Helping in the kitchen

is a favorite pastime of both Hannah and Naomi. They want to stand on chairs or stools or any surface that gets them face-to-face with the food (younger members of the help party fall *off* said surfaces every so often) and help! Yesterday they had a ball because Michael made biscuits for breakfast, chocolate chip scones for tea, and chicken for dinner. He tried to encourage them to come see me (reading in the living room) while he was making the chicken: "Hey girls, don't you want Mama to read to you?!?!?!?!"

His enthusiasm was not fooling anyone. He was cooking and they were going to help. Normally Michael loves the help, but with raw chicken, it's not so fun to have extra hands involved. He remembered the hand-in-the-herb-paste-on-the-raw-lamb incident from Easter and was hoping that the girls would be lured away by the 10 books that haven't yet been packed. Nothing doing.

Happily, nobody extra got chickeny hands yesterday, and they got to help Dada with a whole bunch of cooking and baking. This sort of kitchen help wins out over pretty much any other activity...so far. Once it gets nice enough to go outside, we'll have to see who wins.

Pathetic or easily pleased?

A few weeks ago, I "discovered" -- via the vacuum cleaner -- that someone who shall remain nameless put some whole crayons under the guest room bed. (No, it wasn't Michael.) The vacuum cleaner did not appreciate making this discovery, and my trusty sidekick went on partial strike. Oh, some of the stuff would come off the floor, sure, but it wasn't the usual spanking clean look that I've come to expect from my vacuum.

I've been dreading the fix process. But we're moving, and a whole lot of vacuuming has to be done during the move, and I wasn't going to do it with my poor limping vacuum cleaner. So I took it in this morning, and the guy fixed it in 15 minutes for $20.

WHAT was that?!? I couldn't believe how easy it was. I came home right away and began vacuuming. I didn't finish the whole house -- the girls wanted lunch -- but I'm going to do the rest of it after naps. And I like to think that I'm easily pleased that a quick fix to my vacuum can make my day like that. But others may have different opinions. :)

Mimi

is what Naomi has called herself for a long time. Of course, it's what we call her a lot of the time, too. We do call her Naomi, though, so she knows it's her name, but this week is the first time we've heard her refer to herself as Naomi.

Bird identification

We put a birdfeeder up outside our kitchen window a couple years ago. We have several different types of seed or suet out so that we attract a variety of birds. When the next-door neighbor's cat (an outdoor cat who regularly patrolled our yard) died around the same time, we noticed a great increase in bird visitors. It's fascinating for all of us.

I especially like the woodpeckers. We see several different kinds, and I have to say, they're gorgeous. The girls especially like the junkos and the chickadees, which they can both identify.

We have a particular song sparrow who seems to know when we're having breakfast, because he (or she, I guess -- hard to tell!) comes to sit on the tree outside our window and sing away as we eat. I began saying, when I saw him, "There's our friend the song sparrow!" Hannah has taken up the refrain.

We don't particularly appreciate, though, the starlings. They're nonnative and take nesting boxes and areas that the native birds need. Besides that, they're ugly and eat tons of suet. Hannah recently saw one on our suet feeder and said, "There's our pest, the starling!"

Well on the way

Hannah is becoming a book junkie. She loves books. Both Michael and I are the same way, so it's not terribly surprising. I'm pleased that she likes reading so much (although she's not actually reading to herself just yet), and glad she's enjoying a bunch of the books that I loved growing up. Michael's getting to read some of them, too, since he reads to her before bed. They're working their way through Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, and both of them are really into them. It's hard to say who's more interested in what will happen next.

Quiet time is made very easy by Hannah's love of books. We get books on tape from the library or loaned to us from friends and Hannah is allowed to listen to one tape of approximately one hour each quiet time. She'll listen to the same book over and over before we have to return it. Currently, she's reading The Borrowers Afield, by Mary Norton, the second in the series. She's always very pleased when a book she especially likes has sequels. This is her first time through this particular book, though, and I notice that quiet time pop outs are much decreased when she's on her first or second time through a book.

Our home used to be populated with Hannah's imaginary friends from her books. Then she began to think that perhaps too many of her imaginary friends were trying to live in our house, so they started to build houses nearby. However, their houses are *under* the street, since there's not enough room for them above ground, and people would be bumping into them all the time, since they didn't know that the imaginary houses were there. There's quite a neighborhood.

Apparently, these friends are moving to our new neighborhood, too. They're moving this week, since they're actually picking up their houses and taking them down to the new place. I imagine this takes even longer than packing and moving just the stuff inside the house, but I am glad to hear that Hannah's imaginary friends will be around to entertain and delight us all when we move.

Humility is also

finding out the day after you send the email announcing your move *this* Saturday that your stairs won't be done this week after all, due to several unforeseen and unavoidable problems (like severe back injuries and layoffs in the team doing the work), and that you're going to have to change the move to the *following* weekend.

It's all right, though, I'm sure it will work out for the best. Much better to have a finished staircase with a move...

Humility is

someone coming to view your house when you started packing last weekend. Technically, the listing is suspended, but we decided to let these nice people, whose realtor asked our realtor so politely, to see the house. After 8 weeks of keeping it absolutely spotless for numerous viewings, I was somewhat horrified at the condition in which this viewer would see it. At least it wasn't dirty, just boxes and stacks of things around...

I suppose I should just be glad it wasn't an April Fool's joke.

I must admit, I will be very glad when we move so that I don't have to be on the front lines of home viewing any more. And I think Hannah feels the same way. The other day, she said to me,"I'll be glad when we move so we don't have to clean everything so much before we go anywhere."