He had a very long day.

It's hard work chasing your sisters with a butterfly net.


Forgive the exposure on the top picture. I do not know what is going on with my flash.

How do you know when something is really delicious?

That was really delicious.

Them kids...

-Hannah's uncle asked her what the spots on her face were. "Freckles," she answered. "Are you sure they're not angel kisses?" he asked. "Well are they blue?" says she. "No, they're brown." "Then they're definitely freckles." Apparently angel kisses are blue...

-Gray and I walked in the floor from choring and I nearly tripped over Ains sitting on her knees scrubbing the floor with a washcloth. I thought that maybe she'd accidentally peed and was cleaning it up, so I asked "Is everything ok?"

"No, momma," she said, "me no make mess. Me Cinwella and Hannah stepsister. She bewy mean." and she happily goes back to scrubbing. A few minutes later I hear her say "Me done stepsister. Me going pay wif Bobo (Cygnus)."

-H: Mother, I just went poo potty and it had corn and peas in it.

M: I did not need to know that.

H: I didn't know that. What if you *did* need to know it and I hadn't told you? How could I live with myself?

-I asked Gray if he wanted a cookie and Ains answered "Me want cookie, Momma."

"You do?"

"Yes. I hooman baby. Hooman babies eat cookies."

- We were getting ready to go to a family reunion and while we were packing the truck, we were trying to finish all of the last-minute stuff that needed to be completed/turned off/packed. Hannah was ready, waiting, and impatient to be off to see her cousins. Finally she said, in a very frustrated voice, "Why is everyone hurrying so slow?"

-Ainsley's still switching words with hilarious results. If she wants a Jones Soda, I get asked for a 'baking soda'. If she wants to read Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy, I get asked to read 'Fantsy Pantsy'.

-Grayson? He's just gotten into teasing his sisters. Anything he can do to get squeals out of them he will. He put this to good use the other day when Hannah was sad. He gave her a bemused look and went up and started tickling her knees. Luckily, it was a small sad, so his tickles worked and he was mightily pleased with himself.

Poodles, the 18th century, and magpies.

-Ainsley asked me to put this hat (scroll down to the debutante picture) - all pink and fur and ribbons - on Cygnus. I did and between giggles she said "He looks like a poodle!" It made me laugh because I don't think she's ever in her two-and-a-half years on this earth seen a real live poodle. She recently asked for a poodle book from the library and she went through it, but I don't recall more than a few of the poodles in the book being dressed up fancy.

-Every so often, Hannah says something that even I don't know where she got it from. The other day, Ainsley came into the bathroom where Hannah and I were, grabbed some bracelets and put them on. Hannah looked at them, noticed that the pink bracelet was not the closest to Ainsley's wrist, and decided to help her out with some fashion advice. "Ainsley," says she, "are you stuck in the Eighteenth Century or something? The pink goes in front."

Ainsley responded with her usual impertuable "Oh. Otay, Hannah." and moved the bracelet while I just stared at Hannah. "Where did you learn that, Hannah?" "I don't know. It's just in my brain." Fair enough. Luckily, Matt knew where she'd heard it. They'd watched some Duck Tales episodes on YouTube and the Eighteenth Century featured prominently in one of them. Random.

-Ainsley's at the cute stage where words that are similar get used in place of each other. Example: Killdeer becomes John Deere. As in "Mommy me just saw a John Deere! It was peetending to be boken!"

Or Rhubarb Pie becomes Magpie. As in "Mommy are you making magpie again?" (Actually, 'magpie' is quite common around here since it's Ains' current favorite word and insult. You get her frustrated and you're likely to hear "You .... you .... MAGPIE!")

-Hannah insists that Grayson's first word is 'Hannah'. She could be right. He says 'NAnnah!" clearly and frequently when he looks at her. He also says it clearly and frequently when he's looking at cats, dogs, birds, flowers, the sandbox, the bikes, and horse poo. But Hannah believes it's her name, so sibling rivalry has kicked in. Every time Gray says "NAnnah!", Ains gets right in his face and starts chanting "AINSley. AINSley!" She does this so much that if he were a parrot, he'd be repeating her name by now. In fact, I'm surprised that the local crows aren't flying around cawing "AINSley. AINSley!"

What is that on your feet?

Remember me mentioning that we'd have spotty internet connectivity for a bit out here? Yeah.

On to happier subjects.

This evening, when Matt came home from work, I told him that Gray was asleep in the bedroom and that I was heading out to plant more sunflowers. I came back in an hour later and Matt was crashed so I headed to check on Gray.

I'd left the door to the bedroom open, but it was now shut (by Gray when he'd gotten up) and it was locked (likely from Ains playing with it). No problem. It was one of those doorknobs with a hole in the center, so you could easily unlock it by pushing a match in there. Or a skewer. Or a chopstick. Actually, none of those worked like they were supposed to.

After a few minutes of trying to open the door, I could hear Gray going from wanting to come out to fussing because he could hear me but couldn't see me. I got Matt and asked him to try. When he started trying, Gray started fussing louder, so I laid down to look under the door and try to get him to play with my fingers to distract him.

When I looked under the door I saw the cutest little baby feet walking back and forth. Dirty little baby feet. When had he gotten in mud? I didn't remember him being in mud before he went down for his nap.

