Cuteness in abundance - and "newsflash!!"

We all look forward to our "date nights with Ivy," which come around monthly. Yesterday was such a gorgeous day that it seemed a shame to spend any more of it inside than we absolutely had to! The cooler temperatures made an outdoor fire seem attractive and our girls are always up and eager to make pizza pockets over the fire. So we had a plan!!

I love watching kids enjoy the outdoors - and with such abandon! They played and ate and played and ate and got REALLY messy! The food was delicious, the air was fresh and cool, and there was some serious cuteness to take in. Ivy was so sweet sitting in the big chair downing her pizza pocket and about 1/2 a quart of dill pickles! I had to feed her pickles after awhile because going from eating to playing to eating meant that the food had a sandy crunch to it if not inserted directly in the mouth from someone else.

I love Ivy's, "I splatted!" And she was doing a lot of that. Her two feet haven't quite learned to come off the ground together but she sure was attempting to hop into the puddles. I'm not sure how long they could have played out there and it likely would have been a hard sell to get them to leave that fun and come inside, but the offer of a bath with lots more toys to play with got the two littlest ones traipsing up the hill. We did not take any detours but I plopped them both right in the tub, where they proceeded to play until pick up time. What fun was had by all!

Some day Jason and I are going to make an outdoor fire and leisurely make pizza pockets by ourselves and then sit there watching the fire, reminiscing about the good old days when kids were under foot and we would just sit down to take a bite when someone needed a drink, or another pickle, or their food fell in the sand, or a child was about to go down the slide in a precarious position, or someone was getting just a hair too close to the fire, or someone needed to poop, or the fire needed restoking, or someone wanted another pizza, or we needed to check the three pizza pockets we had on the fire, or.... You get the picture!

But let me not wish away these days any faster than they are flying by already! We are seeing signs of kids growing up all over the place!! And here comes the NEWSFLASH! At about 2 years and 8 months Terah just spent her first night WITHOUT me!!!! I'm still in a bit of a shock that it happened and went off without a hitch - or at least without any difficulty on her part (that is once she went to bed around midnight).

Mom was here for part of this past week while my Dad happily birded elsewhere. She offered for the girls to have a sleepover upstairs and normally that means the two oldest. But Terah seemed more ready and we offered for her to join and when she learned this meant she could try out her hand-me-down sleeping bag and sleep in the "cave" (their walk through closet) she was in! At least verbally so. I thought maybe she was going to be all talk on this one and when bedtime came around would recant and want to come downstairs. Not so!

It sounds like she did an hour or two routine of getting ready for bed, needing a snack, brushing teeth again, being thirsty, getting hungry again, brushing teeth and then finally after a big poopy she sacked out near midnight. I had been sleeping for quite some time by then!! Then in the wee hours of the morning (around 4 a.m. or so - which happened to be almost to the minute the exact 10 year anniversary of Nora's death), I woke and then rested fitfully for a bit before getting up to head to work around 6. I started thinking about her in her sleeping bag and worried she got down to far and couldn't breath underneath the covers. Clearly I was sure she couldn't possibly have just slept peacefully up there all night without me - which was, in fact, exactly what she had done!

She's still a fan of "mama milk" but also clearly can go without it. And she also seems to be quite used to waking up with Grandma nearby rather than me or Jason. This morning, as I was doing my morning puttering she woke and I heard her call, "GRANDMA" from our bed. Thankfully she wasn't disappointed to see me and thought it was funny when I told her she would have to call a bit louder for Grandma to hear her all the way from West Virginia! We enjoyed our time so much having Mom around and miss her already! (And a goal for future blogs: I need to make an effort to get some pictures of Mom and the girls when they are together - so often when she is here and spending time with the girls I am at work or occupied with other things - but I'll make an effort!)

Ok, time to pick some lettuce and get some compost on our corn patches. Off we go!!