Life in the Bend

Today our baby boy turned two! How did this happen?!

Atticus, we are so lucky to be your parents. You are the best little cuddle bug and you amaze us with new developments every day. We love you!

I’ve developed a little bit of an addiction to Craigslist recently. I haven’t actually purchased anything (although I did sign up for a free load of mulch), but I love scanning the furniture, household, and garden sections to see what people advertise. This listing from the furniture section is my new personal favorite.

I’ve received some requests for more pictures. We’re on vacation this week and it’s been fantastic so far. It’s been cold and snowy (!!!), however, so I don’t have any great action shots of us outdoors doing fun things. Here’s a little photo essay about our activities:

They played with their oldest cousin. Norah was so impressed by Helena’s drawing skills.

Paul and the kids inadvertently dressed in matching colors yesterday. Norah wore fancy hair ties for the first time.
Atticus unearthed our teapot from a cupboard and developed an unusual attachment to it.

Norah continues to find new ways to explore the world. She learned to climb over our baby gate this morning.Atticus is delighted that my parents’ dog Kramer is spending the week at our house and has been running to the window each morning and yelling TWO!!! Stella and Kramer have been stalking squirrels, emptying the recycling bins together, competitively digging holes, and generally exhausting themselves. This afternoon I was running late for my aerobics class and couldn’t find one of my sneakers. It was driving me nuts and I finally gave up. Over dinner, I looked into the back yard and saw the sneaker half buried in dirt. These dogs have been very busy rearranging the landscaping for us.

This morning I broke a light bulb and shut the kids in the living room while I cleaned it up. When I came back, this is what they were doing:

Please note that I had not left the television on. I also didn’t leave the drawer empty and open. There’s no need to comment on how dangerous this is. It’s a very sturdy chest of drawers and we arranged the structure to be as stable as possible, but I was still horrified. We will be installing child locks on the drawers and tethering the furniture to the wall.

(As a side note, aren’t you sick of reading disclaimers like this on blogs written by mothers? I’m sick of writing them and would like to assume that anyone who knows me or has read my blog would have enough faith in me to realize that I’m not an idiot hellbent on letting my children kill themselves. Still, there always seems to be at least one commenter who’s available to let me know that should my child eat a pound of the flowers pictured behind her, she could be poisoned!!!! In fact, after creating this post, I almost deleted the picture of the kids in the drawer and the picture of Norah with paint on her mouth because I didn’t want to have to deal with anyone thinking I was putting my kids in harm’s way. At any rate, I’m going to try to stop explaining my actions so much. I’m a decent mother and I’m doing my best to keep my kids safe. On occasion, when they do something ridiculous but not imminently dangerous, I take a picture before I fix the situation.)

Then, because our floors were just way too clean, I decided to help the kids make a painting. It started out pretty well – shirts were removed ahead of time, a towel was beneath the canvas.

Then Atticus and Norah took it upon themselves to show me I still have some things to learn in the area of organizing craft projects for children:

We got our Matrix back from the body shop today. Because it had been damaged on both the front and back bumpers and had a lot of broken glass inside, it has been repainted and basically detailed on the inside. The dent someone put in the rear hatch door the week after we bought it is gone and the hubcap that fell off sometime in 2007 has been replaced. I’m eternally frustrated by having to drop a ton of money on auto repairs and then not being able to notice any appreciable difference in the car (replacing the danged tires last year for example). On the flip side, I’m delighted by our shiny rebuilt Matrix and am thinking it was $5,300 that State Farm spent well.

Atticus started saying “fish” today when he looked in the tank – except instead of pronouncing the “f”, he uses “b” and the “sh” comes out “ch”.