two very different reason why i love having boys….

wrestling with daddy after dinner is a common practice. they don’t wrestle with mommy (and that’s quite alright with this mommy). i just run and grab the camera, or hide.

they still bring me flowers. i don’t know how they learned this but since we moved into the house three years ago, they have always picked and brought me flowers (crocus or tulips from the garden). beauty attractive to a woman, and thought up by a couple of boys. it adds so much to our dinner table.

(photo taken in august, 2006)

adam, who is currently our 2 years and 9 months old, is turning into a little artist.

it’s a little later than the time that sawyer started drawing a lot. i thought, for the sake of documenting, i’d report on a few pictures he’s been doing. coloring is his favorite. he will sit at the kitchen table and color for 45 minutes, sometimes an hour at a time. it’s normally one color per picture (see above photo), and he’s still learning the names of those particular colors, but each day gives him more experience, and i can already see that he’s beginning to ‘get” the concept of coloring inside the lines. and i have never showed him that. i think he watches when his older brothers so carefully color inside their lines.

he also uses both his left and right hands. he has yet to make up his mind whether he’ll be a lefty or a righty and it seems to be driving kenny crazy. (he claims that he’s worried he won’t be able to teach him how to golf or bat as a lefty.) i’d like to take this opportunity to teach him to use both. any suggestions on how to do that?

these next two pictures are his first faces he’s ever drawn. i’m keeping these in our artwork binder (it’s the only way i can survive all this paper we go through on a daily basis. some of it gets recycled…okay, most of it gets recycled, but some of it gets stuck in a binder for me to keep forever). i might even stitch the second picture – the pig-like face. the first one is a little on the creepy side.

what does “art” look like in your house? do you have kids who can’t get enough of it in a day? or kids who would rather watch grass grow than do any kind of art? i have a little bit of both. the older two boys love to draw pictures FOR people. i can’t tell you how many pictures they’ve drawn for me, or kenny, or my parents, or their friends. adam just likes to sit at the table with his brothers and color. but sometimes rowan would rather play pretend or get creative in other ways than with markers, crayons, or brushes.

painting is a little different: it’s a lot of work for all of us. adam seems to paint on one side of his paper, and ALWAYS when i’m not looking, flips the paper over and paints on that side as well. it makes for some creative ways to hang it dry. i’m still only buying washable paints. for that very reason. and it wipes up well off the table. and hands, and shirts and knees.

our weekend flowed with blood and honey. not the good kind of honey. but first…the blood:

i am no good when it comes to blood. it’s the only thing i’m pretty much terrified of when i’m solo-parenting, which, fortunately, isn’t very often at all.

saturday night, adam slammed his mouth into an edge of a wooden piece of furniture. when i heard the screaming, i ran to him and held him tight (praying over and over that there would be no blood…something i do everytime one of them hits their head…blood has only happened one other time in front of trader joe’s with sawyer. yes, i know how “fortunate” i am being a mother of three boys!). his screaming got louder just as kenny entered the room and noticed blood all over my shirt. so he took adam while i got a wet paper towel and some ice. he just kept bleeding and i just kept hiding while kenny tended to him. he noticed a gash on the inside of his lip, so i called the doctor. my parents were across the street this night as well, so they were able to come over and give a second opinion (and stay with the older two boys if we needed to take adam to get stitches).

i can do everything else that needs to be done in these situations EXCEPT actually LOOK at the wound.

i would be a terrible nurse or doctor.

fortunately, all is now well. his lip didn’t really get that big the next day, and he’s back to eating normal foods. but i have yet to look inside his mouth (that’s kenny’s job!).

earlier that same day, kenny decided to assess the beehives. he wasn’t all that sure that they survived as we’ve been noticing many many dead bees in front of the hives on previous checks. since it was warmer than usual out, he opened up the hives and found what he had been worried about: the bees were dead. there are so many reasons this could happen…cold, mites, disease. we decided against medicating them since we left all the honey for the winter. we’re not completely sure if this was the sole cause, but it could have been part of it.

he brought an entire box of honey supers up to the house, and we’ve been dipping our fingers into the raw honey and comb. the boys love it. the honey is very mild and light in color. eventually, when our next batch of bees make it through the winter, we’ll have some good honey on our hands. until then, we order more bees this spring…make sure the bear stay far away, perhaps medicate (or add sugar water to their hives on days above freezing in the winter) them next winter.

i guess there’s a huge learning curve in all these hobbies we’re taking on.

the following video is a private moment, made public by the permission of the two important characters of the film: my brother-in-law greg (kenny’s brother), and our soon-to-be sister-in-law, mila.

congratulations, greg and mila!!!

(click on the above link).

Jessica at Homemaking through the Church Year is holding a Lenten carnival today.

I submitted the Lenten Tree Cross idea at the carnival, but there are other great ideas listed there to use in your home during the season of Lent.

it seems fitting that the same wood that was adorned in greens and beads, ornaments and lights at the celebration of His birth be reused to commemorate the days and weeks leading up to His death (and resurrection!).

the christmas tree was saved, exposed to the elements of snow and ice over the past several weeks and cut this weekend; formed into a cross and carved to hold seven candles, a rustic light, to count down to The Triumph Over Death; the reason we gather each week to worship.

as a family, we count the weeks to Christmas through the Advent Wreath. i love what i found in the “family lenten activities” research i did in the previous weeks in this idea: reusing the trunk of your christmas tree and forming it to create your own “lenten wreath” (or lenten cross).

as a family, we will light one of the purple candles each sunday in lent, and on easter sunday, replace the burnt-down, broken purple candles with pure, new white ones: a (re)new(ed) creation!