Dozer Days

As usual, Ben and Dad (Grandpa Larry) went to Dozer Days with Mark this year!

In spite of the huge crowds, much fun was had!

...and then there were TWO!

Remember Timmy, our tortoise? Well, as of last week, Timmy (who is actually a girl) has a boyfriend. His name is Rose (named by Mark). Rose, at just 5 years, is quite a bit smaller than Timmy, and probably about 25 years younger. We got him from a family on Craigslist that got bored with him and wanted to get rid of him.

The two torts get along just fine, and it is fun to watch tortoise-social behavior. They greet each other by bobbing their heads! ("How ya doin'?") Sometimes they get into little arguments, but overall they seem to like each other. The other day they were both basking, and Timmy put her head on Rose's shell. 

In a few years, when Rose is bigger (he is more of an immature teenager at this point) we hope to have baby tortoises. 

Have I mentioned that Russian tortoises are the most awesome pet, ever? They eat weeds, they don't spit up hair balls, they don't shed, and they don't bark... they are smart, and they get very tame. Plus it feels a little like living with dinosaurs. Did you know that they live over 100 years with proper care? Guess what, future grand-children... you're inheriting a pair of tortoises!

...caught in the act!

Would you like to see 30lbs of pure "Uh, oh, she caught me"...? Sean was having an awfully long nap, so I decided to check on him. Before nap, his room was pristine, and Sean was wearing pants.

Here is what I found:

Guilty... and pretty darn cute!

It was way too funny to be mad at Sean... so after a good laugh, we made a game out of cleaning up together.

Mark, the baby chick whisperer

Mark's Kindergarten class just hatched 9 little chicks! Over the course of 3 weeks the children learned all about how a baby chick develops inside an egg. On Monday morning the eggs began to hatch. 9 of the 11 eggs had chicks in them, and today they were big enough to carefully be picked up by the children.

Mark's teacher took this picture of Mark - she said that he lovingly cradled a little chick and rocked it to sleep.

Mark, chick-whisperer

Mark has wanted to have "pet chickens" for a while now... I really, REALLY don't want chickens. I told him we would re-visit the subject when he was 10 or 11 years old.

Sean's new scar

Do you know those cartoon strips where someone runs off of a cliff, and their legs keep running before they plummet?
Sean did this off of the stairs on our deck last week, and landed head-first on the little stone pathway below. This earned him a wonderful goose-egg on his forehead that burst open in the middle from the impact (Platzwunde). Sean screamed for a minute or so, then calmed down. Ben brought him inside to clean the blood off of his face and to clean out the wound. Our first-aid kit no longer hand steri-strips in it, so I ran across the street to our neighbor's house - she is a prison nurse. Not only did she have steri strips, but she offered to patch up Sean's owie for us! (She commented that Sean is a lot less hairy than her usual patients, but that he was equally tough). Sean did really well while he was being patched up, only whispering the occasional "Ow!!!" Several steri-strips and a band-aid later, Sean felt fine.

It's a good thing that chicks dig scars!

Of course Sean peeled off the band-aid and strips once he was in bed... *sigh* but the owie is less than a centimeter long, and is healing well on its own now.

Family hike

I just realized that I didn't post the pictures of our family hike from a few weeks ago. We drove up north near Yale lake to scout out some possible sites for our church's boys camp that Ben will be leading again this year. We brought along a picnic and had a wonderful day together. Since I was on the other end of the camera, there aren't any photos of me... but I promise that I was there!

Sean actually walked for a good-ish bit, but since every leaf, bug, and stick was fascinating and warranted stopping to investigate, Ben carried him on his shoulders quite a bit as well.

I am not exactly sure why Sean looks so un-thrilled  in  this photo. He actually had a great time riding waaaaay up high!

We had the lake to ourselves, since it was fairly cold and windy that day. 

Sean had fun RUNNING to catch up with us (with much encouragement) after falling behind to investigate something

I feel blessed to live in an area where THIS is at our fingertips!

Mark's hiking/camping trip with Dada

This weekend Ben and Mark went camping in the beautiful boonies near Mount St Helens. Ben prefers not to camp in actual camp-sites, so they headed out with a general idea where they wanted to go, determined to find a beautiful spot to spend the day and night.

They drove as far as they were allowed to, then got their gear out of the car, and hiked for another 1.5 hrs until they found a spot in the forest that pleased them. 

Mark got to carry his own bed roll this time! Ben made him his own walking stick, too. 

Both said that the view during their hike was breathtakingly beautiful.

Mark taking a little break during an up-hill portion of their hike

This clearing looked like a good spot to pitch the tent

Look at the view of the waterfall!

The contraption to the left of the tent is Ben's awesome hammock (that I sewed for him out of duck canvas) with a poncho pitched above it. Ben plans to sleep like this during our church's Fall men's hike. It was VERY comfy.

Mark enjoyed snuggling into the hammock in the afternoon for a post-hike nap. He slept in the tent by himself during the night.

Trees!

An evening view of the waterfalls beneath where Mark and Ben camped

Aside from playing card games and "hide the knife" around the camp, Ben also taught Mark how to throw a knife! Here Mark is proudly posing next to a successful 4th try. After about 30 minutes Mark was able to get the knife to stick in the tree about 30% of the time. (Just the skill a 5-year-old needs!)

What an amazing experience for a young boy to have with his wonderful Dad! Sean and I had a slightly less eventful weekend at home, and we were all very happy to be re-united on Sunday afternoon.

Our trip to Montana

We have been back home for 2 weeks now, but things have just been so busy that I haven't had time to post pictures from our trip to Montana until now.

