Are we having fun yet?: Sun already??! You are right. I was just kidding

T asked me why his pillow had feelers. Feelers?! I looked at what he was pointing to. It was the little thread pieces in his pillow cover that are like a tied quilt. I guess that's a good description of them.

I have a video of them in their dump trucks wheeling themselves around the driveway. T was the best at it. They were playing wheelchair dumps because they had "broken foot". T was imitating it very well!

I've been racking my brain to figure out to get t to stop hitting. Something the pediatrician mentioned was a book about acknowledging feelings and she kind of gave me a premise of the book. Basically the idea is to talk about his feelings. I never though to try it on t because he is a boy and why would he want to talk about feelings. But it is working like a charm at the moment. When I see that he is having a majorly negative feeling, i just talk to him about how he probably feels such and such because such and such is happening while I hold him gently and he does well by not hitting and figuring out a good choice to the problem. Who knew! A boy talking about his feelings. Might as well keep this tactic up for as long as it lasts.

E has a very cute laugh. Right now the sound of ripping paper really sets him off. As long he is doing the ripping. One of w's tissue paper flowers from aunt b got wrecked that way. He is also growing and we didn't know he could reach it.

And of course e is eating everything. He really likes rocks and pine cones and rocks. But don't all babies?

I call him maniac baby. He gets this name because he is a maniac in the bathtub. He can do all sorts of stuff in the tub and it freaks me out because I keep thinking he is going to get seriously hurt, but no. He also crawls around a bunch, more than I remember t and w doing. He crawls in the bark at eh playground, crawls up the stairs, he just tries it all. I have to constantly be on the watch out.

And he has the most adorable set of thighs, so I love him to pieces.

W has taken to hiding. She hides from guests, but she also hides to get away from t. One night I told her she could play some games on the iPad since she didn't push baby brother around during bath time. T wasn't able to play because he hadn't followed the rules. She knew it. She knew he would also really want to play the ipad if he saw her with it, so she hid behind the dollhouse and turned the volume off so he couldn't find her. It totally worked.

She also loves to hide in the bathroom. These are the only two places in the house that have a lock. She plans it out. She brings toys in to play with. Alone. Without brothers. She also likes to redecorate the stuff in my bathroom when she is there

We've had four days of fabulous sun. Well, sun means there is sunshine and clouds instead of just clouds after 12 pm. This is the definition of sunshine here anyway. It's probably been around 55-60 degrees. So obviously it is time to go barefoot and get out swimsuits for water play. Obviously.

We are all majorly adapted to this climate change now if my children can talk me into such nonsense with only a little prodding. I let them get out a bucket of water each, get their suits on and run barefoot in the drive way. I knew the one bucket would last about an hour, the remaining time of direct sun on the blacktop driveway we have. There was no wind that day, so the air warmed up enough against the house that I would go for it. Because I have learned through sad experience that days like this are very very ra and short in durations, so we have to take advantaged. They loved it. They jumped in the buckets and ran around decorating the driveway with their barefoot prints. Then they made pathways with the water by painting with their brooms.

Our neighbor has a fabulous wood pile. I asked permission to take the joy school group out to it to play on the logs and dig in the sawdust. We had great fun. And when the group came back the next time, one of the students asked right away if we could go to the log pile. Sigh. I should have asked permission for that day, too.

But we did something I loved, too. I stole the idea from my auntie Jill. We made shaving cream clouds on the wall of the tub. We were learning about the water cycle and found it to be a perfect excuse to do that art project instead of cloud pictures with cotton balls. I thought the boys in the class would love to squirt the wall and go to town on it. Yeah. It was ok, but the two that loved it the most were actually two of the girls. I think w loved it more than t.

We went to the park on one of the sunny days to fly a kite. Didn't work out too well. But this kite has long annoying strings that turned out to be very successful. They ran around trying to catch them in the wind while I tried to get the kite in the air. Finally I realized that flying the kite successfully that day was that they could capture the strings. They called it wild running strings.

We read books and snuggled in the sun every day.

Another really rare thing here is it to be warm enough, dark enough and clear skies before 8 pm bedtime. When this happens, we go outside to look at stars. I think we all absolutely love it. There is something about it that calms us all down and they start talking like crazy. Probably be cause it is one on one time. We did it twice this week and were sad when the other nights were cloudy.

I got some weeding done during outside time while e was sleeping. They like to help me. T collects his "moss" in his wagon. W tells me she got weeds out so the other plants will have nutrients. And t pointed out that the stupid deer ate some of the daffodil leaves. Sigh. Whatever they hear must come out. It's true. I do say stupid deer very often.

Something I remember as a kid was "going on vacation". My brother and I would haul books up in a tree by makeshift pulley and read while mom and dad worked in the yard. They did something similar this week while I was weeding. They brought their chairs out and put them in the Rhody bush and filled their wagons with books to read.

While I was weeding, w was talking my ear off. This was a day I let her go barefoot. Going barefoot also helps loosen the tongue. I don't think she stopped moving, talking or generally being happy because she could go barefoot. One of the things she did during this time was stand amongst the daffodils and say "these are my temple daffodils". I think it is because there are so many daffodils at the temple and I love taking pictures of them there every year. There is also a big patch of moss in between the daffodils she found with her bare feet. She learned about how lovely and soft moss is.

I had a lot of fun preparing the joy school lesson this week. Everyone else in the group decided to use the joy school curriculum, but I just couldn't get excited about it. I have found that I enjoy being with them when I create the curriculum. This is only fun because I teach once a month for two days. If it were more than that, I would probably stress out about ideas, but for now it is fun. We did come fun experiments out of the book I got for christmas. The best part was putting in the food coloring. There were some sad comments later that they "didn't get a turn doing the experiment " meaning they didn't get to put in food coloring.

We got lots of books about water cycle, rain and clouds from the library. I didn't do the request soon enough and only got the non fiction ones. The non fiction closest to a story stuck the best. When we went to the park today they played "stuck in the drainpipe" in the slide and stairs. The other kids trying to use the slide were not amused. T and W were pretending that they were "drop" just like in the book.

W loves to decorate. She is constantly arranging stuff around the house or creating things. She made a bunch of pictures for the family and hung them up with tape in our room, above t's bed, etc. then she rearranged them later. She also does this with our real house decorations. It kind of drives me nuts but occasionally she will find an arrangement of items I like better than what I had out.

We also went to the park this week. We haven't been in a while, so they had a blast checking out all the new stuff they can do now that they are older and bigger.