Perfect day

Gabriel's never really liked swinging, and he kept saying he was going to fall out of the tire swing.

Check out those thighs! (Luckily mine are hidden in this picture!)

I love this picture of my guys.

We stay so busy with our families that it is rare for us to have a "just the four of us" family day. So I think from now on, we will reserve Memorial Day, the 4th of July, and Labor Day to be our Family Fun days, where we just do whatever we feel like and don't make any plans ahead of time with anyone.

Today, we started off with a trip to the donut shop, something we only do about twice a year. Then we took the boys to our favorite park in Arlington. There's tons of things to do and the entire playground area is shaded. Gabriel played himself silly while I just sat with Joel and let him take it all in. Jav held him and swung (is that right) for awhile. Then we went back to the car so Gabriel could practice pedaling his tricycle in one of the shady spots. He's starting to finally get a little better at it.

We went home to have lunch and then we ALL took naps, something that also rarely happens. It was wonderful! Then we headed out to Marble Slab for some late afternoon ice cream. Who cared if it was just before dinner? We didn't!!! We stopped at Lowe's for a few things for the house. Then had burgers and fries for dinner.

The kids are asleep, we're beat, but it's a good tired!

And I have to comment on our beautiful flag from the Lion's Club. We pay an annual fee for them to put one in our yard on five holidays. Many homes in our neighborhood have them, and it looks so pretty to see them lined up along the street. It's also a good way for us to remember, and begin to explain to Gabriel, what this holiday really means.

Covers

Wednesday songs are Old School Country and Cowboy Songs. I was singing the song below to Joel (the original version) and remembered this really cool version by David Byrne that came out on an album called Red, Hot and Blue. The whole thing is great, with various artists (Thompson Twins, k.d. lang, Annie Lennox) covering Cole Porter songs, and back when it came out all the proceeds went towards AIDS research. This is the best song on the album, though. I love the drum beat!

One reason I love having boys

You get to have funny conversations about penises.

During our zoo trip we stopped in one of the restrooms and as I was taking a seat Gabriel yelled out, "Mama you have a penis!" But I think he really meant it in the form of a question. That's just not how it came out. So I explained to him that "no, I do not have a penis. Boys have penises. Girls do not." I'm sure the other zoo patrons in the bathroom found this enlightening.

So after his nap a few days later, we had this conversation:

"Mama, you don't have a penis."

"No I don't. We found that out at the zoo the other day, didn't we?"

After thinking about this for a long time and apparently forgetting about our bathroom conversation, he said, "But animals don't have penises."

And I said, "Yes, many of the boy animals do. Certain animals, like maybe fish, might not. But boy elephants and boy monkeys do.

He thought long and hard again and said, "No they don't. They have tails."

"Well, they might have both a tail and a penis."

"Oh." At which point his brain was about to explode if he thought about it any longer, so he ran off to play.

Zoo!

Gabriel and I recently became members of the Fort Worth Zoo, something I've wanted to do for a long time. I've wanted to take him back to the zoo for a year and half, but pregnancy and then Joel put our plans on hold for a little while. We finally had our zoo day last Wednesday and we had so much fun. I am trying to do some "Gabriel and Mama only" trips this summer and the zoo will be a big player. The memberships will pay for themselves after three or four trips. We are going to go with Joel Tuesday if Joel's cough gets better by then.

We're so lucky to have such a fantastic zoo in our city!

House

Our dining room. We bought ourselves the mirror (way on sale) for our anniversary this

year. Now if we could just get it hung.

Our Welsh kitchen dresser, which I use as a mini buffet. I would love to get rid of the wallpaper.

One of two oversized chairs that don't work in our house. This one is especially bad because the cats decided early on to use it as an additional scratch post.

I have learned (a little too late for this house), that after moving into a new home, you really should live there about a year before buying any furniture or making any kind of design decisions. It takes about that long to get to know a house. To get the flow, the nuances, understand where the best walkways are, and where the best places to put certain pieces of furniture are. We made the mistake of buying chairs waaaaaaayyyyyyyy before this milestone was reached, and I have regretted it ever since. The rooms in our house are not that big, and we bought oversized chairs that just don't fit well in the room. We also purchased a square dining room table. I love it, but we really should have bought a rectangular one in order for our Welsh kitchen dresser and antique buffet to fit in our dining room. I already owned a gigantic four poster queen size bed before I met Jav, and it is too big for our bedroom.

So there are many things that need changing about our furniture. We are in the process of trying to decide if we want to make our front bedroom the master, the middle bedroom a playroom/office and thereby move both boys into what's now our room in the back of the house. This would mean moving closets too, and I'm not sure I have the energy for that right now. We really will need some extra room one day, especially when Gabriel wants his own room again. We could add on to the back bedroom going into the backyard. We might be able to add-on with a second story. I'd love to screen in what is now the back porch and build a deck around it. But with me staying home, none of this will happen for a pretty long time. And sometimes I feel like our decor is a little garage sale-like. Which always makes me think of When Harry Met Sally and the Roy Rogers garage sale wagon wheel coffee table. Hee hee.

