the attempted family photo

We don't have any photos of all 4 of us and I thought fall in Telluride would be a great opportunity. At the onset, I bribed Joachim with ice cream if he smiled nicely for the pictures. He did exactly what is predictable for a 3 year year old and made a goofy face in EVERY single picture.

Finally, we went back to the condo and I told him in no uncertain terms he would not be getting ice cream (to which he reacted predictably). Realizing how important this picture was to me, Ben graciously gave him another chance (although I would not get my cool outdoor picture, I was happy). We wiped the dirt smeared tears from his face and he did a little better, but if it wasn't him then it was Anna.

Notice my plastered smile, I'm thinking "all he needs to do is smile once, just once, c'mon and smile once for me." I really wish Mhari was around to work her photo magic and create art from my family. Perhaps I should just make this into a collage, I have three times this many pictures.

These are the pictures in which one or the other of my children appear drugged.

And so we enter the sticking out the tongue portion of this photo shoot.
On the bottom here we have the winner, it lacks the fall flare I was going for, but we're all in the same picture and Joachim did get his ice cream. There are plenty more family photos to take and now I have a new appreciation for all of those beautiful family Christmas pictures we receive.
My dad snapped this one while Ben and I were discussing what to do with Joachim, he had no problem being cute here.

Blue Mesa Resevoir

On our way home from my parents' I stopped with the kids at the resevoir to stretch our legs. If we'd had bathing suits we'd have gone all the way in. This is the closest to a beach Joachim has ever been... he even kept calling it the ocean despite my attempts to correct him.

what is this blog anyway?

Recently in several of the blogs I follow the authors have pondered why they blog, or what direction they want to go. So, now it's my turn.

I've become self-conscious of my marathon-blogging as I try to catch up on time between my internet usage. I'm always thinking about you, my friends, who might be reading and skimming and even losing interest in my lengthy stories and repetitive pictures.

Of course blogs are a colored slice of life, we all know that, but Ben has had more than one conversation with me (ok, a lot of conversations) about how my life is perfectly adequate and if reading what my friends are doing is going to make me unsatisfied and feel unaccomplished then I'm going to have to stop reading. (I won't go into the problems facebook creates for me... there is absolutely no way I can keep up). On the flip side reading blogs also makes me feel less alone and more connected to myself through my friends.

I love living in Delta and have no interest in moving anytime soon, but I do feel isolated here with only a few moms whose parenting I can really identify with (thank you Corey and Kassia).

So, laying awake with Anna at night and considering the world of blogs, it occurred to me one of the things I like most about my blog is its scrapbook quality. I have aspirations for a physical scrapbook of sorts, yet alas, a book is far from reality, I barely even get pictures printed to send to the great-grandparents, let alone to hang on my wall or put in a book. Nonetheless, one thing I love to do is look through the 8 or so fat photo albums my grandmother is still adding to.

So, I realized as the mother of two I don't blog to spread my pithy thoughts, and obviously I'm not traveling so there're no adventures to share. I concluded it's just so I can see the story of my life unfold. I know Ben looks back on previous entries at work and Joachim always asks to see himself on the computer. I can even see how much I enjoy having my own story to read. After a few months some entries I cringe with emabarassment over, but boy, wouldn't I love to have a book like this of my own childhood to look over.

I don't know... my grandmother just has a few black and white pictures pre-WWII and maybe that's better, a way to live in the present unencumbered by the past. After all living lightly is supposed to be liberating and I regularly read about our societal need to simplify. I see it in Delta whenever busy big city friends visit and I realize just how beautifully slow-paced our lives are.

In fact, for 2 years my sister in law has not even had a phone in the house in which they live, it's 30 yards away in the house they're building and sometimes, much to my frustration, days will go by without someone checking messages. It's difficult if I'm trying to make plans, but it always gives me a great excuse to stop by and visit. She said she actually really likes not having phone interruptions. It's a foreign concept to me with my cell phone, that said my phone is 5 years old and based on the ads Verizon keeps sending I think they can't believe it still works :)

So, here it is, my scrapbook blog, although that doesn't change anything except how I see it.

Palisades Peach Festival

I have now been to all of the produce festivals on the western slope... I think. Next year it'll be Huck Finn Days and Mountain Harvest Festival I hope. Here Joachim is giving Anna an up close view of the balloon monkey a clown made for him.

