The Pot Bin

This cracks me up every time I see it. It's a big wooden bin where they put the used pots from the greenhouse at the bottom of our hill. But every time I see those words, I expect to see a bunch of stoners leaning in there looking for some weed.

The Middle Child

It probably really sucks to be Naomi. She does get babied an awful lot, and gets her way more often than Hope ever did. But she also gets ignored more often, I think. I'm making an effort to take her places with me rather than always taking Hope and leaving Naomi with David. But the other day at work someone wanted to see pictures of my kids, so I pulled up this blog and easily found pics of Hope and Joel. You know when the last picture of Naomi is from? Christmas. So I'm posting a couple cute pictures of her so she doesn't start counting posts like I counted lines in the Christmas letters. But in that family the middle child always got more lines..........

He once was lost but now is found

Slumbers was missing for a few days this week. We were pretty sure he had to be in the house somewhere, but we'd torn the place apart looking for him and he was nowhere to be found. I was feeling the way I used to feel when one of the cats didn't come home at night, and Hope was starting to sleep with "Soft Slumbers", as she's named the back-up bear we got for just this situation. We assumed he'd get lost when she was little enough that we could just switch and she wouldn't know the difference. Now she knows there's two of them, so it just wouldn't work very well. And with Naomi's tendency to put things in the garbage, the fact that the girls have been playing on the back deck the past few days, and that we'd gone several places that Hope might've taken him, we were afraid he might be gone for good.

But last night I saw a box of books in Hope's room that she rarely plays with. Naomi plays with it alot, so I checked in case she had crammed Slumbers in it. There he was! I actually had tears of joy in my eyes when I saw his little face poking out from between the books in the box. He may not be as soft and snuggly anymore as he once was, but he's still Hopey's baby.

Roly Poly Joely

Breastfeeding is supposed to result in leaner kids. Not working so well for this family. Hope was a formula baby; Naomi was bottle-fed breastmilk, which leads to similar weights as formula babies. At Hope's 2-month well-child check, she weighed 11 pounds. Naomi weighed 12 pounds at hers. Joel, well, Joel obviously isn't starving to death. I was betting on about 13 pounds. No, no; he weighs 15 pounds. On the dot. Fifteen pounds. Hope didn't even weigh that much at 4 months. My boss's daughter who is 9 months old weighs 16 pounds. After weighing Joel and looking at the percentiles chart, the nurse decided she must've written it down wrong because he was so far off the chart and asked if she could weigh him again. Same as before. He's officially a chunk. No wonder my arms hurt and I don't want to wear him in my BabyBjorn.

How do you explain hell?

David was trying to explain what hell was like to Hope. Eternal separation from God doesn't quite convey to a five year old, so he was using other examples. He apparently got the point across though. She said, "So it would be like mommy was spanking me and never stopped?"