It’s always nice for us when the 4th of July falls near the begin­ning or end of the week. We don’t have any fam­ily in town, so if it is near a week­end, either we or they can make a 3 day week­end out of it and take a trip. This week­end, Jason’s mom and dad came to visit us.

They drove up yes­ter­day, and brought A a sand­box as a gift for his first birth­day. It is very nice. They even bought sand that feels like beach sand! WOW! I want to go play in there once the kids are in bed. K seems to have made more use of it than A has so far. A sat in it yes­ter­day for a while and then started eat­ing the sand. Once he got tired of that, he was tired of the sand­box. K, how­ever, was happy to play in there all after­noon and again this morn­ing for almost the entire morning.

Part of the rea­son that they stayed overnight is that we are still try­ing to do a few odds and ends jobs around our house, and some­times those jobs are eas­ier with a sec­ond set of hands. This morn­ing, Jason and his dad worked on installing a fan in our main bath­room. This after­noon, they worked on build­ing a com­post bin. Jason found the plans for the bin on Lowe’s web­site, and I have to say it is much big­ger, nicer, and stur­dier than I antic­i­pated. We will have to do some seri­ous com­post­ing though with this thing.

Jason and his dad were only able to fin­ish about half of the com­post bin project. It said that it was a five hour project on the plans, but I think if I were help­ing, I could eas­ily help them turn it into a ten or twenty hour project. Just think of the fam­ily togeth­er­ness that could result from that help! So, now the bin is in our garage with the rest of the lum­ber wait­ing to be fin­ished. In fact, those things are right next to and on the cement pavers that we will be using in our next big project of re-landscaping the front of the house. That project may have to wait for our next long weekend…Labor Day!

Happy 4th of July!

That is how often K has nursed in the past two days. Look­ing back, I can see that there has been a grad­ual decrease in his nurs­ing since win­ter ended and spring started. I think it’s even pos­si­ble that dur­ing the times we were trapped inside due to weather, he nursed for some­thing to do. Now that he’s get­ting older (2 years, 8 months), it wouldn’t be out of the ordi­nary for him to start mov­ing more and more toward wean­ing, I suppose.

I have never had a goal in mind for him as far as age goes, but I think I would like it if he could hang on until he turned 3. That’s a nice round num­ber, right? I’m just not ready to con­sider him a grad­u­ated nursling yet! I know that he could hang onto just these two nurs­ing ses­sions for a long time, and I hope he does, but only TWO in one day?!?!?!? That was a big sur­prise when I real­ized just how lit­tle he has been nurs­ing lately. Def­i­nitely bittersweet.

At least if he weans, I will still be nurs­ing A. A is show­ing no signs of wean­ing, and it looks very pos­si­ble that he could nurse as long or longer than K based on his nurs­ing ses­sions at this point.

Isn’t that a song? Maybe the song is “you’ve been away for far too long.” Either way…

So, it’s been a long time since I sat down to blog or share pic­tures or just think out loud. Some­times when I let a hobby or activ­ity fall to the way­side, I just for­get about it, and I drift away. This isn’t the case for my blog though. In fact, I think about blog­ging almost every day. In par­tic­u­lar, I think about it when I go to check Jason’s sister’s Project 366 page. When I’m look­ing at her amaz­ing pic­tures, I usu­ally think that if she can take a pic­ture and post it every day while hav­ing 3 kids and work­ing from home, I should be able to blog at least once a week. Guess that wasn’t the case though.

Right now, I have two major goals I am work­ing on. I’m not ready to reveal either one of them though. I know, it’s not fair that I would tell you that much but not say what they are, right? I will say that one of them is pri­mar­ily a mental/intellectual goal. The other is pri­mar­ily a phys­i­cal goal. As I progress and get closer to achiev­ing them, I’m sure I won’t be able to keep either a secret, so be watch­ing.