It just shows how far we've come that we could make the decision to drive up there at 9 am and by 10 am be packed, in the car, and waiting outside the library until it opened and we could pick up some books and a new dvd for the road. After that, we were on the freeway and in Sacha's parents' town by 1 pm. In the past, it has taken us an ENTIRE morning to pack, load up, get the kids going, etc, so we are really making progress!
Maybe I should amend that to say that the kids are really making progress. They are becoming great travelers. They both slept through the night at Bubby and Poppa's house, and they did great in the car, too. It is soooo nice to be able to go places again without the dread of how we'll make it through getting there and getting back and how we'll deal with not sleeping much while we're there.
Of course, Mateo's making us pay for it now. He's been trying to go to sleep for almost an hour, but is so overtired from two days of catnaps in the car (the giving up nap experiment has been shelved for now, by the way, but that's another story) that he's having a hard time going to sleep. Well, and staying in his room. Thank goodness Sacha does bedtime, or there would probably be some serious temper-losing going on right now.
Anyway, I just finally downloaded our recent photos and wanted to post a few. Enjoy!
Here are the kiddos hanging out with my brother's awesome girlfriend, Megan. She knew I was having a rough time and offered to come over last Thursday and help out for a few hours. It was such a sweet thing to do and the kids had a great time. Thanks again!
Here's Mr. M playing with a puzzle with a neighborhood friend. This puzzle, lent to us by our kids' older cousins, has provided hours of entertainment. It shows a bunch of typical house scenes and then has see-through pieces with characters doing different activities. You're supposed to match the character with the scene (ie, man with a lawnmower goes on the grass), but Mateo loves to get everything all mismatched. He and his little buddy must have been laughing for 20 minutes over this thing. They'd go up to the other kid's mom and want her to exclaim over each combination, a la: the bed is in the middle of the road! HA HA HA HA HA!!!! Or, the kid is taking a bath on the roof! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!! Hilarious.
Last time Mateo was sick, he got the idea that he gets to watch as much tv as he wants when he's not feeling well, which is pretty much true. He doesn't get to watch it much when he's not sick, so he started pretending to be feeling bad in order to get me to let him watch a video. I may be gullible, but I'm not that easily fooled! However, now, when I do let them watch a video, they both insist on lying on the couch as though they were very ill. It is too funny. You'll notice that Natalia is very graciously sharing Blankie in this picture, which is not usually the case. Normally, they each need their own separate pillow and blankie combination, and preferably those things should not be touching.
For some reason, this one is of me and Sacha's dad pretending to eat Mateo for dinner. I'm not sure why, but one of his favorite things to pretend is that he is our snack/meal/etc and that we are about to eat him up. In the interests of realism, we put him on the table for this one, and I grabbed a spoon. Yum!
Here are the kids yesterday at their grandparents' house. Sacha found this hammock chair from when she was little (when, legend has is, she spun around in it so many times that she unscrewed it from the ceiling and the whole thing came crashing down on her head - ouch!) and got her dad to put it up again. Being very careful not to spin the kids, lest we have a modern day recreation of the earlier accident, we gently pushed them back and forth and they loved it.
Finally, some photos of the amazing container garden Sacha put together last weekend. You can see all the containers on our front steps here. They're full of all sorts of veggie starts, including what will one day be mini-pumpkins (who knew you could grow them in containers?), chard, snap peas, bok choy, lettuce, tomatoes, summer squash, chives, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Sacha has the kids excitedly checking every day for more new baby plants, which is very cute. Natalia likes to pet them, saying "baby! baby!" Our front steps are really the only place in our garden that get enough sun to grow veggies, so that's why we went with containers for this. They may look empty now, but we hope to do a lot of eating from them as the spring and summer progress.
Here are our hanging strawberry plants, which will hopefully complement the strawberry patch we started in our old square foot garden box from last year.
And, finally, the star of the show, our new blueberry "bush"! It's a bit scrawny now, but we hope it will grow up big and strong and give us many berries. All those flowers will probably come to nothing this year, because we didn't plant our second bush in enough time for them to cross pollinate each other. Next year, we hope! We could have quite a crop in a couple of years, if we're still in this house! In the meantime, we'll enjoy the bounty of berries at my grandmother's house nearby. Can't wait for summer. Yum!
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