Those of you who have spent some time with Clara know she has a teensy problem with spitting up. Tyler said it best this weekend, and since we always put safety first, here are Tyler’s Basic Clara Safety Rules:
1. Treat Clara as if she were loaded.
2. Never allow the mouth to point at anything you are not willing to see destroyed.
3. Be sure of your target and beyond.
Don’t let the smiles fool you she is a dangerous weapon!
Ivy, John and I played hide and seek in the yard tonight. Ivy is still a pretty terrible at hiding, but she’s gotten smarter at seeking, now she enlists the dogs help!
I posted this last night and for reasons unknown to me it didn’t pop up on top, so here it is front and center and I’ll work on figuring out what I’m doing for next time!
It was a bad night. Two girls who did NOT want to go to sleep. I’ll spare you all the details and instead share two pictures that help remind me that they aren’t always monsters.
Clara has for the most part been an easy going baby, she’s had her issues but in general she’s as sweet as she looks in this picture. 
She’s scooting around on the verge of true crawling and true trouble making as she explores every inch of her world. Today the Occupational Therapist gave Clara her stamp of approval. Torticollis is doing great and we don’t have to go back she just needs to keep crawling!
Ivy’s got so much to say lately, and while sometimes I want to go stick cotton in my ears because she NEVER STOPS TALKING it’s so fun to hear about what’s going on in that head of hers. Because believe me if it’s being thought about it’s being talked about. Some of my favorite comments of her’s today:
On seeing a dead frozen quail in our freezer: Oh Mom, that quail is so nice Mom, so nice and so dead, that quail is so dead Mom. (All spoken in a nice soft sort of voice)
On the state of things part way through the Bad Night: “We going to live happily ever after, I was really naughty but now I good and we going to live happily ever after.”
This picture, totally Ivy. I’m not sure if she’s making a face or just in the middle of talking but it makes me smile to see it.
So now I’ll go to bed and hope that the monsters from tonight will disappear and my sweet baby and chatty happy girl are the ones who greet me in the morning.
Ivy made a new friend today…
and she named her Pinky.
I like books! Note the two I’m currently reading to your left.
John likes books! He reads pieces of about five at a time and still manages to remember more of what happened in all of them than I’ll ever be able to do even reading one at a time!
Clara likes books! Believe it or not she wasn’t even trying to get this one into her mouth she was just looking at it!
And Ivy likes books! Especially on a day like today when she was a bit under the weather. We went to the library and got Blueberries for Sal and then proceeded to read it four times before John came home and took over the reading!
Wonderful! Great! A family that reads!
But let’s not forget to factor in the darker side of book lovers. You know the part that has you reading when you should be making dinner/cleaning/pulling thistles/playing with kids. The part that says “I have to use the bathroom.” (ie the only place in the house relatively free of other people because you NEED to finish that last chapter) Don’t tell me John and I are the only ones guilty of that!? And of course the infamous, staying up far too late reading. I’ve done it forever. I have not gotten any smarter as the years go by. And even though at one in the morning I tell myself laying in bed motionless is kind of like sleeping it will sort of count, that hasn’t yet turned out to be true come morning.
And so now almost two hours after I have put my three year old to bed I struggle. Should I be praising her love of books or cursing it, because she is still up, reading by the light of the hall, very quietly, in hopes no one will find out. And yes Mom and Dad I can hear you laughing from here!
I don’t like yard work, I think I could blame it on the child labor that was extracted out of me growing up, but I think my mom might read this so I won’t. Instead I would just like to say, (Mom and Grandpa are you listening?) That I do have SOME standards!
1) Green is good. Well unless it’s purple (creeping charlie), yellow (dandilions), white (clover), or brown (well this color isn’t good but the cow pasture from the neighbors floods parts of our yard with…umm… “dirt” and it’s brown and there isn’t much I can do about it).
2) It should be short. Unless short means that I have to mow it more than once every 7 (or 14) days, then it can be a bit longer. Or if I lose a kid in it, then it’s time to mow, but they yell really loud so that takes some serious length.
3)I want to walk in it barefoot.
Ok fine I have ONE standard, but it’s something right???
So that leads me to my problem. I have too many thistles, and since this directly violates standard number 3 I have been trying to do something about it. The problem is my lack of an other standards are making it sort of difficult. A weed killer you say… well then I would have no lawn (see standard number 1) . So I have been digging thistles, a LOT of thistles, three wheelbarrows full and counting, that kind of a LOT of thistles. Now I have about half my lawn thistle free, Horray! New problem: driving the wheelbarrow is getting difficult due to all the ankle breaking holes left from the thistle removing. This leads me to my big problem with yard work. You spend time, lots of time (if you are a certain kind of person all your time, if you are me as little as you can get away with) because it’s always SOMETHING, and what do you end up with, a short green thing you can walk across…
While I have been digging thistles, Ivy and Clara have been playing on a blanket together while storm wanders around the yard (she finally figured out it’s not a good idea to catch the thistles I throw on the pile). See…
Oh right… so what’s actually happening is that Storm is eating sticks and grass and creating lawn shrapnel all over the blanket while Clara has crawled off the blanket in search of her own lawn to chew on and Ivy found a toad.
Just after this picture was taken Storm and Clara noticed the toad and both tried to eat it.
Tomorrow I’m going to work on the flower beds!
There has been a rash of new runners in my family.
First Tyler started running, then I started running…
Then John started running…
But only Ivy smiles while she runs!
Note: There are only pictures of Ivy because the rest of us were swimmers, our running is not something you want to see.
Behind the Willows 