Then he walked away from the door and I saw it. His diaper. Off and laying on the floor and poopy and he was walking through it. Then he turned and came back to the door. Through his diaper. I was narrating this to Matt who decided right about the time he heard "OMG, it's poop!" that that doorknob needed to come off.

While he unscrewed the doorknob, I got the bathtub running and as soon as Matt got the doorknob off, he was handing the babe to me to wash. Washing Gray was much faster than scrubbing the carpet. That kid covered a lot of ground in the room in a few minutes. Mud would have been easier.

Pirates are funny.

Hee.

Hee hee.

Heeheeheeheeheehee!

Arrrggghh!!! Me im Pincess Piwut AINSEY!


Hee.

Kiddy goodness.

H: Mother, try my food.
S: Are you sure? I don't want to eat your delicious dinner.
H: Of course, please do. It would please me greatly.


H: (After I said that I thought my hair looked nice) Be careful, Mother, or the water nymphs will throw you clear up in the sky like Cassiopeia. That's what they did to her when she was envious.
S: Envious?
H: Um, no. Vain. The nymphs were envious. She was vain. But Andromeda wasn't vain. She just got put in the stars because her mother was vain and her father couldn't kill the sea beast himself.
S: Oh. What was the king's name? I've forgotten.
H: Carl. It's not Harry. That's not a very kingy name. His name's Carl.



The girls are playing their magical creatures game at the table right now. All of the sudden I hear Ains squeal gleefully "I got the HANUMAN! Yay!" Hearing that little voice say hanuman makes me smile.

PYWUTES!!!!

Sorry to yell that at you, but seriously...

PYWUTES!!!

She likes playing princess with her sister just fine, but pirates and the open sea are calling to my girl.

She even makes her sister peep out of portholes to look for 'Waand Hoooo!' because 'Waand Ho is in da Souf Seas.' I have the Island Princess to thank for that. Thanks Barbie.

This one just looks bemused by the whole thing, even when he's told to walk the plank.

Seashells by the Seashore. Kinda.

*sniff* Look how grown-up she looks when she wants her hair fixed.


I snapped the picture right away since she usually pulls out any hair clips/bows/bands as she walks away from having it fixed (and the fixing is always at her request, go figure), but she left these in for almost an entire hour.

We went down to the now-burned-out cattail pond to explore. Hannah told us that we had to take bowls because there were "so, so, so many shells" there. This was based purely on her experience in the canal earlier this week. Danged if she wasn't right. Thousands of shells, littering the ashy ground.


Gray, who cannot see a bucket next to him without trying to fill it up, even got in on the act. Though it was clods of dirt he added to my bucket, and not shells.


Kid has a good arm. My bucket was a foot away from where he was picking up the dirt and throwing it - while strapped to my back - and he made it into the bucket on most of his shots.

This is what the puppy did every time I sat down.


Hannah found this bird's nest in the center of a patch of burned down cattails. How random is that? It's drier than the cattails were, but it's barely scorched.

Sooty girl.

Now I'm going to add this pile of books to Library Thing before I box them up. Fun times.

Make him stop growing up.

At least slow it down a bit?

Little man's trying to walk.

Momma's trying not to sob.

Puppy's trying to chew on my sock.

Little man's giggling hysterically.

All better.

The thing about two year olds and tempera paint ...

is that you can't leave them alone for even a minute.



Not even if you have to pee.



No matter how badly you have to pee, it's not important enough to leave her unattended with paint and a roller.

The thing about tempera paint, though, is that it cleans up really fast.

Today we...

played outside. March has been kind to us. We got two hours of not-too-windy, kind-of-warm, altogether-completely-enjoyable time out of our four walls today.

We started out on the porch. While I cleaned our porch furniture, the kids played around me. Occasionally I had little hands helping me wash, but mostly they were exploring or playing with kittens.


Ainsley carefully inspected Ghandi with the magnifying glass, looked up at me and very seriously declared "Cat."


One of my mothering joys is seeing the similarities and differences in my children. Take how they interact with cats.

Exhibit 1: Mama cat, wraps her baby in a blanket, dotes on him and carries him around.


Plays with kittens, takes a lot of pleasure in kittens chasing her makeshift toys.


Exhibit 2: The Teacher. Tries to teach the kitten how to get in a bucket - whether the kitten wants to or not.


Tries to teach the kitten how to climb a tree - whether the kitten wants to or not.



These children are endlessly amusing to me.

We gradually moved out into the yard, into the pine trees, onto the farm road, and back.

Hannah collected art supplies. I need to get a picture of what she created.



Running down the farm road. The farm land is to the right, our land is to the left.


Hannah found a skull that's been in this exact place for the last three years that we've lived here. She's noticed it before and talked about it before, but she really noticed it today and we had a fun discussion that ranged from carnivores vs. herbivores to spider eggs (there was a nest in one of the eyes) to her own mortality to cemeteries to ... well, you've been there with your own kids, I'm sure. Since she recently had a dentist visit we looked at the teeth and how they fit in (and even pulled some of them out).


Grayson is teething, so mostly he's attached to me, but occasionally he let me put him down for a few minutes. It helped if there was a cat nearby that would let him grab at them.


It felt good to all of us to stretch out a bit.

What I was doing a year ago today.

Falling in love. Again. How many loves can a woman fit in her heart?































Today my baby is still a baby and I'm not rushing him to grow up. Lordy, how I love him.