World Cup fever

We haven't been watching much world cup since our extreme-basic cable package doesn't even include ESPN. So we were pretty excited to watch the U.S. play Ghana yesterday. About 10 minutes into the game Will ran off to his room and reappeared looking like this. Not much later we had to suit Owen up too.

Maybe it was because the U.S. was down by 1, but Will soon got restless as a cleat-and-shin-guard-wearing spectator, so I spent much of the second half actually playing soccer with Will and Owen outside, which at least made the loss less painful.

After the game we had a brief whole-family soccer game with the sprinklers on and then Rob and Will stayed out for a longer game of one-on-one. I'm thinking Will played as much soccer as the World Cup players yesterday, even with their overtime.

Underwater friendship and a rainbow wish

Today we wrapped up our first week of swim lessons at Psalmond Road pool and this year, for the first time, both kids are loving every minute of it and swimming like fish, rather than crying in fear, refusing to do things like put their heads under water, or demoting themselves to toddler classes because they'd rather swim with their parents.

Will in particular was having a golden sort of day. He learned to do frog kicks and back floats for the first time and had a halfway reasonable looking crawl stroke going even if he hasn’t yet figured out how to breathe between strokes. And after a week of telling me, “there this girl I’d really like to meet,” he finally talked with his swim lesson classmate. I think the allure here may have been that she’s pretty brave in the water, willing to go under – but who knows.

Anyway this is how he described it: “It reminded me of Charlie Brown and the little red-headed girl. The way that I met her is that I went under water when she went under water and I looked at her with my goggles. I didn’t talk to her. She talked to me first… I always sat by her. She also looked like a very kind and sweet lady.”

Then on the way home, Will said in an almost whining voice, “When am I ever going to see a rainbow? When I’m ever going to see a rainbow?”

He’d asked the same question a couple days ago on our way home from swim lessons, and I’d told him then that you don’t see rainbows as often in Georgia as you do in Colorado because there are so many trees all around so it’s hard to see as much of the sky. But this time, less than two seconds after he posed his rainbow question, Rob and I looked to the left and saw a nice big rainbow just waiting to be admired.

Will couldn’t stop smiling and laughing at that little miracle.

"I just can’t believe it," he said. "I just said it, and it happened. It was so silly.”

Then he asked us, “What do you think happened?”

I turned the question back on him, and he said, “It might have been like a wish – like a real wish come true.”

More fun with boxes

We may be back from our big trip to Colorado, but the boys continue to travel in house.

Today they rowed in these side-by-side boats for a while and later boarded this “connecting flight” to who knows where.

They carefully selected the luggage they would need for their journey and stowed it in the "overhead bins" on the bed. They also pulled the bed covers to the floor to create a tent-like extra storage compartment.

I remain a sucker for clean-looking boxes that I find on the curbside, mostly because I know that while it may be just a box to you and me, it's a blank slate for creative play for young kids. These I spotted behind the flower shop the other day, and they have bought us hours of happy playtime already.

“Thank you for getting these boxes, mom,” Will told me today. “They are great for making airplanes and boats.”

Happy Father's Day

Here's to dads everywhere, especially ours, who is fun to climb on both in and out of the water and who is always so engaged with Will and Owen -- in play, in conversations, in music-making, art projects, and adventure-taking. We're lucky to have him.



We spent our father's day swimming, playing mini golf, riding the train and taking a paddle boat ride at Robin Lake Beach at Callaway. And later we went out to dinner and delivered our homemade cards to Rob. At the end of it all, Will decided that we should have a "Kids Day" too and he's plotting it for "the second day when Uncle Graham is here." Fair enough, I say, so we'll be having an inaugral Kid's Day on July 3. We all have to have fun together, and Will has stipulated that the adults must draw cards for the kids.

Tadpole captives

Yesterday, the boys and I explored Flatrock Park, which is becoming one of our favorite close-to-home settings for little adventures. We started the day with our first mini-rock climbing since Arches.Then donned water shoes and waded in the creek, holding hands together on the slippery rock. Along the way, we observed butterflies, dragon-flies, water striders, hundreds of tadpoles, minnows, lizards, finger-nail-sized frogs, a crawdad, and a skink. We spent some time in the playground, then returned to the creekside rocks for a picnic lunch and used our empty sandwich tupperware to capture two tadpoles, which Will named Brittany and Averett.

Here are a few resources I used to sort out how to help our tadpoles survive past their initial capture in a container full of creek water:

Caring for tadpoles

Aqualand Fact Sheets on tadpoles

How to raise tadpoles

Big Brittany and little Averett are now swimming in a larger makeshift fish bowl munching on lettuce. We'd love to see them to froghood and then set them free back at the park, but we're amateur tadpole keepers, so who knows.

Rainbow socks

Yesterday I brought Owen a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and told him it was time to get dressed. As he often does, he promptly rejected my offering and went back to his room to design his own fashion ensemble. It looked like this.

When I asked Owen if he'd like to wear two white socks that match, he said he liked red and white better. "Because I like every color," he said.

I don't engage in fashion battles except on special occasions, so we went to the park looking funky. Will started this rainbow-sock trend in our house; he also finds it pleasing to the eye to wear different colors. But I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm frequently throwing lone socks in the boys' dressers when I fail to find the match immediately.

Photographing flowers

While we were in Colorado we visited a wholesale nursery, where a friend of my mom's had green houses full of containers just about to be shipped out to the various towns, landscapers and businesses that had ordered them. We gave each of the boys a camera and let them play flower photographers for a while.


Owen took many blurry close-ups of flowers on my mom's camera, while Will collected some crisper shots, like these:

Thank you Louisa!