domestic diversions

today was a sweet day.  we stayed in and played.  kids being kids.

chloe laid out breakfast:

the house special:  leaf and twig soup

the view from chloe's side: her first picture-taking attempt

multipurpose ;-)

chloe has been begging to get paint for uncle andy's easel since they got it, almost two months ago.  we finally did, and the girls love it!  there's surprisingly little mess too, given that we're talking 6 bottles of paint, 2 bowls and 2 brushes.  plus, we have a practically endless supply of packing paper to paint on.  if anyone can think of a profitable use for toddler artwork, we're generating it at top speed here ;-)

all done!

have i mentioned that chloe has a memory like a steel trap?  i picked up some water balloons in the dollar rack at target soon after we moved, but i kept telling her we'd play with them with daddy sometime, since i never felt like getting them out.  naturally, she doesn't forget this sort of thing, so with summer winding down, i thought we'd give it a try today.

i know, i know, you're sick of jumping pictures, but i couldn't resist =)  i love the golden evening light -

a lecture to myself

i've had this nagging unsettled feeling the last couple days, a week maybe.  restless perhaps, uninspired, not really excited about anything.  i finally put my finger on this odd and unfamiliar emotion - i'm bored!

i can't really remember the last time i was bored.  with two toddlers ('nuff said), groceries to buy, meals to cook, clothes to wash, shirts to iron, rooms to clean, oh yeah and paying work to be done - who has time to be bored?  apparently though, one can be busy and bored.

a few things keep coming to mind as i try to puzzle out this conundrum:

1) i need to make some local friends.  i miss walking to friends' houses, spontaneously meeting at playgrounds, picnics, outings, laughing and groaning about the kids' deeds and misdeeds.  i miss the rare but treasured ladies' night, when we never even got past the kitchen to sit down because we started talking and didn't stop till 2 am

2) i'm not excited about work.  this comes and goes, and there's really no solution to it, but there's been a lot of turmoil lately and i've ended up with some responsibilities that just aren't that fun

3) i can't get over the feeling that i just want to sit down and read a good book.  not sure exactly when i'd do it, but anyone help me out here?  maybe my brain just craves something without pictures and longer than 20 pages ;-)

upon reflection, i think this is actually what happens to a lot of stay-at-home moms, and it's a little surprising that i haven't felt it before.  the world seems to consist of endless to-dos, but unless you are intentional about it, it's easy to forget why exactly all those things should be done.  without purpose, boredom is inevitable.  but wait.. one playground, one painting, one teeth-brushing battle at a time, slowly but unstoppably, two little people are growing up, and i will never again have as much input into their lives as i do now.  put that way, who has time to be bored?

a few of our favorite things

for those who are curious, we escaped irene's fury with only about 8 hours of power outage and no damage to speak of.  the rain and wind even power-washed part of the siding on our balcony for us ;-)

by this afternoon, we had a beautiful day-after-hurricane, so i thought i'd leave you with some miscellaneous pics from the last month or so.  not raindrops on roses, but still, some of our favorite things =)

lucy

first time she did the puzzle by herself - 'i diiiid it baby side!!'
(it's a two-sided puzzle, with the mamas on the other
and has since been completed approx. 4,256 times)

'i have bike!  has pedals!' 
(note that chloe's bike is not one of her favorite things,
at least when it's moving =p,
but the picture was too cute to pass up)

cowgirl =)

make that a climbing cowgirl

chloe

hanging off anything

hide and seek (yes, this is a hide ;-) )

climbing walls - she made it all the way to the top before i even noticed

generally being goofy =)

and a few of mama's 

at a trial My Gym class - i love that with all the equipment
in the room, they manage to end up together in a 2 1/2 foot circle ;-)

only my two girls would fit in a single cart =p

thrilled to find dandelions to blow





picnic at one of our favorite playgrounds

twenty seconds on a tuesday

it was a grumpy day.  not just any grumpy day - one of those super, duper, extra grumpy days where everybody just needs to go back to bed and start over.  unfortunately, only mommy seems to recognize the wisdom in that ;-)

 

i'm the first to admit, i was the grumpiest of all, not helped by the 'MOMMMMY... GET UP!!' alarm clock with no snooze button.  (this actually happens relatively rarely on weekdays, to be fair.  the girls are not generally early risers, though they have been more of late.)  what's worse than being rudely awakened?  awakening to a steady stream of whiiiiininnnng.  groan.   i sent chloe back to her room so grumpily that lucy started crying just listening.  not my best mama moment, to say the least.

 

by midmorning, i decided we all needed a change of scene, so we drove down to Cabin John Regional Park.  now that is a playground!  i wish i had gotten some better pictures, but it was all i could do to locate the girls as they explored at least ten different types of play areas. 

jumping is the new national pastime, didn't you know?

 

 

after we made the rounds, we hopped on the train:




 

i had to work pretty hard to keep the girls awake on the ride home.  just as we were finishing up lunch, i was putting away dishes and they started to rattle.  given our neighbor's complaints, my first thought was that someone was refinishing the floors upstairs.  but the whole building was shaking.. i opened the shades to see if someone was jackhammering outside.  right about when i started to get suspicious and move protectively towards the girls, it stopped.  'what is it, mommy?  what is it?'  it wasn't until i got a text from ben - 'hope you got outside' - that i replied definitively, 'that was an earthquake.'

twenty seconds. 

T minus 5:  trying to keep the residual morning grumpies out of my reminders to the girls to finish their lunch. 

T minus 0:  annoyance - who is jumping around and shaking things?

T plus 10:  puzzlement

T plus 15:  enter mama bear.  how do i protect these two disobedient, irritating, infinitely precious children?

everything is an opportunity.  there are plenty of moments that remind us of our fragility.  we can accept the gift and think deeply and carefully.  or we can brush it off as the day's curiosity and be no more changed than a man looking in a mirror who walks away and forgets what he looks like (1).

epilogue
ben suggested that we stay outside for awhile, so i grabbed my handy dandy diaper bag with its half day's worth of little girl essentials and told chloe to grab some books (as if she needed to be told).

we continued working on our vertical:

and left no doubts about what a certain 3-year-old would grab in an emergency ;-)

(1) - james 1:23-24

daddy's girls

nothing sweeter =)

like father, like daughter

she thought the boneyard was the best part of the game ;-)

apple turnover from the king farm farmer's market



i'd say it was a hit =)



monuments and memorials

almost two months into our stay in the dc metropolitan area, we finally ventured into the iconic national mall.  'twas a lovely, sunny, late summer day, not too crowded, and punctuated with only a few metro mishaps on the way ;-)

chloe looked like such a big girl in her corner seat on the metro, with her purse and her chewing gum, studying the map:

lucy was a little less enthused by the train ;-)

i'd forgotten how imposing the washington monument is:

and how touching and sobering the war memorials are.  this is part of the world war II memorial:

the highlight for the girls - their first italian ice =) we got a lot of smiles and chuckles for scenes like this:

it was a long outing, and with the warmth and the sunshine, it was bound to end up like this =)