Summmertime......

Please note,  This is from Summer of 2011.  I found it as a draft and thought I should just publish it, but blogger didn't put it where it should go!


Well, it has taken a while to arrive here in Portland, but just when you think that summer should be on its way out, it arrives! Yay! Clear mornings! Yay! Warm days! Yay! Fresh veggies and tons of berries!

Maya and Ben are loving it. Our summer has been packed with fun places to go and lots of fun visitors. We spent much of the month of May in Cleveland and had a wonderful time! Lots of thunderstorms and plenty of nice days. Great times with cousins, aunts, uncles, grama and papa too.... but that goes without saying. Maya wasn't to keen on the thunderstorms but loved her morning walk with Grama and Papa.

After returning home, Nana arrived and stayed for about a week. That was fun and then she was off to Pendleton. Grandpa Cal arrived shortly after Nana and so he got to see everyone too.

Ben is growing so fast and has two great big front teeth with a marvelous gap in between. Room enough for another tooth! He has been crawling for a little while (since June) and has it perfected now. He is getting really fast and is ready to walk. He is pulling himself up and trying to cruise along the furniture. He is going to be pretty mischevious, he jsut has that glint in his eye. If you catch him doing something you don't want him to do, he will give a little jump, and either come right at you with a big grin on his face, or high-tail it the other way with the same big grin on his face. He has been eating some things but seems to like blueberries the best.

Maya is super. She is interested in everything and loves all things fairy and princess. She loves to run and climb and is good at both. Lately she has been making up our blessing before dinner and they are the best. She writes them out on paper and then reads them out loud. It is too bad that I can't read them too!

Maya started kindergarten in September.  September 5th.  She was pretty excited and scared and all of the things you would expect.  She did great.  She is having a great time and seems to love every minute of it.  Her class is small and the families that I have met seem to all be very nice.  We ride our new ride to school every morning with Ben riding up front and Maya holding on on the back.  I will post a picture soon.  They have figured out a routine with the garage door opener.  Ben opens and Maya closes.  Ben will open the door and hand it back saying: "Maya!"
I am getting used to the bike.  It is a lot of bike, but so nice that we can ride to almost anywhere I need to be and even nicer that I don't have Ben screaming in the trailer.
Ben is saying so much and his comprehension is even higher.  He is a smart cookie and very determined.  He is pretty reasonable though, talk him through something and 9 (okay, maybe 8) times out of 10 he will come around.  He is in a really funny phase right now. He started making faces and will push out his lips so they are big and pouty and has this silly grin that goes with it.  He is a crack up!
Maya is the best and sweetest thing ever.....most days.  :)
She loves to "help" Ben with everything and so sometimes gets carried away.  There are often tears and screams that I find myself yelling from the other room "What is happening in there?"  Knowing that what I had just walked away from not even 10 seconds ago has turned into Maya making him do what she wants or not letting him push the tractor around because it runs into her people and animal set up.  Good thing his IS so willful!
Sometimes though, it is so funny.  She will tell him what to do and off he goes.... trot, trot, trot, does exactly what she says!
They have the cutest games.  They "Ride the Boat" on the couch, play fort in the play structure, make food in the kitchen, play legos together, and I love it when they turn the music on on the keyboard and dance to the different 1 minute music selections that it cycles through.  Ben usually ruins it for Maya (he just can't help himself) and turns the music up or down, or plays his own piece of music over what she has selected.
They exhaust me, but are the best things ever!

Update

Spring has been moving along at a fast clip.

We are surviving the cast with minimal issues so far. It comes off in 5 days. Thank goodness! He is pretty used to it now, he has figured out how to climb on things, push his trucks and cars along, and will even get a bag, go to the back door and point to it with his trademark grunts, wanting to go outside. He is a smart little guy. The other morning Scott was talking about his new slippers (flip-flops) and Ben went to the door, got one of them and brought it over to him. It was so cute!

Maya is loving planting things and riding her new bike. She is so excited to be able to ride to the library and flies through the constant puddle that is on the way, trying to make some tire marks when she brakes fast. She is learning how to do a handstand and practices everyday.

I have finally put a whole bunch of pictures into a picasa web album. These pictures are from November on. Here is the second album. It is much smaller than the first one. Enjoy!

Broken Arm

By now I think that everyone knows that Ben broke his arm. Maneuvering Kaiser was a fiasco but I think we are through the initiation. It is a stable fracture, called a buckle fracture and should heal just fine. He was casted on Friday and that went as well as it could have. The casting tech was experienced and very fast. Now we just have to keep it as clean and dry as possible until April 24th. Right. They told us that if it got wet or dirty that we could come into the "casting room" anytime and they would just recast it. Right. If that happens, we will just live with it. He is petrified of any and all of it. Every once in a while he looks at his arm, like "where did this come from?" He doesn't have the best balance to begin with, but he is way off now. Today at the park he fell in some slippery mud and ended up with a muddy face.

Maya is busy trying to find ways to break his other arm by jumping over him while he is laying down for a diaper change or jumping on the bed with him because "he likes it!" and making Easter cards. Here is the note that she is writing in Ben's:

Dear Ben,

I think that your face is so cute and I almost love you one hundred times more than my

mama loves me.

When you grow up you will always be my sweetie.

I hope that the Easter bunny brings you things you want and you will always be my

sweetie forever.

Love,

Maya

There was more, I just couldn't write fast enough. Maybe she will write for Hallmark when she is older.

Pictures of the cast will follow!

Benjamin

The game Sequence has been pretty popular around here, and throwing all the chips around seems to be just as fun as the game itself. Ben always looks so confounded when he gets some stuck to the bottom of his foot, it is pretty funny. This morning, though, he had one on each foot and it clicked when he walked, almost like a dress shoe sound. He was so pleased with that. He walked all over the dining room, kitchen and back again just smiling to himself about that sound. It was so cute.

Maya has a family of dolls that live in her play tree house and the brother has been sick for a while now. He is always sleeping and doesn't get to do anything that the sisters do..... poor brother. So today, I asked her if she liked having a brother thinking that there might be some correlation. She wouldn't look at me when she answered and kind of just said yes really fast. So I pressed a little bit and she said: "well, yes, but I wish he took another nap." :)

I don't know if I can swing another nap, but we can try for some more play time. Wish me luck!