Productivity

I am so thankful to Taipan and Taisim today. Yuta's at work, and I'm alone with them today, and have:

- weeded through closets and drawers to clean out clothes that are outgrown or not worn anymore. For not just Taipan and Taisim, but me and Yuta too! This means we no longer have 3-6mo size socks in the drawer.

- organized and cleaned up toys in the bedroom, two playrooms and the living room

Now I have four large trash bags of clothes and two large trash bags of toys that will go to the basement to be donated, sold, or rotated back upstairs. I'm hoping that Yuta won't mind helping me drag them to the basement when he gets home.

Woo hoo! I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the clutter, and am so happy that I was able to get all of that done, and it's only 3 o'clock. And the kids were helpful, and polite about it all. I did take breaks to play with them here and there, and Taisim hung out with me quite a bit, but I am so impressed with how accomodating they were when I told them what I wanted to get done today!

Oh, there's more I could do, but I want to play now and give them some focused time (why am I blogging then, you ask? Because they're eating and talking to me while I type).

How does your garden grow?

On Saturday night Taipan and I went to Target, and while we were there we saw flower headbands in the dollar section. We decided to get a couple. When we got home, we spent an hour or two playing with them.

Here are the kids (and me) trying on the headbands:



Then Taisim had an idea of growing flowers, so we all took turns being the gardener and the flowers. We used a pool noodle light saber as our shovel, and as soon as a hole was dug by the gardener, the flower got into the hole with their seed (the ball is the seed).

Here's Yuta getting ready to be planted, and then Taisim watering him, and giving him some sunlight (the olive pillow is the sun), and finally our beautiful Papa-flower is blooming (I think that pic looks a bit like the statue of liberty too):



Now it's Yuta's turn to be the gardener, and Taisim is the flower:


Taipan wanted to be our photographer and videographer while we were growing flowers. He took some of the ones above, and also had fun taking pictures with Yuta's iPhone. I did grab him for a mother-son picture:


Two great pictures of Yuta and Taisim:


And this is one of the pictures taken by Taipan - we've got about five of these where he took a picture of himself, and Yuta jumped in a couple:

Hopscotch and other fun

I decided to take Friday off of work ... I've had a lot of long days lately, and wanted to have some extra time with Taipan & Taisim. As luck would have it, it was a warm day. A bit overcast and windy, but not cold. So around noon the kids and I went to the park - it was so nice to be there after so many months!

Here they are at a picnic table, eating some of the many snacks we brought with us. In the first picture Taisim is helping get Taipan's hair our of his eyes, which was sweet.


After the park we stopped at the library to pick up a DVD we had on hold, and stayed there to play for about 30 mins, and then some friends were waiting for us in our neighborhood (they beat us there by about 10 mins). We did a lot of "adventure" sword and pirate play that afternon, but we also did a bit of hopscotch, and that's what I caught pictures of.

We ended up with three hopscotch ... um, boards? areas? ... anyway, our routine is to draw them, and then deocrate each of the squares. Here's the first hopscotch, before I decorated the squares:


And here's the third one (again before we decorated the boxes) - Taipan helped me draw this one. The "8" is intentionally a sideways rectangle, and when you jump on that one you're supposed to jump sideways.


The rain washed them away already .... but we're already talking about doing more once it's drier (and warmer again).