3 Posts for the Price of 1 :)

Wow - its been almost a week since I last posted. I guess I haven't been feeling very posty lately, but I have been feeling very commenty on everyone else's blogs. :) Though as I go through each day I'm always thinking "oh, I should post about this or that." So I have an idea, I'll post a bunch of the things I've thought about posting about rather than one long post about any of them... Bear with me, we'll see how it goes.


Our Saturday

This last Sat. we went to a great regional park. It was a huge park with a great playground and even a carousel so the kids had lots of fun. The playground was so spread out that I basically had to stick right with Ben or he would have gotten totally lost. There was one point were panic set in because I was looking all over, up into all the slide/climbing areas and I couldn' t see Ben anywhere. I hate those moments so much when your scanning the crowd for the right color of t-shirt and you're so freaked out that you're never going to see it... Ben was fine, he had just wandered off a little more than comfortable and I herded him back towards the more age appropriate playground equipment. We had some nice family time chatting during a picnic snack of apples, bananas, bottled water, and little Trader Joe's chocolate chip cookies. (Have I mentioned how much I love Trader Joe's! I just discovered this store recently and it has the coolest corner market type feel to it, along with great organic stuff.) I also love picnics with the fam!! I am so glad those times that I actually plan little picnics when we have outings - it always adds to the fun and togetherness.


Our Nina Basket Crisis

As many know I have a basket "problem". I love baskets - I collect them, fill them with anything, put them all over the house, love them... I've tried to limit my basket consumption lately because I have so many at this point that its kind of an issue. Well Nina has become more mobile lately and she also LOVES baskets - but in a bad way. She loves to EAT them. In the past week I retrieved so many little basket sticks out of Nina's mouth that I had to do something about it. She was actually rolling over to the baskets in the bottom of our bookshelves in the family room and prying out loose little sticks with her tiny fingers and shoving them all sharp and splintery in her mouth. I think I was in denial for a couple of days thinking she would stop doing it - I mean it can't taste very good!! But no, she really likes eating baskets. Its horrible. So now my 6 lovely bookshelf toy baskets have been replaced with 6 red-plastic-$3-Ikea-toy bins. It makes me a little sad to even write about it as I look over at them right now - they just aren't as cute. Oh well, someday (hopefully soon) Nina will get over her taste for baskets and I'll be able to put them back, but for the time being it gives me peace of mind to know she won't choke or perforate her trachea with sharp little basket sticks. I guess another post I could write about is what a crazy baby-proofer I am, but that's another story... For that one I blame my vivid imagination of what "could" happen.


Sophie's Poems

Last week was standardized testing for Sophie at school so she didn't have any homework - silent cheer for Jenni!! Instead of homework Sophie decided for herself to write a series of poems each with an illustration. It was so great that she thought of this idea herself and wanted to WRITE!! Writing tends to be a little bit of a hurdle for Sophie. She loves math and art and reading and well anything in school other than writing. A lot of it is that she wants it to be perfect and spends a lot of time pulling her thoughts together and (when she starts actually writing) erasing. But with these poems she really enjoyed herself and there are no eraser marks on them at all. Here's her little poem entitled The Tree: "Waving in the breeze. So sweet and when it's hot your shade is nice." Another is Butterflies: "Flying in the sky. I try to be still, but I sneeze." I think they're really sweet. We had all the pages hanging on the fridge last week and now I think I'm going to put them in a folder in her memory box.