Roller Skates!

After about a month of talking about roller skates, pretending to wear roller skates, and a number of invented roller skates (i.e. mom's fuzzy socks pulled up to his knees with spoons inside them), Nathan finally got real roller skates! Lots of wobbly, rolly, fun. He has already discovered the fun of roller skating at the park and in the backyard, the hardship of trying to use the potty without taking roller skates off, and the excitement of being pulled along by Daddy on his roller blades.

Growing Garden

Our garden is growing and changing week by week. We had a small harvest of cauliflower and broccoli (probably small because I kept moving them). Our lettuce and Swiss chard are doing great. Our favorite so far has been the snap peas! Once I made a mesh of strings for them to climb up, they kept growing and getting bigger and now they're producing really tasty snap peas... and quite a few. Bea and Nathan love picking these when were outside and popping them in their mouths. What a great snack food!

Invention: Banana Plate

Nathan announced with enthusiasm today that he had invented a banana plate. Nice design- biodegratable, perfect fit, easy to find when eating a banana.

Popcorn Party

Popcorn is our new favorite snack. (I know you're happy about that, mom and dad!) I grew up with Iowa popcorn fanatics for parents. I remember them munching on popcorn every night while reading before bed. Now... my children have discovered the excitement of popcorn and while we don't eat it every day, it is our afternoon snack several times a week which makes it the most popular snack.

Nathan and Bea love the process of popping corn and the silly way we eat it.

1. Nathan and Bea get our our air popper and the jar of kernels out of the cupboard by themselves. They measure the cup of kernels and pour it into the machine.
2. I do the plugging in while they make a big show of covering their ears when the noise comes on.
   
3. Anticipatory squealing while the kernels are heated and jump up and down in the machine.
   
4. Squealing turns to yelling "Yeah!" as the first kernels explode and then mass of popcorn pushes down the slide and into the bowl.
   
5. 2-3 late poppers usually surprise us.
   
6. Popcorn can be scooped into bowls, bags or... best or all, eaten in a pile on the floor like a puppy.
   

One

Bea has been telling us about some of the mathematical concepts going through her head! She is currently practicing, enjoying and exploring ONE! Bea likes to point to 1 thing and say, "one." If there are three objects she points to each saying, "one, one, one." In kindergarten and first grade, teachers recognize this important mathematical concept called one to one correspondence. It's hard to count bunches of things or add groups of things if you don't understand that each object gets only 1 number assigned to it. I think Nathan understands this too, but he sometimes demonstrates what it looks like if you aren't using one to one correspondence. When he's excited about a certain number, let's say... fourteen, he might look at a group of three things and tap his finger about twenty times in the general area of the group of objects and say, "one, two, three, four, ba, da, ba, da, ba, da, fourteen!" Its fun to watch Beatrice discover and communicate about her world... one thing at a time.

The Carrot Seed

Just like the little boy in the book The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss, we had planted a carrot seed. Actually, a lot of carrot seeds. We watched and waited and watered and weeded and they didn't come up. I checked the seed package to see how many days the seeds take to germinate and I counted out the 14 days after we planted. We waited and watched, and nothing came up. Finally after about a month, we decided the carrot seeds didn't work and we planted tomatoes and onions in that patch of the garden. Two months later, I was weeding around the tomatoes and... surprise! A baby carrot came up. I think I had been weeding them out for a while without realizing it. Bea and Nathan both got to sample the two baby carrots we harvested. Just like the boy in The Carrot Seed, our carrot was not for complying with the timeline of impatient people!

Computer from the Sky

We had been saving up for a new (well... used, but new to us) laptop and we were about 1/3 of the way there after our garage sale when a computer seems to have dropped out of the sky! Nils was walking home from work and found a computer lying in the street. After assessing the scene and realizing it was not a lost computer but a discarded one, he scooped it up to have a closer look. It was pretty beaten up and had probably been run over by a car.... but after a little tinkering he realized that the hard drive still worked and was actually faster than our current one but the screen and the mouse did not work (making it pretty hard to use). This turned out to be just what we needed!

Our home computer was getting slow and it also had a broken screen that we were making do with. Our screen was broken on the hinge and we had to baby the right side where it often detached from the laptop and made the screen go black. This new found computer had a working hinge but the actual LCD panel of the screen did not function. So... Nils was able to fix the mouse and take the inside of our screen off and put it into the inside of the found computer.

I am amazed at my husband's handy skills. While he has always been good with technology, he does not refurbish computers on a regular basis. He had to check a few on-line resources while he worked and the only computer that could connect to the internet at that time was the new found one with a completely blank screen. So... he plugged this computer into an older monitor to navigate through what should have been on the screen and read about which wires to cut as he snipped away on that same live computer. He likened this experience to brain surgery in which the patient has to be awake during the procedure. Wow.

Whether this was a computer from the sky or a moment of great recycling, I am grateful that my needs... and even more... are always taken care of. Today I am reminded that the things I need (and want) are not all bought and sold by my careful planning or spontaneous choices. Sometimes there is a Provider who can step in with a gift. This gift of a computer makes me happy because it was a very nice gift with monetary value, but it makes me smile even more because it was "just what I wanted!" How did He know? I'm always surprised by how well the God of the Universe knows my little life.

Dress Up