There was peach everything, but all we came home with were peach colored beads and peach flavored popcorn. There was a surprising number of visitors from Denver... they were the only ones crazy enough to pay those prices for peaches, we got ours elsewhere.
I just love her cute little nose and I can't get over how bald she still is. I think it throws people off because she'll be wearing a pink onsie, purple pants, and pink socks and women (never men) will have whole conversations with me about my son. It bothers me just a little, ok, enough to tell Ben about each and every incident, I just don't get it.
Joachim chose the caboose, of course, and the ever exhausting moon bounce.

Free hand drawing

All summer Joachim produced stencils with crayola markers. He never turned down the suggestion to stencil.

Once our refrigerator started over flowing, I sent them to grandparents, then to friends, I decorated presents with them and finally I started discreetly throwing them away. He was beaming proud of each and every one he produced and he would always call me in to share in the reveal.

Ben expressed concern Joachim wasn't free drawing, and I didn't have much explanation for why, but then I didn't need one because the first week of September we started up story time at the library again and something clicked for him.

At the end they did an incredibly corny craft decorating a pencil and Joachim absolutely fell in love with his. He named it Sandy Bairdy and when we got home first thing he did was draw a picture of Sandy Bairdy using Sandy Bairdy. I was dumbstruck, I guess a summer of stencils wasn't a waste after all.

He then added the picture below which he told me is Wallace and Gromit going to the moon in their space ship. Oh, what a proud day for me. He's gone on to draw all sorts of imaginative stories. He narrates as he draws giving me a beautiful glimpse into his world.





What does Anna do all this time? She rips up paper towels into confetti, her current favorite occupation.

Llama Llama misses mama

This was the story read at story time. It's about a Llama and his first day at pre school. It was poignant for Joachim because he had tried a pre school last spring and he will tell all who ask that he was too scared, but he'll try again when he's big like Jacob.

I found the drawings to be so expressive of my own little boy it touched me too. Interestingly, all on his own he started calling me Mama Llama and himself Llama Llama. It sort of roils off the tongue nicely.

I've ordered Llama Llama and red pajamas and Llama Llama mad at mama through inter library loan and I can't wait to receive them.

lego-holic

Joachim has also entered a major Lego phase. He will literally do legos for more than an hour at a time, and has an amazing ability to start over when something falls apart (balanced at other times with outbursts of frustration in which he scatters pieces everywhere). Our collection has been humble, yet adequate, but recently Ben bid on some legos by the pound on EBay and scored 5 lbs of awesome legos at a fraction of their retail price.

Each one of Joachim's creations is an original, although he does get out pictures and tries to follow the instructions. If you see the picture he was working from you can always see the resemblance.

He won't accept help and if you do help him he will redo your work, "to make it something better." They all involve a long and interesting story if you have the patience to listen. I have an astonishing number of pictures I will spare you. The picture above is a mechanic's garage, if you look closely you can see the car is up on a little lift. He also clips thread between legos to create tow trucks and trains.
And yes, he's still practicing to be a master chef. Below he convinced my mom he needed flour, water and spices to bake bread... I wonder where he learned that?

toilet lid

I'm going to hear it from Ben for this one, but for weeks after we got this new toilet lid I had to go through this ritual with Joachim. I was so tired of him slamming the lid and waking Anna up that I put in a request for this lid... worth every penny to me.

the fence project

This morning as we waved goodbye to Daddy, I noticed a thin layer of frost on the car. A sign of things to come and a reminder we need to bring everything that's ripe in from the garden. Already! This year's growing season was so short.

Yesterday Ben finished our fence! I hadn't thought it was much of a priority since Joachim is a homebody and he mostly plays in the shade of the carport and doesn't leave the yard.

But a fence keeps out wandering dogs and I realized I couldn't safely have other people's kids over to play. I was also getting tired of looking out my kitchen window at our Baptist neighbor's cinder block building and asphalt parking lot. (Aside from that, they make great neighbors).

In May someone accidentally backed into the passenger door of my car and the insurance settlement just about covered the cost of the fencing materials. I unfortunately have to live with a slightly crumpled door, but the car is old and it still runs fine.

