Babysoroos

Outside this afternoon. Daddy was using his chainsaw, so the boys were standing well back. I think Ben might have been making sure Timothy stayed well back, but it’s a sweet picture whatever his reasoning was.

I’ve had another blog for many years at www.blether.org. It’s been updated sporadically, randomly, taking long breaks and changing course and focus. Or not having course and focus, or something. The archives have been deleted several times as I clean up and decide to try again anew.

This blog is about the kids. It’s personal, it’s for family and friends to keep in touch. I don’t want to share this one with the world.

But I also want to blog about things that don’t feel like they fit here. They aren’t about “baby Soroos” specifically, they aren’t only for friends and family to read. In fact, they’re things I really want to share with a wider audience, a community I’m discovering of other women who are crafting, sewing, quilting, embroidering, and finding ways to incorporate their love of “making” into their children’s lives. I want to write about crafts I do, or crafts with the kids. Sewing projects, art projects, things we’re learning, books we’re reading. I just want to write more, actually.

So I’ve resurrected my old blog, this time as Island Mama.

That’s where I’ll write about stuff that isn’t just family “news” and share photos of my/our arts and crafts.

This is where I’ll still post photos of the kids just for the sake of photos of the kids. 🙂

I’ll provide links from here to there whenever I write something about the kids, but you’re all welcome to visit over there as often as you like.

Timothy loves to climb into this little armchair and read a book. It’s just the right size to curl up in. He does this at least once every day, I think.

It was snowing, but we decided to go for a walk in the woods anyway. It’s never quite as drippy in the woods as elsewhere, just soggy and muddy. And soggy and muddy is fun for boys.

Timothy walked a good half of it on his own.

Ben is very interested in fallen over root systems and large tree stumps. And climbing.

They took a little convincing to pose together….

Then Timothy got tired and actually said “up!”

But I wasn’t quite quick enough….

I want to make this a Friday morning habit if we can. If we can do it when it’s snowing in March, we can do it in any weather! It’ll be fun to notice the differences in the woods as the seasons change.

Yes, it’s the end of March. Yes, we live in the Pacific Northwest where we don’t often get snow.

And yes, that’s snow.

Not much of it lying, granted, but still, good grief! It’s nearly April! We have seedlings coming up! We need sun!

The weather better start behaving and people better get healthy. I’m tired of all this winter stuff.

We made playdough using a new recipe this time. In the past, we’ve always done a cooked version, using cream of tartar and loads of salt. This time, since we had Kool-aid in the house (no, not for drinking! from a silk-dyeing experiment I just described on my other, non-baby blog), we did the no-cook Kool-aid playdough. It was a pretty different texture — squishier, softer, a bit stickier, less gritty. And it smelled yummy. They both had a lot of fun with it.

Timothy loves the chalk board. This was all his own work. Grass? Trees? Just lines for the sake of lines? He was very focused for a while. Til he started throwing all the chalk on the floor and eating it.

Yesterday we received these t-shirts from when Granny and Granda visited Antigua on their recent cruise.

They both fit well, and I had visions of a nicely posed picture of the two of them standing next to each other looking at the camera. Ha. Getting the boys to stand still and face the camera is a completely lost cause these days. That’s why they’re lying down, but even that had its challenges….

I realised last week that we were wasting the sunniest room in the house. What was formerly the guestroom and my sewing room faces south with sliding glass doors. It is a lovely bright room. And it was being used only a few weeks a year by guests who mostly just sleep there, and the rest of the time by me in the evenings when the kids are asleep. And on all of these sunny spring days we’ve been having, it was gated off and inaccessible while the playroom sat there and looked like a dark brown cave. No wonder the kids didn’t want to play in it.

Duh.

We moved the guest bed into the “cave” along with some stuff I want to store out of kids’ reach. We moved the toys into the sunny room and kept my sewing machine in there. We’ve spent at least some part of every day in there since then, boys playing together, or Ben helping me make something. All my supplies are easy to get to, and Ben is fascinated by the sewing machine and loves to help me use it.

I really like this new arrangement, and I think the boys do too.

Timothy got his first haircut this afternoon. It had been well past his eyes and starting to look like it was annoying him. So during his afternoon nap I trimmed the front and a little over the ears. He looks so different! (And his hair is amazingly different than Ben’s to cut.)

Unfortunately, the other difference you might notice is his upper lip. He had a couple of run-ins with a kid-sized wheelbarrow this afternoon. First Ben rammed it into his tummy and knocked him over, then while I was discussing with Ben why that was not a nice thing to do, Timothy climbed into the wheelbarrow and it tipped him out onto his face on the concrete. Poor kid. He has such a fat lip, but once it stopped bleeding and I gave him some Tylenol (he got less than half of it in him, the rest he wiped all over his face — it works topically, too, right?) he was back to his normal chirpy self. He even ate a fair amount of dinner.

I’m sure he’ll recover quickly and then we’ll get a better picture of his hair.