Gardening and a Mountain Goat

***This post is like a double - I haven't been keeping up as well!**

Green seems to be our current color.  The gardens, decorative and edible, front and back, are thriving and growing and beginning to produce beautiful and yummy-licious things.  The lush green of Summer is nearly upon us, the rains have been plentiful and the Sun is warm.  Even the Pond garden is doing well, producing its first blue Water Lilies (2nd and 3rd year plants) and reproducing lily pads by the day.  

School is done.  In our digital world, Chase and Indy both received picture slideshow DVD's set to music to remember their school year by.  Pretty neat. 4th Grade Promotion was cute and fun.  I barely got by the frenzied week of class picnics and parties.  My Dad and Stepmom came to visit and stayed with us for 3 days.  We ate terribly.  Having moved to North Carolina 5 years ago, a state which apparently cannot produce a decent pizza, bagel, soft pretzel or cheesesteak, the 'rents, or more specifically, my Dad, insisted on enjoying these aforementioned carb-y culinary delights throughout his visit.  Nonetheless, any time with them is time well spent.  We did give them a Farmhouse tour, in which I believe they were impressed.  

Farmhouse update - we will soon be ready to pour concrete footers for the back addition.  So. Exciting.  

RJ, now 10 months, is simply all over the place.  Chase affectionately calls him the "Mountain Goat" for his love of climbing anything and everything.  From gates to stairs to people who happen to be lying on their bellies reading books, RJ will climb it and stand up to proclaim his accomplishment.  He climbs and stands on toys with wheels (ugh), he  piles toys in corners of rooms to climb up by using his hands on the wall corners to steady himself.   He makes a run for the stairs any chance he can get.  We don't have any gates permanently in our home, never have.  And now, there are just too many people in and out, up and down and all around for that to make sense.  My own kids would get used to it, but the kids that hang out here or come over would cause a problem and the neighbors might fall over it or even break it.  So you can see it doesn't make much sense.  Except for the part where it's supposed to contain the baby.  Yes, yes, back to the baby.  He's using baby signs, signing "more," "eat" and "all done."  He says, "cup."  Although with him, he adds an "a" so its more like, "a cup!" "a cup!"  Most of his pre-verbal sounds are in exclamatory mode.  He walks when it makes sense, but since most of his toys are still on the floor (exactly where I want them to be!!) he crawls a lot too.  He can walk 3 or 4 feet before he gracefully (psych!) plops to the ground to go after what he wants.  He is decisive, determined and strong-willed.  He will push you, pull you, growl at you and plainly remove your hand from his if you are in some way preventing him from getting to something he wants.  This has earned him the occasional nickname of "The Prince" as he seems to believe that he is.  He laughs.  A lot.  All the time, really.  At many different things.  At us singing.  At himself.  At his siblings performing antics for his amusement.  Everywhere we go, strangers call him "the happy baby."  He does cry, sometimes, when thwarted, really hungry, really tired or when upset at himself for crapping his pants so that he has to lie down and get changed.  He still falls, bumps into things, stands up and bumps his face/head/arms/self on all sorts of things that look and SOUND like they hurt, but he often does not cry at these.  But growls.  Obviously, it is the item's fault for being in his way.  And he always tries again.  He is not the type to sit and cry about it.  

Riley is learning sight words and reading Beginner Reader books.  It sounds early, it IS early.  I am very aware of this and am not sure of my full feelings on the matter.  But she has memorized most of the children's books we have and still voluntarily spends a good part of her day "reading" or being read to.  She speaks with the vocabulary of an older child and uses words appropriately.  She spends car trips asking me to explain what "rude" means or what the water cycle is. She still spits out a classic kid-ism once in a while, like "that man has a mustachio!"  To her credit, she is big fan of pistachios and doesn't know many men with a mustache....lol!  Ry is a very smart kid, and I say that not to brag, but to state a fact.  In a functional manner, having a very smart kid means it is my job as her parent to engage her mind appropriately, to present her with challenging but not overwhelming educational opportunities and to allow her to advance at her pace while at the same time allowing her to act her age.  Her intellect paired with her size (she has always been 90% since birth and although she is not chubby, she wears 2 to 3 sizes up depending on the brand) means people sometimes have no idea that she is 2 yrs old.  Not for long, of course, in less than 30 days she will be 3.  She is very much looking forward to her birthday this year.

The pool is being used every day, even in the rain, and rain we have gotten!  Roger and the neighbors are working on homemade solar panel pool heaters but the kids don't seem to mind the chilly water.  

We are, as a whole, ridding ourselves of "stuff."  We are paring down (again!!) on toys, clothes, random items, accessories, etc.  In a year's time, so much makes its way in, at holidays and birthdays and other types of events, and so again it is time to purge.  This year we are HOSTING yard sales, and driving the other way when we see them.  I have a great love of organization and cleanliness, but I am also entirely functional.  A completely clean and organized house would never be fun, creative and enlightening for a child (or for me!) and so we tend to live more functionally than otherwise.  But when something does get totally cleaned, spotless, beautifully organized, I stare at it... for those lovely 10 seconds that it lasts....