When I ran all of this by Jav he said, in typical male thought process, "Why don't we just move to a bigger house?" Well, money is the first answer. But the second one is that I love this house, at least most of it. It would be so great to have an extra room for guests or an office, or preferably both. We both HATE our master bath and want to have it completely ripped out and redone at some point. The kitchen could be a bit bigger too. But I love the living and dining area and the yard. So do we pour money into it, knowing that we will probably not get that investment back if we ever sell? Or do we just move?

Our color scheme is a bit wacky too. The people who lived here before us had the walls of the main living area and hallway textured and painted. There's brown, kind of a mustard color, and an unusual yellow. It sounds horrible, but it actually all works really well together. Even so, one of our problems is that there's just too much going on with all of those colors. Especially when we get down to my furniture color scheme. I've always loved the movie Home Alone and coveted Kevin's house. Every room has some form of green and red to add to the Christmas spirit of the movie. Without even realizing it, I already have a red and green color scheme running through this house. (Not bright red and bright green, but subtler shades of each). The living room has a green rug and a burgundy chair. The kitchen has burgundy and green in the wallpaper border, and so does the Master bedroom. I'm not too jazzed about keeping the borders long-term, but they'll do for now. The quilt on our bed is red and Molly's bed is green. We painted the playroom an apple green, and want to go back and paint the baseboards and trim some shade of red. This all seems to work in my head, but I know we need to remove some of those colors from the wall for it to really work.

Oh well, it all gives me something to think about in my spare time. Ha.

First and last day of school

Gabriel's last day of preschool was today. He'll be in the 3-year-old class next Fall, with two completely new teachers. This year his lead teacher, Ms. Amy, had been his assistant teacher the year before, so the transition was really easy. Plus many of the kids were in his class last year too. Next year, so far only one boy, Luke (we all call him Lukey-Luke) will be in his class. Everyone else moved to three days a week. But that's cool because he and Lukey-Luke have become pretty good friends. I plan to have Luke, his Mom, and his baby brother over for a play date during the summer. She had Will two weeks almost to the hour after I had Joel. Every time we showed up to pick up the boys Ms. Dawn, his assistant teacher, said, "Here come the babies!"

Gabriel has really matured in many ways, even though he still has babyish moments. I really think they do a great job with the kids at this preschool. We are debating about whether or not to send Gabriel to this school up until he goes to kindergarten or switch him over to his private school for Pre-K. I'm glad we have some time to think about it still.

Ms. Amy and Ms. Dawn wrote on their goodbye note today that the thing they'll miss most about Gabriel is hearing him sing. That made me cry.

Posting gap

Aunt April with Joel. He actually fell asleep a few minutes after this was taken.

I'm really trying to get better about posting, but the past two weekends and in between have been crazy.

We had our six year anniversary on the 8th. We went out for a nice long dinner at Lily's Bistro on Magnolia. GREAT food and reasonable prices. It had a very European sidewalk cafe feel about it, Jav and I both agreed. Then Mother's Day was the 9th. Jav and Gabriel went to Mass with Jav's Mom, while I staged a slight protest about having to get up early and rush around on Mother's Day and stayed home with Joel. In fact, I was moving so slowly that I made us late for Esperanza's for lunch and we had to wait in a ginormous line. I felt pretty bad. But it was really fun once we got seated, and they always have great food.

Then during the week Gabriel got sick again. It was kind of a relapse from his earlier congestion and cough, but the cough was much worse this time. He couldn't sleep, and spent a night with Mommy again. He finally was able to settle down and stop coughing around 3 or so. We were both wrecks the next day! We decided to take him to the doctor again, and ended up seeing a doctor in our group that had once seen my brother as a baby! Dr. Scroggie has to be getting close to retiring, but he's still going strong and is SOOOOO wonderful with Gabriel when we've had to go to him. And God bless him, he gave us an antibiotic this time. I'm not thrilled about how often Gabriel is having to take them, but he's been sick pretty steadily for over two months now, and I think he needed some help to kick this.

We had a Baptism class for Joel Thursday night, which I think is a crazy time to have a class for people with infants. We took separate cars in case Joel started to have a meltdown. 7-9 is supposed to be bath and bedtime, not "here's a roomful of strangers and please don't make a fuss" time. I thought there might be a quiet corner where I could feed him during the class if needed, but they had 30 people show up, the largest turnout they'd ever had! So I missed part of the video they show while in the bathroom feeding him, and he still wanted his cereal, so I took him home after the tour of the font. It's not like we haven't done this before, people! We learned that our new priest favors the total immersion approach, where the baby goes in back first and doesn't get his face wet, but the rest of him gets doused. At first this seemed to be going overboard to me, but then we figured that he will probably cry either way, so why not? This is horrible to say, but Jav thinks people like the spectacle of the baby that freaks out as opposed to one who stays quiet during the whole ceremony (kind of like how people go to a Nascar race just to see the wrecks). It wakes everybody up.