Here Ben is drilling post holes, although he had to dig a lot of them by hand because the dirt is so hard.
Here he is nailing up the pickets... a LOT of pickets.
This is the finished south side (the chain link is coming down next).
This picture is from the front of the house (our side yard).
This is from my kitchen window, no more asphalt and cinder block! Ben doesn't know this, but I'm going to ask for one more section of fence that is angled to 4 feet so it won't end as abruptly.
I do love my finished fence and I'm looking forward to planting lots of flowers along my new border. I think our neighbors at the church are pretty happy with the fence too because our yard isn't much to look at right now... we even got a weed citation warning from the city, which was mortifying, but easily remedied with a lawnmower.

One morning, Joachim and I stepped outside to find a backhoe digging up our yard. Nothing could have been more exciting for a 3 year old boy. They were doing something to our water connection and they had to dig a 6 foot hole!

my scariest moment yet.

Ben finished the fence Saturday and that evening I have my first parenting panic attack.

Thanks to Corey and our awesome stroller I walk to church as often as we can, it's only about 15 minutes and the kids love it. We were getting ready to leave for vespers and I told Joachim to go out to the carport and get in the stroller, Anna was already buckled and I'd run back in the house to get something for her. When I got back out, Joachim wasn't in the stroller. I called in the back yard and then in the front and he didn't answer. I was a bit worried, but mostly annoyed, I went back in the house and looked in all of the rooms calling him, but no Joachim.

Worried, I went back outside and walked all the way around the fence looking for him down the alley and around the baptist church.

He had NEVER disappeared like this and he always came when I called him. I started to think, ok this is Delta, I've never heard of a kidnapping, so he's probably not far, I just have to find him. The problem was I'd also recently talked to my neighbor and learned that fifteen years ago her 6 year old son had been hit and killed by a drunk driver who drove up on the sidewalk (they lived two blocks off of Main St. then).

I started imagining my son somewhere nearby unconscious which is why he wasn't answering my yelling. I called Grandma and asked her to come right away to help me look, (Ben was running an errand in another town). I kept walking around and around our house and down the alley calling him. None of our neighbors were home or in their yards because I'm sure they would have stopped to help.

I went back out to the sidewalk and there he was walking back from the end of the block with hands full of rocks and sticks. Before I could say anything he called to me, "I didn't go in the street. I just had to get these pretty rocks." Upon further probing I put together that he had walked to the other end of the block on his way to church and was waiting for ME to come. When I didn't come and he heard me calling he decided to come home. He just thought he'd get a head start and I'd catch up. I was literally sick the rest of the evening, and we've had many conversations with him since about wandering off and where he is and isn't allowed to go by himself.

I'm glad the fence is complete, but it's only around the backyard, which I can't really see from inside the house and he still prefers playing in the front (there's more going on in the neighborhood). Actually, I know everyone on our block has a pretty big backyard, but I've noticed we all spend a fair amount of time in our front yards playing or just sitting on the stoop. I like that. At least by spring he'll be 4 and I'm hoping less prone to absentmindedly take a stroll.

The 6 or 7 minutes he was missing was a strange mix of feeling like an awful parent and realizing nothing is really in my control because anything can happen at any moment, like my neighbor's son who was hit on his own sidewalk in front of his house.

texas

My grandparents treated us to our annual visit and as always we had a great time. Joachim is starting to remember them and their house from one visit to the next which is fun. We went in July which is a pretty big mistake (bigger than I realized), but I wanted them to see Anna when she was still a baby. We will now get back on our winter visit schedule and I don't think we'll do summer again. I really don't know how people live there, it doesn't even cool off at night!
My rose was in bloom! More than 20 years ago my grandmother had each of is grandkids pick out a rose and she planted the bush in her garden for us. I am happy to say my rose bush is one of the surviving few (It has been a long time). It's a yellow peace rose developed after WWII. I of course didn't know that when I picked it, but some time in high school my grandmother sent me a newspaper article she found all about my rose. I vaguely remember picking it based on scent... and it still smells just as luscious.
Martha Gene and Baity as an engaged couple.
I sometimes try to picture my Grandmother with 4 kids under the age of 6, taking diapers to the laundromat down the street and having ice delivered to her ice box. I always want her to tell me how she did it and what she remembers and she says it's so long ago no one could remember. She's still sharp as a tack and not one bit senile, I guess it just was a long time ago. It makes me wonder if I'll really forget these sleepless baby nights. I already forget parts of what we went through with Joachim's skin rashes. The days are long, but the years are short.