the best

Sakina is the best. The boys were racing their bikes up and down the driveway and Lullaby was playing in the sandbox.  Sakina went over and curled up next to Lullaby. It was so sweet.

Lullaby isn’t very gentle on Sakina yet, but Sakina doesn’t seem to mind much at all. She is the best dog.

Lullaby dumped fistfuls of sand all over her (face included) and Sakina didn’t budge.

Sakina, we love you. You are perfect.

Piedmont Park

The Rogers are some of our favorites here in Georgia. Our kids are the same ages, Adam and Paul are both doing the medical thing, Megan and I get along wonderfully. It's a great match. We spent the day feeding ducks.

The boys took their bikes to ride down the hills (a new favorite).

After the park, we went to the toy store. We spent a while there and managed to get out without buying anything. Thank heavens for being poor. :)

cake stand

My mom bought me this super fun cake stand for my birthday (thanks mom!) and I love it. And I use every excuse to use it. It's too much fun.  One of the days I pulled it out to display our dessert for after dinner. The boys were so inspired, and finished their dinner faster than I have ever seen them eat. It was so nice not to have to remind them a million times to finish their food.

After dinner, they got to decorate their cupcakes, sprinkles and all. It was magical.  The boys of course were extremely disappointed every night after that though when we had no cupcake decorating...

boysenberry jam

Paul got a package from his grandma. She canned and mailed him a jar of her famous boysenberry jam.   We were all excited to try it.  We bought english muffins the next morning and LOVED it. Best jam ever!

Paul says: "Every bite of this boysenberry jam tasted like a flavor dance party in your mouth.   Grandma Berg, thank you for the experience that was your boysenberry jam, that will forever be seared on my palate for life. Gangsta gangsta."

We ate the entire jar in about a week. It was SO tasty. Thanks Della!! You were so sweet to think of us.

fun with friends

Dries and Petal invited us to play at a park near their house. It was a cute little park hidden away in the woods. The kids and I loved it.

Running up and down the hill from the woods.

Matix found a tiny green caterpillar, picked it up, named him, kissed him and set him free in a new home (a better looking shrub near the playground).

nine

Matix loves the movie “9” – Don’t judge me for letting him watch this fairly intense movie, he loves it and gets a lot of good s tuff out of it, I swear. :)  Anyway, one of the things he learned was what each number looks like.  The characters are very memorable and their names are the numbers printed on them.  Number nine is Matix’s favorite, but he can draw all the numbers one through nine correctly – although sometimes backward.

Look at those dirty hands and bitten fingernails... 

school

Matix loves going to preschool. Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9am until 1pm. He is in the Owls class.  His best friend Dries is in the Fireflies class and those two classes are together for part of the day, which I know is Matix’s favorite part.

I am so intrigued by all the things he has been learning there. He comes home and will bring up little things, that I know he didn’t learn from me. He can pump on a swing now, and says things like, “Well I think you should have a turn now, that’s fair.”

The school has a very nice family feel to it and the kids are often doing little projects and talking about their own families. One of the times they were collecting family pictures. We went through the ones that we had and the two that he picked to share with his classmates were of a time he went on a small boat with Hawken and grandma Stacy in Miami and the other picture was of him feeding a giraffe.

He is very proud of the artwork he makes there. I have a few painted crab apples in my kitchen windowsill right now. They do all sorts of cool exploratory art projects. Dipping cars in paint and rolling them down a paper covered ramp… Using (new) flyswatters to splat paint on a canvas… Matix brings home the most interesting pieces. He is proud of all of them and we hang them up in the hall near his room.

I love that Matix goes to school, although I miss him, like really miss him, while he is there. He is so grown up, all of a sudden. My big four year old.

garden

Our garden veggies have done pretty well, considering this is our first attempt at a garden, ever. As kids both Paul and I “had gardens”, but really, all the work was done by our parents… Besides eating. I remember eating lots of stuff we grew. :)  Anyway, one sad day, I looked outside just in time to see Matix picking all the tomatoes. Green, red, big, small, didn’t matter. I was frustrated, but they all ripened in our kitchen and tasted good despite their small size.

The other tomatoes that the adults have picked are perfect. They get to be about the size of baseballs and are tasty treats. We love them.

Then the beets. I decided I wanted to rip out the middle section of garden and start over with more cucumber and green beans and carrots after digging out an enormous any hill, and that meant, it was time to harvest the beets. We weren’t really sure if they were ready or not, but they were okay size and perfect for juicing.

After pulling these up, and what was left of our squash and watermelon plants, we replanted and they are all growing FAST. Hooray for naturally rich soil. 

The boys, of course wanted to try these weird new things.  They didn’t like them too much, but didn’t hate them either. They did love however that their mouths looked like they were bleeding. They thought that was very cool.

trouble

Lullaby has full range of the house, and often while I am cooking dinner or busy with some other thing, she sneaks off, and then I hear her yell for me... "Mamaaaaaaaa!" or just a shrill yell.  One day she figured out how to climb into the bathtub, but couldn't figure out how to get out.

tent

Some nights Lullaby goes to bed early. Hard to believe, but sometimes 6pm is too late for her.  On those nights, the boys and I have extra time to do things, like build a tent in the living room to watch a movie from.

I love that the boys love things like this. It took just minutes to set it up and they talked about it all week. So fun.  Life is good.