I spent most of the week and all day Saturday cleaning my house, inside and out. My side of the family came for lunch yesterday, and it was the first time we've had them over since Gabriel's birthday last September. So it was the first time my house has been that clean since then, too! It was a good dry run for my Book Club meeting next month. I had a sudden burst of energy to clean after I took Bones to the vet Thursday morning. He had been acting like his back around his tail was hurt or something, and his hair had gotten a bit thinner there. Well, the vet found two fleas crawling on him! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! I kicked into panic whirlwind vacuuming and laundry mode, with a staging area for every piece of bedding that he had come in contact with for the past week. It took me two days just to wash everything. So far I think we've avoided disaster, only because Bones is so sensitive and completely freaked out as a warning. And I love having the house this clean. I feel like I deserve a week off from cleaning now.

We had a great day yesterday. It was supposed to rain, but luckily had cleared off by the time everybody arrived. We had baked spaghetti, garlic bread and a big salad. And for some reason I was craving Italian Cream Cake for dessert. Simple, but delicious. We had to get the two leaves out for our dining room table for the first time since we bought it. We are a larger family unit now with my uncle living in town, and three out of four cousins sitting at the table now. Once Joel gets old enough for a regular chair we'll have to buy an extra, since we are eleven total. How wonderful is that? I think when we bought the table we never thought that we'd fill it up, let alone need an extra space. We have some major things going on with Cade right now that I don't want to post about yet, and it was so nice to hug both he and Macy, even though I don't get to see them much when we host everybody. I love my niece and nephew soooooooo much!!! And Gabriel set up a lookout post in front of the picture window around 11:00 and couldn't be convinced to come down until they showed up.

Joel is maturing so fast. He is sitting in a high chair now during meals and loves being up off the floor level. He little hands are grabbing at everything, and he's doing this funny lunge for things when he really has to concentrate. The interaction between the brothers is getting so cute. It's almost like Joel finally realized that this bigger whirl of energy that comes at his face all the time is his brother, and now looks forward to seeing him.

I figured out one of the wonderful things about having a baby around as opposed to an older child is the way they look at their mother with just so much love. From morning until night, his little face just lights up every single time he sees me. It's something that Gabriel doesn't do as much now, and I hadn't realized I missed it.

Ok, I am caught up on all of our happenings and ready to move on to other topics.

Walking

I love to walk. I got hooked over 15 years ago when I realized that it it the easiest way to exercise. No driving to the gym, no fancy equipment. Just some good shoes and that's it. I started out walking on tracks with my buddy at the time, Tracy. She was a true power walker, and we were just after the fitness aspect of it back then.

But as the years went by, I would try to walk wherever I happened to find myself. Campgrounds, around lakes, strange neighborhoods during out-of-town visits. One of my favorite places to walk was Fredericksburg. I would visit my grandmother for the weekend and get up really early to walk as the sun came up over the hills. That's where I fell in love with walking just to clear your head, or to enjoy being outdoors. I would check out everyone's yard and get gardening ideas. I would count how many different bird calls I could hear. I would just breathe. I discovered that walking is better therapy than anything you might pay for. And now, when I walk, worries may come up, but then I shake myself back to the here and now, and concentrate on making my legs move my body forward. And just breathe.

Dream gift

Joel and I went grocery shopping yesterday morning, as we do most Saturday or Sunday mornings now. I decided to see what was on the classical station for the drive over. One of my favorite pieces of music was on. Mozart's Sonata #12 in F, heard below. (This wasn't the pianist we heard, but this is a pretty good version).

My mom has an ancient Mozart piano book with a bunch of his sonatas in it, including this one. One day years ago I was just trying to play through some of them and I became hooked on this piece of music from the moment I started playing. I practiced it on and off whenever I had the chance at their house, because we don't have a piano. But I haven't played or thought about this piece for years now. As I was listening to it yesterday morning, I realized how much I miss playing these days. And it dawned on me how much I would love to have a piano in our house.

We bought an electronic keyboard for Gabriel for Christmas and he loves it. He loves to explore the different sounds and rhythms it can make. But he doesn't like for me to play it, and it's just not the same as playing a real piano, at least to me. I realize that I still wouldn't have much time to play it these days, but it would be so wonderful to just sit for a few minutes and just play away. I never realized what a gift my grandparents were giving me with the nine years of lessons until I became an adult. Now I wish I had practiced more, because even though I can read music, I never practiced back then didn't learn many of the technicalities. Which means I don't think I learned enough to actually teach piano to someone else. My nephew is dying to learn, and I'd love to teach Gabriel or Joel, or both, one day. I also wonder if teaching piano would have been a way to earn some extra money. But I'm just not that good.

I just wonder where on earth we would put a piano, anyway. But that's going into a whole 'nother post.