October

We've had the most gorgeous fall here, with much leaf-gathering, apple-crisp and applesauce-making, and crafting.









My mom came for a very nice visit, and we all went to an apple orchard nearby.



As usual, Oli*ver found the nearest tree to climb, and at one point he had a small crowd of Japan*ese tourists taking his picture. The only word I could make out from their conversation was "circus". Indeed...















Notice the "Oli*ver" tractor?




We also had lots of time for just hanging out together, which we all enjoyed. We will see Omie and Opa next at Christmas in Manhattan.





















On the Monday before Thanksgiving, Ollie will have his tonsils out. He's had case after case of strep since last spring, and it's clear that it's needed. No*ah suggested we put his Thanksgiving pie in the blender this year.

for you non-facebookers

I did this once before, but here are some funny kid-isms that have come up recently. In reading them, I notice a lot are about the very quotable O*liver, who is king of the funny comment around here at the moment. Noah*'s quite funny too, but his physical humor, funny faces, and flair for acting out stories are a little harder to translate into a blog post...

The four of us spent half an hour chasing 4 escaped hens around the
neighborhood and back into our yard this afternoon - a little nerve-wracking, but the teamwork was good! The "ladies" are having a time out until we can plug the gap in the fence and clip a few wing feathers.

Oli*ver: "Mama, I think tears are really liquid feelings."

[Mi*nke] is raising the Litter Police. The boys Freak. Out. if they find litter in front of the house, and have all sorts of theories about how such an atrocity might have come to be. In this case, the answer was: it fell out of Ollie's pocket on the way in from the car yesterday....

Olive*r: "Is it completely certain that there's not even ONE dinosaur left? Not ONE?" Me: "Yup, not a one." Oliver: "That's a tragedy, isn't it?"

[Mink*e] is thinking that the urinal smell may only go away by actually removing the toilet and cleaning underneath. Ah, the joys of little boys. At least they can pee against a tree on a hike...

Enjoying a lazy Saturday morning with the boys, playing board games in the sunny living room in our pj's while listening to Bluegrass Saturday Morning. (Also so glad the board and card games are finally getting more interesting. Am I the only one who hates playing Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land?)

Oliv*er, upon staring dreamily into space whilst listening to a Bach Cello Suite: "I think this is the most beautiful thing my ears have ever been used to hear." Wait till I bust out the Goldberg Variations....

The boys and I took a hen to church as a prop for Children's Time (Matthew 23:37). The hen was less trouble than the boys on this particular morning.

[Mi*nke] wonders how old the boys will be before they learn about 9/11. Not yet, please - them finding out about the bridge collapse was bad enough.

Oliv*er tooted at the table and then leaned over conspiratorially, saying, "Between you and me, there's a smell." Oh, the lovely things we learn in the school lunch room...

Oli*ver wants to be an "idea" for Halloween. Do I have to come up with a giant lightbulb type costume?

I volunteered at school today, and there was a fire drill. I was so charmed by all those cute, earnest kindergartners, and also my own, blowing kisses at each other from their respective lines.

[Min*ke] is glad for the increased reading fluency observed in her children, but less so that they picked the City Pages ads to read while mom was checking out library books

No*ah: "Oli*ver! Don't do that! Some ideas that come into your mind are supposed to just stay there and never come out!"

Watching the original Alice in Wonderland movie with two tired boys and a giant bowl of popcorn. Noa*h says Tweedledum and Tweedledee are "pregnant twins".

I love my sons' names, but admit we had no idea how popular they would be. Noa*h S. and O*liver S. they are destined to be. I suspect the parents all the Jennifers, Lisas, and Jasons in my grade school classes had a similar experience.

Noa*h asked Olive*r why he only had one apple from today's orchard field trip when N*oah had received several. Oliver replied, "I think maybe they're rolling around on the bottom of the bus."

Strep case #7 in 5 months for Ollie. ENT referral for tonsillectomy. Sigh.

