Reasons to visit California

The Birds of Paradise are in bloom now.

We have avocados for less than $1 each -- and we can sit comfortably outside at 10:00 in the morning. 

We have cute kids. Who don't like clothes.

Sentences!

Warning -- pictures not necessarily related to story.


My little Keenan, who turns two tomorrow!!, has recently begun stringing sentences together. Nevermind that his pronunciation leaves much to be desired. I was awestruck on Saturday of last week by what he said when he was eating breakfast.

 I had told him he needed to finish his eggs before I would get him a bowl of cereal. When he had finished his eggs, he said, "Eat all eggs. Now have cereal." I had no idea a child so young would be able to articulate an idea this complex, let alone think it in the first place.





Today's sentence was less awe-some, but it was terribly sweet. I was making lunch. The girls went with  their dad for the afternoon so it was just Keenan and me. Keenan was eating and I was still preparing more food.

"Mama," he half-shouted, and I thought he was about to start screaming because he was so hungry and I hadn't read his mind yet to put more food in his bowl. But instead, he said, with that same tone of voice, "I like that song."

I had just finished singing, "My Heavenly Father Loves Me," from the Children's Songbook.
 And then he started playing a game with me: What's the sign for _____. That was a fun game, since I had to decipher his spoken words and hope that the sign I made matched what he was thinking.

And now some fun from Adara:

 The school work that came home with her today said that she "needs improvement" on "using beginning sounds, phonetic spelling and resources for each word."  I will write her sentence and let you be the judge of whether she was spelling things phonetically.

"I like when the lef wr n re tre." [Translation, in case your phonics is different than Adara's: "I like when the leaves were in the tree."]





Finally, here are a few Halloween-related pictures.

 

(I wasn't going to put a headband on Keenan, but when he realized that, he started to get upset. So he had no one but himself to blame for this blackmail picture.)

Humility

Quick thought I want to save somewhere before I forget it:

True humility includes a sense of being loved in your imperfections.

Halloween

We took Jon to work this morning (our other car is getting fixed). While driving back to take Adara to school, we heard a big THUMP, like someone banging on the car. I looked around and saw nothing - no other cars, no pedestrians, nothing in the to road.

"Maybe the trunk is open," I thought, but I couldn't stop right there (I think there were train tracks). Then we heard the thump again, and as I was looking for a place to pull over, we heard three thumps that sounded for all the world like a big scary guy banging on the back of the car.

But no one was there. And I was freaked out. There was still no sign of anyone or anything else on the road except us, and all I could think was that the thumping was coming from *inside* the trunk. We were in an industrial part of town, by the train tracks and there was no way I was getting out of the car at that point. I just hoped no one was attached to the bottom of the car or something gruesome.

But then I remembered the pumpkin. I had thought Jon had taken it out when we dropped him off, but what if he hadn't? I decided that was probably what was making the noise and justified myself in driving home without checking to make sure everything was ok. When we got out of the car at Adara's school, I checked the pumpkin. The stem had broken off from the impact of bouncing around the trunk. But why it would have made three very rhythmic thumps when we were driving down a level street is still a mystery.

Big as a grandma

This is one of Naomi's sayings. Perhaps she heard it from one of her friends. Today as we were grinding grains for bread making, she looked in the bowl and said, "That's as tall as a grandma!" Then she measures with her hand to the height of the ground grain and says, "Grandma's this high."

Baby wisdom

You know how some refrigerators have a place you can get cold water by pressing a button on the outside of the door? Keenan is learning to use it.

It's always nice to have someone motivating you to do the chores you keep putting off. . . .

And on the Naomi front:

As we were walking home from taking Adara to school this morning, Naomi was talking about the toy she was holding.

"I like Dinah. She's a special tiger. Mama? When you have a baby in your tummy, you're stronger. And. I see a red truck following us. Look!! Now there's a white truck following us!"

Darndest things

Today Naomi said, "Every night I go to sleep with panties on, and when I wake up, they've turned into pull-ups!"

Anybody know how to help her continue to develop this sense of humor?