Summer Weekend

In an effort to embrace life and my children for whatever they offer, I've been working on relaxing my expectations and thinking. Instead of being more focused on what needs to get done I'm looking at my children & their abilities & interests and taking learning opportunities wherever we can find them - however inconvenient it might be. You may think this is an obvious or easy thing to do...but as you can hear from my last post, it's not exactly either for me. We're getting there.

Friday morning began with a playdate. My sister, brother-in-law, 3-year-old twin daughters and 7-month-old son came over for about an hour and a half, I think. They live across the country so this is a rare treat in itself. It was their first opportunity to see our home and neighborhood, and we came up with a few projects & snacks for the big kids to work on. Great fun for all!

Saturday began with brunch at my parents house since my sister, brother-in-law & 7-month-old were heading back home to WA later that day. We ventured down to the school playground behind their house for more activity.

Saturday afternoon we finally tackled a project we'd been putting off "for a better time" for a few months, I think. Anson "helped" from his pack & play, and...

Simon got right into it. He tried to help with his play tools but quickly realized the screwdriver didn't fit, so we helped him use the real ones. He was so proud! The best part is that we now (finally!) have a bureau and therefore enough storage space for both Adam and me to put our clothes away.

Another project I'd been hoping to accomplish since we moved in to this house consisted of shelves for the boys' bedrooms. We had two wood shelves & four wood brackets that needed work. I found several great colors of leftover paint through Freecycle and let Simon choose the colors for his shelf & brackets. We still have to do a few second coats, but expect pictures when they're finished. They look great - and again, Simon was deeply proud of his involvement.

Saturday afternoon Simon and I had also made some "message boards" out of cardboard scraps and clear contact paper. I put one up in my kitchen for quick reminders, phone messages, etc. and assisted Simon in making a little one to practice writing letters & numbers on too. We headed out to look for wet-erase markers (after 3 stops: go to an office supply store for them! Walgreens & craft stores don't carry them.) and ended up with a few extra project items from the craft store clearance rack. Sunday afternoon Simon and Adam made several critter puppets...again, look for pictures soon.

Time for a little gaming squeezed in somewhere too...as well as a little D&D strategizing Sunday evening.

And Anson chugged along through it all, "helping" as he can. Did I mention that he's walking everywhere now? He pretty much has no use for crawling anymore. It's toddlin' adorable.

The final "project" of the weekend was an amazing salad...I reinvented a cobb salad I ate once at Old Chicago (excellent) and tweaked it to Lange perfection: hormone-free grilled chicken, organic raisins, organic hard boiled eggs from free-range hens, organic baby bella mushrooms, organic strawberries, organic cherry tomatoes, shredded sharp cheddar, a generous sprinkling of dulse and a dash of crunchy "salad topper" (I don't know what they are...but we didn't have sunflower seeds that I could find and happened to have acquired a bag of salad topper crunchies along the way...) all arranged on a big pile of organic baby spinach leaves. I would have crumbled some bacon on there too, had I the time & ingredient, but it didn't feel lacking. I used an organic balsamic vinaigrette dressing; Adam used an organic dairy-free ranch. We decided after this meal that we need to look into some larger bowls for "big-salad dinner" days in the future. Yes, we had seconds. Yummm....

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