For My Mother, On Her Birthday:

Just a quick little post to let my Marmee know how much I love and appreciate her. I'm feeling a little sad right now, because the summer's over, and Mom will be going back to work in the school district. It's been so great spending so much time with her, I love to just spend the morning at her house hanging out with one of my very best friends. I know that Boo really loves going to Grandma's house and playing on the stairs (first and foremost! he loves those stairs!) and playing the piano and trying to get that one porcelain bowl that he can juuuuust reach on the shelf before anyone notices him and takes it away. But mostly he just loves his Grandma! So it'll be hard not to have as much time with her, but I'm oh so grateful for all those lovely, lazy, stolen summer days spent with my Mom. Happy Birthday Mom, and may you have all the happiness in this world and the next.

Good Reading...

I thought I'd throw out some recommendations of good reading I've had lately in case there is anyone else out there who loves to read as much as I do! Also, because this post is chock full o' links, I figured I'd better finally figure out how to embed a link! Aren't you so proud? I'm getting so big!

Books:
These I'll be really brief about--
Skellig, by David Almond --lovely, lovely, tale. Youth fiction, not fantasy or sci-fi, but more like mythical, lyrical.
The Various, by Steve Augarde--great adventurous fairy tale set in the modern English countryside. It's the first of three, and the next one, Celandine, is also great. I've got the third one on hold at the library!
The Princess and the Hound, by Mette Ivie Harrison. I really enjoyed this one and look forward to reading some of her others. Also youth fiction and fantasy. What can I say? It's my favorite genre!
The Unhealthy Truth, by Robyn O'Brien--interesting journey of a normal, run of the mill mom, who's kids come down with crazy food allergies, and all the stuff she learns about the food industry and the FDA while trying to figure out how to help her kids. Great reading, even if you don't have a kid with food allergies! I read this one a little while ago, but I've been recommending it to everyone, and I don't want you to think I'm not well-rounded in my reading!


Article:
Here is a very interesting article I picked up on msn.com the other day about how, basically, we might be killing our kids with knowledge. I'm one of those mom's who definitely believes in children having a childhood for as long as they can with as much unstructured play as they can, and I was, and still am, pretty appalled that they invented all-day kindergarten! Anyway, I guess in some parts of the country preschool is not enough of a push to get kids reading, etc, super early, but now there is a big boom in extra, professional, TUTORING, for preschoolers. Anyway, read if your interested in studies about education and the different ways that children learn!

Blogs:
This is a link to my friend Rosalyn's blog. She's just talking about a tough day of parenting, and yet I found it really uplifting and sweet and funny. Maybe it just feels good to commiserate!


I'm on a blog list called Mormon Mommy Blogs and they have a home blog with guest writers who write about different things pertaining to mormonness and mommyness and bloggyness. I really enjoy reading these guest posts as they are usually VERY beautifully written, and they take me into another person's world and experience. This particular post had me in tears as it was so beautiful, about a young woman's struggle with infertility. Not very long of a read, check it out!

And this recommendation is for an entire blog, not just one particular post. I recently discovered it because it had the same title as one I had been considering starting myself, but I'm not bitter that she already thought of the title first, because this blog is GREAT, and a total treasure. It's called Old School, and the author mainly writes posts on how to do useful things like sew up a tear in your kids jeans, or can turkey, or (my favorite) how to cook with dried beans. But this is all incidental, as while she is imparting all this wisdom clearly and succinctly (we're mom's; we don't have a lot of time!) she is also pretty darn HILARIOUS. You've got to check it out, you won't be sorry! This link is specifically to the funny bean post (actually about making split pea soup) but you should look around the rest of her blog!


Anyway, Happy Reading!

Then something just went "Click!"

Boo is signing! It is so exiting, I can't even describe to you how much fun it is to see him do his little signs and see his face light up (and mine too) when he sees that I understand. We've been watching the Baby Signing Time videos for months and I've just been patiently perservering, waiting for him to show some...sign, ha, that he was getting it. He's been saying a handful of words now for over a month, like hot, on, up and down, walk, and more recently something that sounds like I go or let's go, I can't quite tell. But no sign that all the signing I was doing and the videos he was watching were making any impact. Except once, about 2 weeks ago, he seemed to make the sign for hat, but as I didn't see it again, or anything else, I wasn't sure. Well on Thursday we were in the car and I turned around and saw him doing the sign for "more". I just about jumped out of my seat! And bam, just like that, it's like he got it, and there's no stopping him now! Boo, in just 2 days, has now effectively done the signs for "more", "water", "milk", "grandma", "all done", "book", "eat", "sleep", and just now, he did the sign for "bath"! It's so exciting, have I said that already? I'm so glad I did this, even though for a while there I really thought it wasn't going to work.

Speaking of baths, remember how he used to love baths? Then he just stopped, out of nowhere, for more than a month. He hated them! Baths became this thing we inflicted on him while he stood there screaming, tears and snot running down his face, as seldom as possible. And then, after playing outside with the water hose in grandma's backyard, "click!" went that little thing in his brain again, and ever since then I haven't been able to keep him out of the bath! I think he took 5 baths yesterday! I know, the granola in me is cringing at all the water usage, but can you blame me for letting him? It's just so great to be past that little phase, I'm willing to give him lots of baths! ( just so you know, I am trying to limit it a little more now, for instance, he's only had 2 baths today! lol).

And while we're talking about growing and developing news on the baby front, I should mention (as I know I haven't posted in quite some time, more on that later) that he's been walking now for more than a month, and has gotten really quite good at it, and speedy! That was another funny little click: it seemed that he knew how to walk for like 6 +weeks, we'd catch him at it all the time, but he prefered crawling. I think he thought he was faster at crawling so he wasn't going to bother with that walking stuff too much. But then click went that thing in his brain and he suddenly figured out that walking was much more preferable than crawling, and just like that he was a full time walker!

I'll try to work on pictures or video of some of these new tricks, and I promise to write a post really soon on why I've kind of sucked at blogging lately, and I'm going to post more! I promise! To try!

Vacation Part 1

There are so many pictures, I'm not sure where to begin! I'm pretty sure it's going to take a few posts. It was such a fun, jampacked trip with lots of wonderful family and fun things done and beautiful places seen. I guess I'll start with the beginning of the trip, which was at my Grandpa's house, and included a quick jaunt over to the mainland, via the ferry, to see my friend Jessica get married. At Grandpa's house, Boo had lots of fun...

splashing in the birdbath...

taking a bath in Great-grandma's sink...

and oh, just endless hours of going up and down the stairs, up and down, up and down. At home or abroad, stair-climbing is this kid's favorite past time!