Black & White

As as long as I've had a camera I like, I've hated using it at playgrounds. They are always oversaturated, super bright primary colors that distract from the kids and create color casts all over the place. I have no idea why it never occurred to me to just switch my camera to shoot in black and white. Duh.

For the last couple weeks we've been strict about getting school done right after breakfast so we can get back into the habit of daily school, but since it's going to be so hot for the foreseeable future I decided we needed to resume early morning walks to the park and save school for the heat of the day (because yes, I actually turned the air conditioning back on). These picture are almost entirely of Gussie because the three older kids rode their bikes to the park and instead of playing on the playground they spent most of their time riding their bikes around in the grassy field under the trees.

The classic determined face of a 2-year-old.

Gussie brought a small suitcase full of toy cars with him to the playground and sent them down the slide one by one.

Occasionally Catherine made a quick stop in the playground to run the monkey bars or these slidy bars, whose intended purpose I do not understand at all.

When it was time to go, Gussie happily packed up his cars and headed home.

He came to a "T" in the road and couldn't decided which way to go.

That little suitcase was just killing me. He walked for probably a half mile before he finally crawled into the stroller.

Then I found one in color and totally over-edited it, just for fun.

The end.

Summer Is For Growing

I'm actually having trouble comprehending how it got to be August, how summer got to be nearly over, and how Michael Jr got big enough to ride a bike on his own. He wants to practice non-stop. His first question almost every morning is, "Mom, after we eat breakfast can you watch me outside on the sidewalk?"

Gussie wants to take over all the garden and yard duties.

But honestly, I'm not letting him! Other than the strawberry patch, nothing else that I've attempted since we've been at this house has been very successful. This year I started a bunch of different flowers from seed and decided to plant most of them on the front hill in the sun, which required hours and hours of moving actual soil into that spot to replace the concrete-like clay. And it is actually working! We have 6-foot sunflowers, 3-foot high zinnias, marigolds that have turned into bushes, a tomato plant that is actually producing tomatoes instead of just leaves, and very happy borage and calendula. So I'm not letting Gussie take all the credit.

 The kids are apparently also trying to grow some birds. They were eating muffins on the porch the other day and noticed the sparrows in the bush eyeing the crumbs, so they dumped the rest of the crumbs off their plates onto the porch and backed up into the doorway to watch.

This picture has nothing to do with anything. Gussie and Michael decided to pick up all their toys with tongs yesterday. And Gussie prefers to wear nothing but a diaper pretty much every chance he gets.

He also really likes watermelon.

I was moving another year of pictures from my computer to a separate hard drive yesterday so my computer would actually work again, so of course the kids wanted to see every single old picture I had on the hard drive. Luckily we only got through most of 2012 when they saw the couch picture and got distracted because they wanted to recreate it right away. So here is the original from August 2012:

And here is August 2014:

And then this happened:

I Not Two

We've been trying to explain to Gussie for the last few days that he is two now. Whenever we tell him that, he replies with,

"I not two."

[giggles]

"I two."

[rolls on the floor]

"I not two."

[attempts a headstand]

So, basically, he's made an airtight case for being two.

There are a lot of perks to being two, one of them being that you still recognize that everything is amazing and wonderful, even a single balloon being bopped around on a string by a favorite uncle.

Also amazing: music. We've had a lot of experience with musical birthday cards, but Grandma brought out one that trumped all the rest, simply because of the song it plays: Who Let The Dogs Out.

For the record, how that song has persevered is something I will never understand.

At first Gussie was just mildly amused that the card made noise when he opened it. 

Then after a few times he heard the words and kept responding to the card, "Let the dogs out?!" Then he started to notice that whenever he opened it, adults in the vicinity would spontaneously start waving their arms around in dance. He decided to test this out when we were all sitting around the table outside. He walked up to Grandpa, opened the card, and stared him down until the dancing started. Then he closed the card and moved to the next person until he had goaded every adult in the house to dance to Who Let The Dogs Out. Out of respect I don't have any pictures other than of Michael Jr, whom Grandma convinced to dance as well (possibly against his own better judgement).

It's ok. He still knows he's the coolest.

Grandma had everything else we needed for a proper party, including hats! Gussie wasn't so sure about the string on his.

So Catherine delivered his to Papa instead.

Gussie needed some help blowing out the candles, but he did not need any help devouring his cake.

And he had a really good time showing off toys old and new to everyone who came to celebrate with him.

If you missed the party and want to celebrate with us, just send a video of yourself dancing to Who Let The Dogs Out.

