July

Snippets from July – a trip to the coast, a trip to the river, neighborhood fireworks from the window. We have been so busy with life, work, preparing for big changes and all the little tasks and minutia in between. On the evenings we mostly do chores and get ready to start over, and on the weekends we mostly unplug, relax and enjoy each others company, so I haven’t really kept up with this space. Maybe I will now? Or not. We'll see.

Easter

This girl LOVED Easter so much. At 20 months, finding things and putting them into baskets is already one of her favorite activities, so having new, brightly colored objects with stuff inside to find all over the house and yard was all-day fun.

Her Easter basket was waiting for her downstairs when we got up and she enjoyed that and a few of the easiest to find eggs in the front room before we took a break for breakfast. She is crazy about her new book Nest, and little chick (Folkmani’s finger puppet). She also got the Grimms rainbow (which I hear the bunny planned ahead for and bought at the black Friday sale last year) and eggs filled with lots of socks.

She also got a chocolate bunny because she always points out the one in Curious George and the Chocolate factory, which she thought was funny but only had a few small bites (perfect!).

K is so focused most of the time, it is really hard to catch a smile on camera. She smiled so many times all day, but her smiles are quick little scrunched nose grins at us and then she is back to the task at hand.

I had fun all last month getting her basket ready. It was a plain unfinished one from the thrift store, then I stained it (I was going for a rustic uneven look and am happy with how it came out but it was messy and took forever to try so to be honest I would not recommend that as a DIY, at least not with an oil based stain) and spray painted the bottom gold for a dipped look. I made the Easter grass from strips of fabrics in shades of green and I love how that came out. Shades of pink, peach, yellow or blue would also be great!

Sunday

We somehow managed to time nap to hit both the children’s museum and a friend’s first birthday today in addition to the usual cleaning and laundry, and now at 7pm are feeling both pleased with the success and supremely exhausted.  Commence Sunday downtime to prepare mentally for the work week ahead.  When I first typed that out, I capitalized “nap” which says a lot about the life of a parent and its relative importance.

K had a blast at the birthday party – she loved playing with the other toddlers there, the balloons (we brought a few as our gift since it was a presents not requested party, and coincidentally managed to match colors to the ones the mama had bought already – yay!), and she also loved seeing the family’s chickens and bunnies.  The mama who’s baby turned one is a friend of mine from 20 years ago, which is still hard to absorb.  I was warned that time accelerates as you age, and really rushes by when you have kids, but it’s still hard to internalize even while living it.

We had a little break from teething, but two new ones are just starting to poke through and K has definitely been feeling them.  Lots of frozen treats – favorites include  ice chips, frozen blueberries, peas, and frozen deiced bananas (her nanna’s idea, which reminds me of last month when I offered her banana and she started cracking up.  It took me a minute but I asked “banana? Nana banana?” and she laughed harder and nodded – it was so cute).