TWENTY-THREE

The plums ripened this week -all twelve of them. :) 

2015 week twenty-three

After the longest week of waiting and wondering, and then a very stubborn baby with tightly crossed legs, we found out we're having a boy. We're very happy.

At a fancy splash pad in a cute swim suit with friends. 

At our trailer park splash pad, naked, alone in the backyard. 

Vera really loves to play with play-doh. This week she was all about making cookies and kept handing me flattened bits of play-doh that needed to be put in the oven. She loved it. 

I had unexpected and quite intolerable allergies this week so a couple days we stayed in all day. And one of those days we dug out the rest of the sugar cookie dough from Christmas and made cookies.  She kept saying, "cookies so happy. cookies loves you [me]!" She is convinced that everything loves her, though. "This book loves you! Monkeys loves you! Strange dogs loves you! Pickles loves you! Baby brother loves you! etc."

And after a three-hour nap, you really need a good cookie. I let V pick the cookie cutters. She picked: a foot, a cowboy boot, a star, the letter "o",  an airplane, a flower, and the number "2". 

Beautiful grilled dinner: made in Texas smoked sausage, grilled tomatoes (some from our garden), and zucchini, tossed on the grill with pasta and some ripped basil from our garden. 

Vera found this Halloween decoration crow and she loves it. She takes it with us on walks, wants it in the car, pushes it in the kid basket around the grocery store and looks like she's tending a dead bird, and snuggles with its scraggly feathers and sharp pointy beak and claws while she sleeps. 

Ward cook out to celebrate summer. This is what summer looks like in Texas: Why am I outside? Also all the spiders' egg sacks have hatched in and around my house. I feel like I am walking through them constantly -even in my kitchen. Poor placement spiders, that is very high traffic and I will not tolerate any more of this. I almost feel like I'm living a Sugar Ray song, "Every morning when I wake up there's a [spider web] hanging from the corner of [every surface in my house]!"

We had a few bananas going quickly downhill and so we tried a recommended recipe I had never tried from a cookbook I already had. V loves to help me and that banana bread was perfection. 

We continued to feel sick this week. Eventually we figured out it was allergies and V started feeling better and I got some Claritin. One morning when the two of us felt just awful, we were snuggling in my bed. Before Matt left for work, he paused and said we both looked so cute, so he took a minute to snuggle both of us. It was a very brief moment in an otherwise very miserable day that was precious and perfect and I want to remember how tender it was to me.

When we flew to Mexico we lost the tiny baby doll that we let her take places. So one day I took her to a toy store and we picked out a new baby. This was her first experience of going into a toy store and walking away with a present. She could not believe I was a) letting her carry around a baby doll, and b) that I was letting her take it out of the store. Her little eyes were just glowing as she clutched that doll to her chest as we walked around the grocery store next door. She was practically floating through how wonderful it was to receive a surprise toy. It was so sweet.

One morning this week I had a lot of weeding and gardening to do, so we bug sprayed and sunscreened up and V toddled around the garden with me. It was a beautiful morning some neighbor was "moving the lawn" and we have had a lovely amount of bees this year who were all buzzing around. V found the grill brush and was cradling it like a baby. I paused weeding the pumpkin patch to watch her swing the grill brush around dreamily singing and babbling to herself. She paused to pick some chamomile flowers and shred them. She sidled over to my tomato plants and yelled, "Mama! I have ONE tomato! ONE tomato?!" I told her yes, she could pick a tomato but only one and only a red one. 5 tomatoes later, I catch her naughtily pick a green tomato. She saw me coming and quickly threw it into the carrots. Who taught you to already try to be deceptive? She helped me dig up the last few potatoes that didn't rot and carried them around the garden in a big red bowl with a little towel over her head. Then the towel fell off and she collapsed in anguish.

Last sweet story for the week:
One evening we were reading Madeline and Matthew was sitting nearby. She has asked to read several books so often that she has a good deal of many books memorized -Madeline is one of those books. So we try to pause at the end of each line to get her to finish the sentence. We came to the page that read: And all the little girls cried, "Boo hoo! We want to have out appendix out too!" And I prompted, "And all the little girls cried..." and Vera finished, "Boo hoo! We want to have a candy!" Matt and I laughed so hard. V didn't really understand why we were laughing but quickly joined in. Now when she thinks she's being silly or funny she'll say, "Boo hoo! We want to have a candy." I love her.