Summer Rolls On

It's August! Since Catherine started soccer practice this week (Mary's starts next week) and the planners I got for the girls' school start with the first week in August, I decided this would be a good week to ease us back into a regular school-every-day schedule.

But since having their own planners is motivating the girls beyond anything I could have imagined, they are busting through our light school schedule in about an hour each morning, so we're pretty much free by second breakfast. That leaves plenty of time for summer fun still.

Unfortunately I've mostly been taking pictures of other people's kids lately, but (luckily?) I still have a few backlogged from July.

This is from way back before we left on vacation. We met Carrie and her kids for some clambering at Turtle Park, and Sophie happened to be outside when we were getting ready to go so she came along as well (because really, why go anywhere without a kid in every seat in the van?). Just take a moment to look at each individual kid in the picture. I love all of them.

Oh, Miss Mary. This girl still never stops singing. Flying down the sidewalk on her scooter... singing at the top of her voice.

If we have to go more than a few hours without some sort of physical outlet for Michael Jr, it could take twice as many hours of this type of thing for him to settle into a manageable balance again.

Uncle Tommy and Aunt Jena are in town, which means we got to watch some bike racing! The race not too far from us follows a circular path through a park, so we can sit in one spot and watch the racers go by about ten times during one race. A better setup could not have been engineered for Gussie. Every time a bike or pack of bikes came around the corner to go by us again, he would light up and shout, "Nother one bike coming! Nother one bike!"

Michael Jr also still gets really excited by a good bike race.

In fact I think he was so inspired this time that he asked if we could get out the pedal bike his size so he could learn to ride it. We've had one in the basement for a while but the one time I had it out he sat on it for a second and ran back to his balance bike. But yesterday he spent about ten minutes figuring out the pedaling while I kept him steady, and today after about two minutes of that he took off faster than I could run beside him! He rode his bike by himself the whole way to the park and back for soccer practice this evening, which game him a lot of practice with the starts and stops. So, no pictures, but another balance bike graduate, just like that.

And a totally random picture of Catherine with our first softneck garlic harvest a few weeks ago.

4th of July

Well, I hope you enjoyed the photos from the last Cape Cod post because that's pretty much all there is. I have a few random shots, like this one of Grandma and the kids swimming in a lake while it was raining because the kids really wanted to swim in spite of it being cool and rainy and since we had spent the whole morning cleaning up the rental house we decided to let them swim (I lucked out and had to sit with Gussie, who had fallen asleep in the van).

And this is how Gussie spent his early mornings at the house we were staying in. He loved those chairs.

But I only have one picture of our last few days there. Two of those days were mostly spent at two different lakes with friends swimming, kayaking, water canon fighting, and paddle boarding. I was in the water about as much as the kids and there's no way my camera is getting near a kayak, paddle board, or water canon squirting war, so it mostly stayed packed up. Here is one pictures of Catherine working on her steering skills on the paddle board. I only had to swim out to get her once because the wind was blowing her out into the lake and she couldn't figure out how (or wasn't strong enough to) get herself turned back to shore. For the most part she did great! She even did all the paddling the next day when we went out in kayaks.

So, since I don't have anything else in the way of Cape Cod pics, how about some long lost 4th of July photos? Yeah, that seems appropriate for August.

You have to excuse the focus problems in may of these photos - this was while I was still figuring out the best way to work around the failed controls on my camera.

Grandma and Grandpa had us over for a 4th of July shrimp boil feast. Even though they did all the prep/cooking/party work, the kids still made them expend a lot of extra energy.

Catherine and Grandma might wear the same shoe size, but Grandma still has some power.

Gussie loves the 3-2-1 blast-off rocket swing.

Apparently Daddy and his brothers adorned their wagon with this "twinkie power" sticker ages and ages ago, and it made me laugh extra hard when Gussie was trying to pull Michael up the hill in it.

He's either dive-bombing, head-butting, and surprise-attack wrestling you, or totally chilling. It's a good life for an almost-2-year-old.

Here's our shrimp boil spread out on the table...

Mary was a big fan of the shrimp.

This is Michael, telling me exactly how the hot air balloon firework (but without fireworks), floated up into the sky and just kept going and going and going. They loved it!

Everyone also enjoyed the growing worms, like normal.

And then Daddy lit one of the screeching/spinning ones in the road. That was the end of fireworks for Gussie. At the slightest noise we had to retreat inside, and he cried when I carried him outside to the van after dark when it was time to leave because there were booms everywhere.

I think Olivia and eventually Mary came inside as well while Daddy and Grandpa lit some fireworks in the park. We left late enough that we got to watch random fireworks all the way home from the safety and comfort of the insulated van, just the way Gussie likes it!