Off to see Grandma and Papa

The boys are off to visit Grandma and Papa and go to day camp in Chicago.  Julia and I were in Pennsylvania this weekend visiting my law school buddies and were fortunate enough to have a long layover at O'Hare on the way back to Des Moines, so we stopped by Grandma and Papa's house for dinner with everyone.  (One of the benefits of living so close to O'Hare!)

Grandma and Papa have a beautiful backyard with a summer house, bubbling fountain and a patio and these gorgeous vines and flowers. It is a magical little spot that feels like such a relaxing getaway.  When I asked the boys how their first few days away went, they crowed "We had so much fun that we didn't even miss you at all!!"  I told them how awesome that was, and that I told them I hoped they enjoyed every minute with their Grandma and Papa.  I love that they are at an age where they can so thoroughly enjoy a visit like this.

Invention Lab

Welcome to the boys' workshop, or as they prefer to call it, their Lego Village Creation.  They happily spend hours in their rooms assembling, disassembling and re-creating things out of these tiny plastic parts.  Legos have been around since I was a kid, but my brother never was really into them when we were little and I didn't play with them either.  AJ discovered them around age 4 and David was not interested until he turned 4 as well and caught the bug.  I thought the interest would pass like it has for Thomas the Train and Transformers, but Legos seem to have more staying power.  Maybe because there are endless things to be created or because there are sets that become more challenging as you get older.  As a parent, I support this interest wholeheartedly because the product is educational and the language of the cartoons is age appropriate.  (Unlike Transformers, where one character said to another "Tell me what's on your mind or I will blow your brains out and see for myself!"  Yikes.  And very 1980s with insensitivity to gun violence in schools that we deal with today.)

When I see this table in the boys' room, I always think of an inventor's workshop with pieces of one invention next to a completely separate project in a way that makes sense only in the beautiful mind of the creator.  I encourage all of this play and wonder if someday the boys will invent the next great healthcare technology or come across a new scientific discovery.  Julia does not show a deep interest yet, but I am curious to see once she is four whether she gets the bug, too.

Puppy Love

We started off dog sitting for a 140 pound black lab and I very unexpectedly fell in love with him.  He is polite, he is calm, he listens to me (at least someone in the house listens to me!) and he follows me everywhere.  When Joe travels for work, I feel safer with Charlie's loud bark at the doorbell and snoring on the rug next to my bed.  He has been with us now for about three months, and the one who is in love the most, though, is Julia.  I didn't realize until Charlie's arrival how often Julia is the odd man out in play with the boys. As the youngest and the only girl, she is often marginalized, and while the boys will usually play with her, there are many occasions when they are in Legoland or simply do not want their pesky little sister to be part of their play.  Charlie's arrival has brought Julia a new best friend.  She hangs on him, follows him everywhere and says "Chaw-lee" about 1,000 times a day.  She even gets him to play princess with her, and Charlie patiently tolerates this, although he is not the most enthusiastic about this type of play.

Summer Reading

Grandma Francie and Papa came recently and brought some more good books.  Grandma Francie brought The Odyssey, which I wouldn't have thought to read to the kids, but they love it and we are reading it for the second time.  She also brought the old Hardy Boys books Joe read when he was in elementary school.  I checked these all out from our local library in Earlham, so it was nostalgic to see them again.  We are also working our way through Charlotte's Web and some books from the Magic Tree House series.  AJ is going to a YMCA day camp this summer and one day this week took a Magic Tree House book to camp and his friend, Sam, finished reading him the last three chapters.  I remember loving to spent a whole morning or hot afternoon reading when I was a kid.  One day last week, it looked like this at our house.

Settling into Seven

Is AJ really seven?  Seven??  How did that happen?  We had his friend party this weekend and in the span of the two short weeks since school ended, AJ and his soon-to-be first grade buddies suddently seem much more grown up.  No one's parents stayed for the party (one mom told me she prefers to stay but her son asked her to leave, saying, "Mom! You're not going to STAY, are you??")  When I gave AJ his birthday card at home on his birthday, it was signed "Love, Mommy & Daddy" and he promptly informed me that he would prefer it if we would refer to ourselves as Mom and Dad from this point on.  And then when I asked AJ what he hopes to do when he is seven, he thought and said there is only one thing, to climb a mountain using a rope, a pickax and some other tool.  I think he saw this on a Looney Toon cartoon, but Auntie Nicki awesomely took his request very seriously and told him he could do this the next time he comes to visit her in Colorado.  Somehow seven is light years away from six. 

Davey-o-Dile

Meet the newest creature in the neighborhood, the Davey-o-Dile. Two summers ago, Davey was terrified of the water and would cling to me even when wearing a life jacket.  He did not venture off the steps of the pool unless he was forced to.  Last summer he got slightly more comfortable and would do a little bit of jumping in off the edge as long as someone held on to him and he was wearing a life jacket. This summer he is already putting his head under willingly, jumping off the side ("back up, mom! way, way back!") and swimming underwater.  It is so much fun to see him develop on something that was such as challenge in the past.  He seems to love it.