Saturday, February 18, 2012

Hokie Madness

IMG_3251_thumb

This is the outfit Tucker chose for school the other day, totally unprompted.  Austin nearly keeled over seeing Tucker’s spontaneous Virginia Tech spirit.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Valentine’s Day Party at Tucker’s School

IMG_3262

Molly is ready to be one of the big kids!  Especially if it means she can have strawberries, marshmallows and Capri-Suns.  She positively ran around Tucker’s classroom squealing.  I’m not sure who was more enthusiastic about Tucker’s Valentine’s Day part, because Tucker also was talking about it for days beforehand!  IMG_3265 IMG_3260IMG_3266 IMG_3271 IMG_3272 IMG_3273 IMG_3274 IMG_3276

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Today, Austin gave me a romantic cactus (I love cacti: they don’t die no matter how mean you are to them!) BUT my best Valentine’s present was being able to take the kids on our first walk together since September.

It was glorious here in the late morning; blue skies, crisp but not cold, and we found ourselves at a park we hardly ever get to.  The mallard ducks were out in force, the playground was all ours, and each person we passed on the trail by the river paused to say, “What a great day!”  I’m sure all of them had good reasons to be grateful for the beautiful weather, but I felt especially so.  The weather wasn’t just beautiful; everything was beautiful, getting to spend a morning like that.

Tomorrow will be the four week anniversary of getting off crutches, and I am still profoundly grateful for the little things I used to take for granted.  So many things have been made new for me again.  I keep having all these firsts—first shopping trip, first trip to the park, first afternoon outside, first walk.  Each first is so sweet—but also each second and third and fourth time too.  I am finding that my thankfulness is not wearing off as quickly as I might have thought.  The best of everything is getting to hold Molly and walk with her wherever I want (the result: my baby likes me again!).  Being on crutches was like a barrier between me and the world; I could think and talk but I couldn’t move.  In some ways it felt like living a virtual life.  Getting to frolic outside in the afternoons with the kids has been unexpectedly delightful, it feels like the antidote to the virtual life. 

God is so good.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Can I come?

IMG_3249

I used to call Tucker my feral son because of the amount of time he spent outdoors.  I think I am going to have a feral daughter.  This picture is of Molly bringing Austin her coat so that she can go outside with him (he is about to leave for work).  We got a babysitter a couple weeks ago, and as we went out the door, Molly went into the pantry and got her coat and tried to follow us out.  It was so cute it was heartbreaking!

It’s not that Molly just wants to be with us; she genuinely wants to be outdoors.  Ever since she made the four-legged to two-legged transition recently, she just can’t get enough of being outside.  Her favorite still is the stroller, but she loves the swings, the tent platform/tree house (incidentally, she can climb the sloped ladder all by herself), the slides, the sandbox… really just about everything.  Of course, she is completely and utterly unreliable outside so it’s not a place we can really leave her side and do anything else (maybe that’s why she likes it so much!)

Here’s Molly all spiffed up for church:

IMG_3236 

And here’s Molly delighting in her mad rocking skills:

MVI_3250

Finger Bracelet

IMG_3254_thumb

Tucker made me a finger bracelet today.  I had no idea such things existed until he gave one to me, but I felt quite stylish and honored.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Auction Madness

 IMG_3241      

I discovered our local auction house a few weeks ago, and have very much enjoyed a new source of great deals.  Plus, the process is so fun because of the suspense.  I have not actually bid on anything live at an auction—that would require hours of sitting there waiting for an item with a small child or two—but I’ve placed absentee bids, and get lovely emails on Friday afternoons after the auctions letting me know of my success.

My coup de gras this week was buying a set of sewing items for $25, clearly from an estate.  Maybe this doesn’t seem like a great deal to you—admittedly, it was the very top of my bid range—but at $4 for a spool of thread these days, sewing stuff can really add up.  I thought about the woman who assembled everything as I organized my new treasure this weekend—clearly a bit of a packrat, because there were definitely over 100 spools of thread.  But she devised some ingenious storage solutions for the thread so not only will I never have to buy thread for the rest of my life, I will always have amazingly organized thread (yes, this is something I worry about). 

She also was a button hoarder which makes me the proud owner of a large collection of buttons.  This is very ironic because my grandmother was a button collector and it was a hobby that never really piqued my interest.  These buttons, thankfully, are not valuable buttons, but they look very much like fun crafty buttons to make all sorts of weird projects with and to let kids string and sift and sort (once they reach the age that they won’t eat them). 

Her collection also included 7 thimbles, oodles and oodles of needles (again, one of the things I will never have to buy), scissors, extra pin cushions, all sorts of fasteners, razor blades, threaders, gauges and some eclectic small instruments whose function I still don’t know, and others that I’m sure I’m forgetting. 

So while I technically didn’t need any of this, I’m pretty sure it’s a good investment… right?

IMG_3246IMG_3245IMG_3244

IMG_3243IMG_3242