Boy At Rest

We mentioned that Joe took a nap on Mother's Day, but Fans!  He also took a nap Saturday!  !!!!!  Julie and Ted were busy re-edging all the garden beds in the backyard, and along about three o'clock, Joe asked if he could take a nap.  Well, of course!  But nowadays, when Joe asks to take a nap, it's liable to mean can I lay my head down for a minute--literally--and call that a nap.  So Ted asked if he'd like to curl up outside, and when Joe said yes, got the Northwestern blanket that we keep in the bike trailer in case the bambini get cold, and that Joe, in particular, loves.  Joe also requested a couple of books.  After he was all tucked in on top of a towel and under the Wildcats blanket, we heard him reading to himself, before he drifted off, and Ted took these pictures.

This picture is of Julie napping in the backyard, in 2006!  Before all bambini, and before we'd carved out the gardens that are there now.

Tree Trimming

Taking in the show.

 Ted has decided to tackle painting our garage which matches the color of our house before it was re-sided in the wake of a hail storm a few years ago.  The garage is also rather dirty.  A large apple tree grows next to our garage, so the first thing Ted did, was trim it up.  He began Mother's Day afternoon when both bambini were asleep.  (You read that last sentence right, Fans: both bambini--!!!!!  Joe napped, and at the same time as Clara--!!!!!  On Mother's Day--!!!!!)  When they woke up, Julie took them outside for their snack and they settled right in for the show.  When a big branch came down, they cheered: "Yea!!!!!"  After they were done with the snack, they both helped pile the branches up for bundling.  Good times, good times.

Birdie (in bird shirt) at work.

Helping.

Here, the right side has been trimmed up.  The branches used to be as low as those on the left!  They were as low as, and even with, at least the window box on the garage.

Getting There, One Pedal at a Time

And here's another fabulous development in Clara's development: she has learned to pedal her push-along bike.  Oh Brigade.  This is huge.  Huge!  Because previously, she would place her feet on the bike's pedals, but not rotate them, leaving the pusher to do all the work.  That would be just fine, of course, except that her feet would stray to the very inside of the pedal platform, and rest next to its spindle, where it would then stymie the rotation of the crank*, and thus the propulsion forward.  All the while, Clara would be steering--in the loosest possible sense of the word--as the pusher would be steering--in the stricter sense of the word--and in short, it was not the la-di-da frolic one saw pictured on the box in which the push-along bike came.  But now, Our Bird has got this pedaling thing down.

Now, she is also enamored of the bell.  Really Makers of the Push-Along Bike?  A bell?  The old-fashioned kind that require a firm grasp of the operation of the evolutionary wonder that is the opposable thumb, while peddling and--dare the dream--steering?

What Birdie does is stop dead to operate the bell ringer lever with two hands.  You see the problem instantly, Our Dear Readers.

One challenge down.  Many more--and many more miles--to go.

*It's true.  This author has just educated herself on bicycle parts and, more specifically, pedal parts.

Communicating

In other news, Clara will talk your ear of these days.  This week's menu has gotten a little screwy on account of the fact that Julie was sick Monday, so a tomato that was meant for tacos another night became part of a caprese salad tonight.  As soon as Julie cut into hers, Clara, next to her, began murmuring Rain Man like, "I need a nato," (translation: "I need a tomato.").  Also tonight, earlier, when Julie and Clara were on the porch doing puzzles in order to be two less bodies in the busy kitchen, Clara looked at Julie, put her hand on Julie's leg, and said, "Julie."  Julie decided not to get into the whole two-names-for-one-thing-so-Mommy-to-Clara-(and-Joe)-and-Julie-to-others bit. The other morning, Julie was upstairs getting dressed when she heard Clara, clear as bell from downstairs, say, "Mama, where are you?"  And then the other night, Clara quite clearly said "No blanket," and when Julie confirmed with "No blanket" Clara said no, and added, "I hot."  !!!!!  We're like. . .COMMUNICATING!!!!!  And it's totally awesome.

Imagination at Play

It is sometimes fun to walk past a room in Raleigh House here and see the flotsam and jetsam of whatever business in which the bambini have been engaged.  (It is also, admittedly, sometimes maddening to walk into one's home and find it looking like a tribe of wee barbarians has swept through, but such is life these days and soon enough, no doubt--no doubt--one of us will be teary-eyed because we are packing off the cupcake kitchen while the other says "there, there now.")  Above is a picture of is how the living room looked the other morning.  Because you may not be able to see all the details, Fans, we should tell you that to the right of that stack of pillows lies Captain America (you can just see his red boots), Clara's coin purse, her heart necklace, and two cupcakes.  A tea party might have been in the works, as you can see the plates laid out on Grandma Jane's blanket, but who knows?  After all, just last night, Joe dragged Grandma Jane's blanket into the kitchen and announced it was "hot lava!" and, moreover, that if we went on it, we would be "dead FOREVER!"   Oh my!  The baskets were bound for the porch where they were to become shoe baskets in Julie's seemingly never ending quest to quell the shoes that grow like mushrooms by every doorway, but they haven't made it there yet, and now perhaps never will, as they have been appropriated as who knows what.  Julie can see quite clearly now all the shoes that might be inside the alleged shoe baskets dumped in a heap and the baskets trotted off to points hither and yon throughout the house as all manner of things.  The bambini do love them a basket.  Never met a basket they didn't like to haul about or tug between them.

It doesn't take much these days to set Joe off imagining all manner of fabulous things.  Last night at dinner, Julie shared that she'd visited her doctor earlier that day.  Joe promptly--and apropos of nothing--asked if there were monsters there.  Julie said no, and asked if there were monsters at his doctor's office.  Joe allowed that there were.  Here are the particulars of these monsters:
They are white.
They are furry.
They have 15 eyes!
They do not have teeth.
They do not speak.  EVER!
They have flowers for feet.
They walk on the heels of their feet.

Obviously, we shall have to alert Dr. Harrington.