Nate: Mama, orange ball?
Mama: Um, you have a blue soccer ball, but you don’t have an orange ball.
N: Orange ball, peas?
M: But sweetie you don’t have an orange ball.
N: I say peas. Orange ball. Peas.
M: But…
N: (grabbing me by the clothes and pulling me out of the chair) Orange ball. PEAS! I say peas; you happy.
M: (now standing in front of the refrigerator watching Nate try to pull it open) What are you doing?
N: (pointing to the mandarin oranges) Orange. Ball. Peas.
Why didn’t I think of that?
to find a cuter kid. Anywhere.
Helping! I love to help!
Hey! You kids! Get off my lawn!
Harry Potter and Boba
You KNOW I'm rockin the sweater vest.
She asked …
At the Denver Zoo David helps Nathan scale a wall
Nathan often fakes us out by asking us to sit down and then he gets up and heads off. David fell for the trick at the Denver Zoo this weekend.
I'm so cute it doesn't matter I rarely sleep through the night.
I think my head just might pop clear off!!
Look at all the pretty little snowflakes!!
And quite blow-y! From a look at the sheltered area around the side of the house it looks like we got four to five inches since about six tonight. Not bad. PLease excuse the picture quality. A rather ginormous hot toddy was consumed to fortiefy me for picture taking in the elements. Or something like that.
Standing just inside the front door looking straight out over the parkway. Look how light is the night sky. I love the light when it snows.
This is the view from the "sun" room on the front of the house. The blurry fog is snow, but this image doesn't come close to capturing how peaceful it is tonight.
The day after Thanksgiving Kori and I were sitting around after stuffing our faces when we thought we heard cars on a wet street. We jumped up and found it had snowed a couple of inches while we weren’t paying attention. All snow is awesome, but Surprise! Snow! the magical kind of awesome. These are from the next day – there was more snow, but I’m a bit of a sloth in the mornings.
This is looking to the right from our front porch.
Looking to the left from the same spot.
And, really, would it be anything like me to go a long time without posting anything, use photos as content, and NOT use my kid? Exactly.
Usually I am not a fan of messy baby faces, he was having so much fun and we were tired of trying to get him to eat. This was before we threw our hands up for good and decided to not worry about how much he eats and instead let him decide for himself.
The weekend before Thanksgiving David decided on a whim – literally as we were walking into the house carrying groceries – that it was time to do some fall clean up! Nathan decided it was time to play with rocks.
"And I gots this here rock." For the record? That look? Totally his personality - "What can I get away with now?"
Nathan has a new trick! He likes to push his step-stool around the kitchen and climb up to the counter to “help.” It should be noted he has branched out the step-stool pushing to climb up and turn light switches on and off all day. We live in a strobe light now. Be sure to notice the sunscreen on the counter. That would be the evening we got the surprise snow.
"Helping" Grandpa Bob make corn and crab chowder.
Claire is Nathan’s lil’Mommy. Or girlfriend. I can’t figure out which is true. I do know they follow each other around and hug all the time. Alas, he only knows how to say her sister Ella’s name. He sees Claire and runs at her full steam to hug her while yelling “Ella! Ella!” It’s freaking adorable.
I am pretty sure he is telling her about the fairies that live in the Christmas mansion and I am pretty sure she isn't buying it.
"What? I KNOW I am not supposed to touch and guess what? I am NOT touching, ok?"
I really need to pull out the books and figure out how to get truer colors in low lights. You’d never know it from this shot, but the living room is a lovely shade of olive green.
An idea of what our home looks like for the holidays.
I wish I had thought to bring the real camera and not just my iPhone.
The last couple of weeks I’ve noticed that Nathan will tear head first into his playroom and then crash out on the floor. He’ll play with his toys while lying on his belly. It dawned on me that he is mimicking the way I read to him. I lay out flat so our heads are nearly the same level. This confirmed for me all those studies that say that you are your kid’s greatest role model and blah, blah blah.
So I decided we need to get outside and move more. Now everyday we head outside and we “walk” up the parkway. I say “walk” because, really, I don’t think we go more than 200 or 300 yards in any direction. We spend a whole lot of time finding “treasures” like sticks and pinecones and most especially dandelions. My kid can spot a dandelion in any thousand foot radius. He hones in on them like they were prized truffles. It’s a shame he can’t actually figure out how to blow on said dandelion to release the seeds. No, that falls to mom and produces great belly laughs. If there is a vast dandelion outbreak in the Park Hill neighborhood next spring it is entirely our fault.
Another thing Nathan does is hug trees. Literally. I have no idea where he learned this behavior or why he thinks trees need hugging, but his liberal parents couldn’t be happier. He just runs up to random trees and wraps his wee little arms around them as far as they will go and squeezes. When the hug is over we’re off looking for dandelions.
Nathan woke up fussing a bit ago and so now I am awake and I can’t turn off my brain. Specifically the part where we are looking at record high temperatures this week. And zero chance of snow in the foreseeable future. Today I noticed six new buds on my rose next the garage door. Wrong! Then the aspen trees caught my eye. They are budding. In November! I want cold. I want snow. I want to need to wear my new chocolate brown wool coat – even if I’m the only one who adores it.
Next year? I’m not having the sprinklers blown out, the screens pulled off the windows and the storm windows put on, or having the evaporative cooler winterized until at least Thanksgiving. Or maybe Christmas. No, better yet, maybe we just won’t do it at all! Ha! Stupid weather.
: wanders off muttering (Sleep. I just need some sleep and then I can stop obsessing about the weather. Sleep.)