So many kids

A couple weekends ago our friends the Bergums were back in town.  We ended up getting a bunch of the gang together, and it was just like they'd never moved to Atlanta!  Especially for the kids - it's amazing how they can pick up playing together like they just saw each other last week.

It was a gorgeous day for a bbq, so I brought along my camera and took waaaay too many pictures.  Too many cute kids to take pictures of!

Signs of spring

As I'm sure you've picked up on, we are having the most amazing early spring.  Other than the obvious signs (like the 70+ temperatures, with lows in the 60s!), we can also tell it's spring because there are kids running wild through the neighborhood in shorts and flip-flops, the ice cream man has driven by twice, and now... my daffodils are already blooming!

And my tulips are not far behind!  I'm thrilled - I just planted the bulbs last fall and wasn't sure I got them in soon enough, and our soil is pretty iffy in general.  But they're coming up - yay!  Now I just have to hope we can avoid the inevitable snow that'll come our way before we can truly declare it's spring...

Random update time!

It makes me laugh that two posts ago, I posted pictures of the boys in the snow.  I haven't updated the blog lately because we've been too busy playing outside, in our shorts!  Last week was Zach's spring break (it's still funny to me that a 5 year-old can have a spring break), and we didn't need to head south to find a beach, it was absolutely gorgeous here!

Anyway, on to my random updates about our two goofy boys:

Charlie has been noticing letters and numbers.  He'll see some letters on my shirt, on a sign, wherever, and point and them and say "A, B, R..."  And no, he isn't right.  In fact, he often says those same letters while pointing at numbers.  He occasionally throws in an "I" sound, but for the most part we hear those three letters.  One of these days I'll get video of it, cause it's pretty darn funny.

Scott and the boys often go to Target on the weekends, as part of their breakfast outing.  Exciting, I know.  A couple months ago they came home and Zach excitedly told me there was a t-shirt that Scott wanted for his birthday, and he wanted to get it for him.  Great.  I took the boys to that same Target a week or so before Scott's birthday, only to discover they had that shirt in a medium and an XL; Scott usually wears a large.  I explained to Zach they didn't have Scott's size, and he decided we should get the XL.  Here was his logic: well, it doesn't fit him now, but he'll grow into it in a few months.  Hopefully Zach is wrong and Scott won't "grow" into an XL anytime soon!  :)

With the gorgeous weather, we've been spending a lot of time outside.  Charlie LOVES it; you ask if he wants to go outside and he just runs for the door, grabbing his shoes.  And when you open the door to the garage, he always heads for the same thing: the blue push-car my parents got him last year.  He loves it.  It's very cute, except when we're heading into the garage to get in the car to go somewhere, and I have to chase him before to get him in my car, as opposed to his!

We had a solid month where no one in our house was sick, and it was positively delightful.  But a bit of a stomach bug and colds have hit many of us, and last week that resulted in us canceling a playdate.  The next day, Zach said "Mom, I would cancel Charlie's sickness if I could."  If only.

If you want Charlie to come running, start putting toys away.  Whenever I toss his cars into the plastic bin I (try to) use to corral them when no one is playing with them, or if Charlie gets up in the morning and finds all the cars in the plastic bin, he immediately dumps them back out again.  Arg.

Zach said something the other day about God being able to fly.  This was news to me, and interesting, so I asked why he thought God could fly (I didn't think they taught him this in preschool.)  His answer:  invisible people can fly, and God is invisible so he must be able to fly.  Huh.  Solid logic, I guess.

With the warmer weather, Charlie is no longer wearing a onesie under his clothes.  He's absolutely delighted with this, since it means he can show you his "bee-bo" - his belly button.  Well, he tries to say "bee-bo", which is from a Sandra Boynton book we all love, but unfortunately he says something that sounds more like "bee-bee", which is quite disconcerting when he's pointing at my belly.

Zach climbed up on the couch while I was reading the other day, and peered down at my book.  He said "Wow, that's a lot of words. Why aren't you saying anything if you're reading all that?"

A Perfect Moment

The two ingredients/background to the perfect moment:

1.  I love to read.  I enjoy tv and movies, but if I had to choose, the book would always win.  It's my favorite way to relax, escape, be entertained, etc.

2.  My boys have a witching hour.  Between 4:00 and 5:30 PM is my absolute least favorite time of day.  I don't know if it's that they're getting tired, I'm getting tired, we're all getting hungry, or some other weird biological/environmental factors, I just know that's the time of day when you are most likely to hear whining, crying, and yelling at our house.  The boys always want to play together, but it seems to be the time they are least capable of doing so successfully.  I do my best, but sometimes I don't have the energy to play in order to keep the peace either.  In summary: it isn't pretty.

So, imagine the moment earlier this week as I was trying to finish making dinner at some point during that witching hour, when I realized what I was hearing: silence.  I looked up, and made a beeline for my camera so I could capture the perfect moment:

Yep, my two boys, independently happily engrossed in books.  One reading, the other "reading,"  Yes, I did notice they couldn't relax, sit down and curl up with their books; one even has just have one foot on the ground, but I don't care!!  A. Perfect. Moment.

Wheeeee!

We got some snow last week, a whopping two inches or so.  The day before I had found a deal on some snow tubes, so we were ready to go.  Zach, Charlie and I gave it a try one afternoon, but the snow was already starting to melt and we kind of sunk more than we slid.  Huh.  It was also Charlie's first real experience walking around in snow, and it took him a while to decide that was ok.

Over the weekend the weather got colder and the snow got harder - perfect sledding conditions.  So Scott and Zach zoomed down the hill next to our house over and over again; Charlie gave it a try but wasn't so sure about the whole thing.  I have to say, I was a little relieved; he's a daredevil about most things so it's nice to know there's one potentially dangerous activity he didn't immediately embrace!