Before school started, I let Oli*ver know that his often anatomically-correct drawings were not going to be OK in the classroom. He apparently took this to mean that he should draw his male people as usual, then use a darker color to add pants.

quick update

Hi there -
Quick update here: School is going quite well for our little kindergartners. We had a honeymoon of a beginning followed by a bit more of an adjustment followed by what feels like a good settling in and a good routine for the family. The boys are making friends and learning, and seem to feel positive about school. I volunteer weekly and am always impressed by the calm and gentle atmosphere and the friendly staff and students.
If you'd like to see some recent pictures, you can see them here.

big yellow bus days

School is going quite well. After some tearful jitters from No*ah the night before, they both got right on the bus last Wednesday with huge smiles of excitement, and off they went. I didn’t cry, though I’d had a lump in my throat on an off for days. Then J and I embarked upon 3 intense days of basement cleaning and wall repair. We’re still not done, but we’ve taken a huge leap forward in clearing out excess junk, and the longer term plan is to create a large-motor space down there. We’ll put a gymnastics mat on the floor and hang some of those rings and ladders from IKEA from the ceiling, and they can go to town. Our long Minnesota winters can make it hard to get the kids enough exercise, and I think this will help, though with Ollie’s asthma, we can’t have mold and damp down there either. So we’re patching the walls and painting, and it is a big project.

I was fine that first day, until we pulled the lazy boy I nursed them both in, the giant hideous brown thing that made it possible to rest with a colicky reflux boy semi-upright, to nurse them both at once without dropping either of them, to rock them for hours and hours before sleep. These milestones are so intense, but even more so with twins – poof! They’re both out the door, and the house is silent. But they bounded off the bus bursting to tell me that they loved it so much, they didn’t even want to come home.

Reports are that school is great, that they love choice time (the long Montessori work periods) and recess best. No*ah said his teacher is “almost as beautiful as my mama”. Ollie has been playing with the same little girl every day, so he feels like he’s made a friend already. No*ah has 2 kids from church in his class, and my good friend Carrie’s daughter as well.

So things are going well. Such nice parents, kids and teachers. When No*ah and I visited for his assessment, older kids in the hall sweetly asked if we needed help finding anything, and wished him a great first day. It’s the type of place where the kids know the janitor, where teachers develop relationships with kids that last for years. On Friday, we received a thorough list of what they’d been doing all week, and there’s definitely some stuff there for them to learn or work on. There are 27 kids in each class, with a teacher and an aide per room, and thankfully, lots of parent volunteers too.

No*ah had a nightmare last night, something about being lost in outer space. Rocking his sobbing little body, I hit upon what it is that I’m hoping for – not academic perfection or sports prowess, or popularity, but not being lost or adrift, to be ensconced in a community of peers and adults that cares about them and holds them accountable to do their best, these sweet brave boys of ours.

It was quite a party at the bus stop!



I drew a heart on each boy's hand, a la the book: The Kissing Hand. I thought it was so sweet that Ollie kept pressing his hand to his own heart.

late summer

I hope late summer finds you well. It's been pretty hot around here, but we've gotten outdoors quite a bit regardless.

Ollie was very pleased to discover that he could climb the pussywillow "tree" in our backyard.

Watering the potatoes.

"Going to Chicago on our red-barrel mobile"

Lately, Oli*ver has forsaken his Reader's Digest Guide to Home Improvement for this book.

No*ah talking to Omie on the phone to tell her his tooth was loose.

He lost it the next day. Very exciting around here!

Our new "ladies", who are doing quite well. We hope they start laying at the end of September before they molt.

We've been having some talks about what will probably not be OK on the playground at school...

This past Saturday, Jo*el and I slept in until 9 AM. No*ah was upstairs drawing and reading and this guy was building...

It’s been a good summer, with lots of family time. We went to New York, camping once just the four of us and once with friends, the boys went camping with Jo*el, and we’re all going to a cabin on the edge of the Boundary Waters in a couple of weeks. The boys have done VBS as well as a couple of great little camps at our favorite nature center, and they’re in a Music Tog*ether camp this week. In 3 weeks, they start Kindergarten, which is still a little hard to imagine. They’re ready, both academically and socially, but it’s a big transition. They’re mostly excited and a bit nervous as well.

The boys are at a lovely stage where they take pride in and even compete at being helpful, bringing in groceries, helping with peeling and even cutting and cooking up veggies and putting things away. They have bad days, but mostly, they’re really pretty good, loving, and pleasant to be with. They sit nicely in church with me now after a somewhat rocky transition out of the nursery this Spring. And I love all their nutty “inventions”, their games and their stories. They ask such wonderful questions, and their observations blow me away.

