We are March-ing, ever March-ing

I recently looked at a calendar, whereupon I discovered that it was already July. July! Which discovery was quickly followed by a panicky feeling that perhaps I had not posted anything on my blog recently and--horror of horrors!--I was coming up on five months behind. This, combined with recent tactful comments by family members, caused me to feel an overwhelming amount of guilt about being a terrible blogger, and I almost decided to quit blogging altogether. Except that I also recently discovered that I am a terrible ping pong player. I took a long, hard look at my life and decided that I should give both blogging AND ping pong another try. I haven't yet had a chance work on the ping pong, but here I am, ready to give the month of March its due attention. And if I'm really on my game, April won't be far behind...

One fine, breezy day in March, after sending Charlie packing (well, really just to preschool) I took Antonia in the jogging stroller along a trail that runs through Henderson called the Pittman Wash. The Pittman Wash is what passes for "scenery" in our neck of the woods, being an interesting combination of sewer/drainage ditch, natural watercourse, biking/running trail, and city park system reclamation project. On this particular day of my run, there were two big excavators hard at work putting our tax dollars to use moving big piles of rocks around. (I I should mention that I actually really appreciate the City of Henderson for working to make the wash a nice place to run, it's really quite lovely, in most places.) I knew that I would feel like a really good mom if I brought Charlie back after preschool to see the "diggers" in action, even though part of me revolts at the idea of going somewhere twice in one day (it feels so inefficient!) So we came back later that day and sure enough, Charlie loved it, and I felt like the best mom ever! I momentarily forgot that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that we spend too much time wandering the aisles of the Target Superstore.

Antonia, however, continued to stare balefully at the machinery the entire time, and refused to get out of the stroller.

A popular playgroup activity hereabouts is to play at Boulder Beach. In theory, Boulder Beach is, well, a beach at Lake Mead. In reality, it's more like the surface of the moon, if the moon had lakes. But Antonia thoroughly enjoyed the unrestricted access to mud and rocks, and never even tried to go plunging into the cold water.

Charlie responds to the news that he and Nia have eaten all the granola bars and bananas, and there are NO MORE SNACKS.

At the end of March, during Will's spring break, we headed up to Utah to hang out with this guy, Hunter Howard Robinson, our first nephew on Will's side of the family. It was fun to hang out with Will's family, and be in Utah in the spring. Spring in Utah is best summed up by these lyrics from everybody's favorite Tom Jones ballad: "love is in the air, in the whisper of the trees..." You can just FEEL the zoobies getting engaged, can't you?

This Utah trip was our first experience staying at a hotel as a family, and it went surprisingly well. We had to experiment with a few different sleeping arrangements (kids in one room, Will and I in the other...one kid in the bathroom, one in the closet...kids in two different rooms, Will and I in the lobby...kids in the car and Will and I in separate rooms...Ok, some of those weren't real.) This is because our children sleep like angels alone in their own rooms, but like jack-in-the-boxes if anyone else is in the room, popping up so often to see what said other person is doing that NO ONE GETS ANY SLEEP. But we did eventually find an arrangement that allowed Will and I to have the nice bed and the big TV, and children to sleep well enough that sleep deprivation was kept to a minimum. Click here to see a short video of what we did during some of our down time. Charlie has the best line in the video. Antonia was being grumpy. I had a severe cold at the time.

I forgot to bring Antonia's swimsuit on this trip, so she had to bare it all at the hotel pool. And then, to add insult to injury, I didn't tell her I was taking the picture, so she didn't have a chance to suck in her gut.

Isn't this just the cutest durned thing ever? It warms the cockles of my heart, and my cockles are usually pretty warm to begin with.

Did anyone else think Easter was too early this year? I did, but maybe that was because I started buying Easter candy in January, when the grocery store started selling it. I had a long conversation with a friend about the Easter Bunny and whether or not it's appropriate or even harmless for kids to believe in that kind of mythology that perpetuates consumerism. Here's what I decided, don't tell me if you think I'm wrong, because I don't have any more mental energy to expend on the issue: The idea of the Easter Bunny isn't any worse than Santa Claus, it's the execution that becomes a sticking point for me. I absolutely loathe the man-sized commercial version of the Easter Bunny, but I think something along the lines of "Alice in Wonderland's" gentlemanly little White Rabbit could be perfectly appropriate, with the right backstory. I have at least another year to come up with what the story could be, but it needs to be something I can use to motivate my kids, the same way Santa motivates kids...

We had a fantastic Easter party with friends the Saturday before Easter, which was everything you could dream of in an Easter party: Easter egg hunting, bowling, crafts, prizes, hot dogs, meatballs, candy, candy and more candy. And the peanut-butter cup trifle, oh!, the peanut-butter cup trifle! For a few moments that day, I think I knew what heaven must feel like.

Possibly my favorite part of Easter this year was realizing that I had so much candy from Grandma Daines and Baca Hall to fill the kiddies' buckets, that I could hoard all the rest of the Easter candy for myself and Will. (It may or may not be true that Will and I ate an entire bag of Cadbury Mini-Eggs in one day. Also, there may or may not have been a day that week when I ONLY ate Cadbury Mini-Eggs, and nothing else.)

Easter morning: Antonia, drunk with the joy of Cadbury Eggs

Charlie, also heavy-lidded with pleasure at the thought of all that Easter candy

Instead of an Easter egg hung on Easter morning, Lori thought it would be awesome to put Dorothea in Antonia's doll stroller. She has a thing about appropriating doll accessories for her own use...(See evidence below)

And now we have some random pictures to wrap up this post. But before I sign off, here is a funny-ish conversation I had with Charlie one day.

Charlie: Where Jimmy sleeps? (He was still working on use of "does," and some other grammatical structure things, you'll notice. Jimmy is our next-door neighbor, an older gentleman with an awesome Italian accent.)
me: In his bed, probably
Charlie: Where his bed is?
me: In his house.
Charlie: Where in his house?
me: In his bedroom, probably.
Charlie: Where his bedroom is?
me: In his house.
Charlie: Where?!
me: In his house, I said.
Charlie: But WHERE?! He doesn't has an upstairs!


Coming Soon: The Story of How Antonia Became The Cutest Patient Ever Seen at St. Lukes Regional Medical Center