Easter Picnic

Happy Easter! I hope you all had beautiful and relaxing days. We had a wonderful celebration. The above picture is right before we departed for the Easter Vigil. The cranky face is because I was trying to get Lucy to wear the bow. She hates anything in her hair, and will just point at it and cry until I remove it. She knows if she tries to take it out herself, it will hurt. But, I gave in, took it out, and our Easter Vigil experience was better because of it. She actually did pretty well for a two and half hour service!

Sunday morning we slept in, and then made Monkey Bread. I have not had Monkey Bread in years and years, but for some reason it popped into my head sometime shortly before Lent, and I decided it would be our Easter breakfast. I kind of dreamed about it all through Lent, and it was indeed a glorious Easter morning breakfast.

Shortly after that, we packed up some food and went on an Easter picnic. It was a perfect day--very warm, 80 or 90, but we found a great shady spot at a regional park near us. We looked out on the lake, and enjoyed a feast-- delicious sandwiches, strawberries and blackberries, chips, cookies, chocolate, and jellybeans.

Lucy almost fell asleep on the car ride there, but we kept her awake by talking about blackberries and chips (she was very excited to eat them).

She surprised me by mostly staying on the blanket near us, but once she walked off before I could put her shoes back on her. The ground was damp and she tip-toed around in her socks. It was very cute.

Sometimes when Lucy is very happy with what we are doing (spending time outside), she gets very affectionate. I was showered with hugs during our picnic.

I can't say it enough: in the midst of all of our busy-ness near the end of the semester, it was just so nice to spend a nice relaxing Easter together in the park.

Talkin' about dee-dah

What is dee-dah? You got me. But, that is what Lucy is talkin' about, according to her. "Talkin' about (blank)" is a very common phrase these days. The first time she said it occurred like this: the little boy who lives upstairs raises quite a ruckus sometimes, and it surprises/frightens Lucy. So she will run to us saying, "Scared Jo-Jo!" She did just that the other day, although no noise prompted this. I said to her, "Joe didn't make a noise. What are you talking about?" And she responded, "Talkin' about scared Jo-Jo!" This is just about the most sophisticated sentence she's uttered so I laughed pretty hard. And now we're talkin' about dee-dah...

In other news, sick has become our new normal. At the tail end of a nasty cold that we all caught, Lucy and I caught yet another very nasty cold. We are still battling it, and hoping that James stays well for the end of the semester (and beyond). I haven't taken many great pictures lately, because most of them include a large amount of snot which tends to ruin the picture a bit. So, this post will mostly be a few stories, with perhaps a couple of pictures if I can manage to get some snot-free ones in the next couple of days.

Big news: for the first time, we have hope that perhaps maybe Lucy has a glimpse of understanding into this whole new baby thing. It is thanks to a gift from a very thoughtful classmate and friend of James. He gave us a book entitled Angel in the Waters, which is about a baby in its mother's womb talking with his or her angel about the whole experience. I usually don't like these kinds of "when you were born" books because they seem a bit dramatic or goofy to me, but this one does a pretty good job in my opinion. Anyway, Lucy immediately latched onto this book, and now I read "Angel Wah" about 15 times a day. After one of these readings, I simply said, "Lucy, a baby just like that is in mommy's belly." She looked at me, looked at my belly, and began showering my belly with hugs and kisses. Now she frequently pulls up my shirt to say hello to the baby, give it a few hundred hugs and kisses etc. Earlier this afternoon, in the midst of a hugging session, she stopped to point at my belly and started counting... and went up to twenty. I laughed and told her, no there is just ONE baby in there.

Oh, and if you'd like to read the book, here it is! http://www.angelinthewaters.com/onlinebook/coverpage.cfm

One more story on the book front: I've been reading the works of Maria Montessori lately and learning a lot about her method of education. One of the things I picked up is that children of Lucy's age love coffee table books: books with large colorful pictures and not a lot of text (animals, plants, art, etc). We have a great ongoing used library sale near us and so I picked up a coffee table type book on aquarium fish for $1.50. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. After just a week or two, Lucy could name almost all of the 60+ varieties of fish. Her favorites include Red-tailed Black Shark, Goldfish, Sucker Loach and Cardinal Tetra. We're trying to find some other coffee table books...

Here is a sweet picture James took while both Lucy and I were pretty sick. She was so stuffed up and yucky-feeling that she just couldn't sleep laying down, and all I wanted to do was read. We compromised.

I've had some time off work recently, and so I've been able to cross off many tasks on our ever-growing to-do list as well as have some of the kind of fun that I'm not usually able to have with Lucy since we are always busy and out of the house. One day I made finger paints, thinking they'd be a huge hit. Well, this is as much action as the finger paints ever saw. Lucy thoroughly enjoyed looking at them and naming them repeatedly (red, blue, yellow...), but could not be enticed to color with them. Ah well.

This past weekend brought us some lovely weather, so we took advantage of it with a trip to our nearby woods/river/large creek?/general nature place.

As you can see, Lucy was extremely pleased to be spending some time in the great outdoors. Lately, even if we spend hours outside, she will cry (and I mean WEEP) when it is time to go inside, even if it is cold, dark, she's hungry, etc.

Lucy loves slides, and she shows off her creativity by turning anything you can imagine into a "wee lide": my leg, a broom, a slightly sloping hill of dirt.

Oh, look! Our little one on the way. It's hard to believe we'll be meeting him or her in just seven(ish) weeks.