's only happened three times or so =p

l
this one loves to be outside.  she's become quite adept with her two-wheeled scooter, which she routinely thanks me for =)  i found her doing the monkey bars backwards yesterday, and climbing the (small) tree in our front yard a few weeks ago.  she taught herself to do a back walkover using our big red ball as the drum like she saw the big girls do at gymnastics in md.   she has an affectionate, people-pleasing nature (with both its good and bad connotations), loves to be helpful, especially with cooking, and often tells her sister that it's her turn to pick something, only so she can choose exactly what c wanted in the first place.   she's quite observant, often anticipating what I need (diapers, for example), so that she can have the pleasure of bringing it to me.  she loves pancakes and waffles, anything daddy grills, and sometimes goes back to sleep on the couch after her bowl of cereal =)  she has some surprisingly deep thoughts mulling around in that little head, asking things like 'what does God say?' in a discussion about accidentally squishing ants outside.  this morning, she asked me to pray for c at school.  unfortunately, she also has a penchant for telling tall tales that we are working on =p  she's our girly girl, always drawn to fancy dresses and pretty things.

s
guess who is crawling?  not quite officially as in up on his knees, but he pulls and kicks himself across the floor effectively enough that the gate has gone up across the stairs =p  he can sit up, but has a penchant for toppling as soon as he reaches for something.  he's become vocal enough that we've started putting him the nursery at church, but he's still content tagging along everywhere in the bjorn, routinely falling asleep in it when i'm at bible study =)  for an almost-six-month-old, he entertains himself amazingly well with his baby toys and his toes.  of course, he also has two doting sisters ;-)  since we moved, he's been downstairs in the room next to the girls, and last week was the first and only time i've had to get him in the middle of the night (4:45 am).  he'd just moved into the crib finally, and i think he was getting his arms stuck in the slats =p  he usually sleeps about 12 hours a night.  tonight was his first taste of rice cereal!

so there we are!  I promise more pictures and fewer thousands of words next time! =)