We had such a wonderful time. We stopped in Spokane on both ends of the trip to see my parents. As always, the boys really loved spending time with their grandparents and aunts and uncle! The drive to Bozeman was LONG, but the boys did really well. We stayed with my aunt and uncle (THANK YOU, Dan and Carolyn and Diana!), and visited my grandparents (Grandma and Bapoo Rumely) twice. This was their first time to meet Sean. We also went to the Museum of the Rockies. It was an all-around wonderful Spring break trip.

Here are some pics:

Mark was SO excited to visit "Big Mike" again!

Ben offering Big Mike a delicious little morsel

Mark reading the sign to Sean

The boys with Great Grandma and Great Grandpa Bapoo 

Sean enjoying a snuggle with his (great) Aunt Carolyn

Did I mention that we had snow?!

Sean liked the snow at first, and then decided that he was DONE.

Mark held out a little longer - we built a snowman together. 

Before going inside, Mark made a snow angel - much easier to do in real MT snow than in Vancouver slush!

What a wonderful Spring break. We had such a good time, we forgot to take more pictures! We feel so blessed to have such a wonderful family!

Sean's sense of "self"

I have many photos from the last weeks that I still need to share, but that will have to wait for another day.

I wanted to share with you that Sean is developing a very real sense of independence and "self" right now. He likes putting on his own socks and shoes (sometimes he ends up with 2 socks on 1 foot and none on the other, but he does NOT want to be helped). He likes to go pee on the BIG potty without a potty seat, but does NOT want to be held onto or touched - so far he hasn't fallen in, he does hold onto the seat pretty well on his own. He also really enjoys singing/listing the names of his favorite people and things (Mark, Dada, Momma, Mark, Momma, milk, Dada, Meow, Momma, car, etc). Yesterday, in the midst of one of his little lists, he stopped, patted his chest, and said a very clear "Shhhhaw!"

(photo by Diana Griffing)

Sean also spoke his first sentence with a personal pronoun today: "Me down!" (accompanied by much squirming, just in case we didn't understand).

18-month check-up (S), Painting with yogurt (S), losing a tooth (M), playing in a blanket fort (M+S).

First, Sean had his 18 month check-up. He is developing really well, and he is SO TALL! At 36.5 inches tall (93cm) he is the size of an average 3-year-old. He weighed just under 29lbs (13kg), which puts him in the 85th percentile for his age... but below the 10th percentile for his weight-to-height ratio! The doc was not at all worried about this, Sean eats well, has healthy round cheeks, and cute little dimples on his arms and legs. In my Mom's words, he's just "a very looooong drink of water."

Mark has early release from school all of this week. Thanks to all the wonderful WA rain, I'm having to get creative with finding things to do indoors! Yesterday I took Mark, Brady and Sean to eat gelato at Chuck's produce. I pushed all 3 of them all over the store in a shopping cart (together they weigh almost as much as I do!), and then they each got to choose 2 flavors. Anyone who knows me well knows that we hardly ever eat sweets... so this was a treat.

Today we did some art together after Mark came home. Drawing ("daw! daw!") is Sean's favorite thing to do. About 100x a day he announces "daw!" and climbs up onto one of the 'big' chairs at the table, helps himself to some pencils, markers, or crayons, and starts scribbling on the paper I leave there for him. I always stay with him to ensure he doesn't run off to "daw" on walls, clothes, or kitties...

I've tried painting with Sean in the past, but he kept trying to eat the paint. While it is supposedly non-toxic, I wasn't thrilled at the idea... so today I decided to try letting Sean paint with plain yogurt that I added some blue food coloring to.

"before" painting - not quite sure what to think of it, especially since I wasn't letting him sit in his usual "daw" spot...

blue yogurt "paint" and some white paper

"Hmmm. This is kind of cool."

Mark had fun drawing - it is so fun for me to see how much concentration he musters while working on a project!

Sean tasting a little of his paint. He doesn't usually get to feed himself any really messy foods, so this was extra fun for him.

It was nice to have some extra time with Mark. I kind of feel like I never see him, since he normally has school until 3:35 every day.

I painted a little stick boy for Sean

Sean really started getting into the whole thing at this point: he SWISHED the yogurt all over the paper and the tray, he SCOOPED it up in his fingers and SQUISHED it between his hands. Of course he also fed it to himself by the spoonful.

What are you looking at?

Mark proudly presented his finished art project

He explained the details to me

At some point Sean abandoned the use of utensils to feed himself the yogurt by the fist-full

Mark continued drawing for a while

"after" painting with yogurt. Sean was so happy!

Ok, so at this point Mark announced that his tooth is REALLY loose, so I suggested he bring me the floss so he could try pulling it out. I tied a loop of floss around his tooth - it was so loose I was able to see part of the root when he wiggled it - and with a good YANK Mark pulled it out.

Eek! Blood! (Mark was a little worried about tasting the blood)

Mark pressed a cold wet wash rag against the empty gap for a few minutes to stop the bleeding

Proudly showing off his gap

Once Mark's tooth stopped bleeding, and once Sean had been washed off, we went into the living room and built an awesome blanket fort. I don't very frequently actively role-play with the boys, but this was fun! We took a rocket ship to a variety of planets, got stranded, rescued, caught some space pirates, killed some aliens, and had a lot of fun in the meantime. Sean got really into it, and Mark had a lot of fun narrating and enacting.

Another "cheese" for the camera

Boy, do I ever love my 2 boys! (here in the blanket fort)