Of course, they do still need some re-directing at times. I was straightening up in the living room a few days ago when I saw something go sailing by outside, with lots of giggling to follow. I looked more closely through the window and was somewhat mortified to discover that their earlier experiments with a fork and a screw at the kitchen table had lead to the full-on discovery of the catapult, complete with boards and rocks. I went outside and gave a rather stern and emphatic lecture about the importance of using non-rock-like object for one’s catapulting, and the possible consequences of using rocks near roads, people, and windows. A little later, No*ah came in and said he had a theory: If a little person stood on one end of a board over a big rock and a big person jumped on the other end, would the little person go flying through the air? I told him that would depend – on just how much heavier the big person was, if the board didn’t break, and so on. No*ah went back outside, and a little later, I saw him dragging a larger board from the backyard to the front. The front door opened and he asked, “Mama, would you step outside?” Umm, no….

So yesterday, we found a large number of yellow cukes in the garden, as there seem to be about 20 minutes in between tiny-gherkin size and big-fat-over-ripe size lately. I did a lot of garden work on this cooler, drier day than we’d had in some time, but most enjoyable was helping the boys catapult the cucumbers into the compost pile from 15 or so feet away.

camping

The four of us just got back from a weekend of camping. Pictures are here (check out the bottom of page 1, plus pages 2 and 3 of that album). It was lovely, if a bit of a noisy and crowded campground. We went there specifically because the hiking and climbing are so great, and we thought the boys would enjoy the 3-mile hike along the river. We were right, they loved it, as did we. Summer is going by so fast - the boys have one more little camp, then in two weeks we're going to a cabin on the edge of the Boundar*y Waters for a few days, and two weeks after that, Kindergarten begins. Gulp...

Trip to New York

A few weeks ago, our family went to upstate New York to visit my family. We had a very relaxing and enjoyable trip, and were lucky enough to come in just between 2 waves of very high humidity. As you can see, we played in the cool creek, relaxed outside, visited a few places (including a nursery that had a bunch of old farm equipment that Oliv*er is still talking about), and had lots of nice meals together. The boys are good travelers, the only significant challenge being that they don't bunk together that well. No*ah just needs a lot more sleep, and after waking up with his brother for a week, he was pretty exhausted. It's good to be aware that for now, we'd better keep Ollie downstairs in what we hope will eventually be the guest room. But they had a great time anyway, as did Jo*el and I. We I just celebrated our tenth anniversary, and to celebrate, we left the boys with my parents for a couple of days and went to stay in a bed-and-breakfast in Vermont. The boys did great with their Omie and Opa while we were gone. We explored a bit, perused bookstores (which we've been doing together for about 13 or 14 years) and hiked a bit of the Long Trail. The Green Mountains are among the most beautiful places I've ever been. The soccer games were very closely followed by the men, even Jo*el, and Holland hadn't yet been delivered its crushing defeat. Below, a couple of them are still in orange, hoping for a win.

I hope you all are also having some lovely trips and time with friends and family this summer.


































This is very typical No*ah! He waters our garden regularly, and knows the names of a lot of the flowers.












There's a wonderful organic farm right near my parents' house. One of these trips, I need to offer to do a bit of fieldwork in exhange for asking all the questions I want, because I get some great ideas and tips every time we stop by there. For example, they just pull a few spuds from the edges of the beds when they need them instead of harvesting the whole plant at once. My little farmers liked that approach too.






















(Forgive me, I have a bit of a mushroom obsession going at the moment. The bottom one below was as big as a dinner plate!)




Can you believe this is my husband at a bed-and-breakfast? I will say that we got lots of time to talk, and that there was a book of spanish poetry on his nightstand. (No pics, but we also visited the Farmer's Diner, which will be familiar to anyone who has ever read Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.)







My parents had some sand hauled in, which the boys loved so much that when we got back, we asked Grandpa (Joe*el's dad) to help us put together a proper sand-box. I was going to get the wood and do all the hauling of sand, etc, but St*eve built it, delivered it, then helped me get all the sand. So nice of him, and the boys are so happy playing in it.






Goodbyes....






Thank you for a lovely visit, Omie, Opa, and Oom (uncle) Kean! We hope it's not too long before we see you again.