Around the house

Benjamin enjoys pulling himself up on anything he can get his hands on. He still goes about it in the most awkward fashion. The splits are this boy's best friend.

He was clinging to the dishwasher for dear life and looking mighty uncomfortable...

...so I helped him step his feet a little closer together. He was so excited.

He's been so goopy lately—his eyes and nose are constantly oozing. When he wakes up in the morning I have to clean his eyes before he can even open them. They're not too bad during the day, though, and he doesn't have a fever and hasn't been complaining, so I guess we'll just keep cleaning his eyes throughout the day and night until it gets better (or worse).

Miriam took five million years to put away the dishes today. She was supposed to finish before her friend Claire came over to play but didn't so Claire stood in the kitchen and watched Miriam work while they told each other all the names of their siblings and exchanged meal ideas.

"I had spiral macaroni and cheese for lunch!" Miriam exclaimed.

"I didn't," Claire said. "The only thing we have in our house is just rice and beans. But I have two sisters."

"Oh," said Miriam. "I only have one."

Their conversations are hilarious (that means funny—and it's one of Miriam's new favourite words, only she thinks it starts with an L and says el-larious, as in "That's L-arious."). After Miriam finished putting away the dishes they played with play dough.

I asked Claire if she would smile for me but she told me that she could not.

Benjamin went down for a nap today and slept the whole time Claire was over. He was still asleep when it was time to pick Rachel up for school (we went on a family adventure today) so we had to wake him up. After we got home this evening he fell asleep nursing (which is getting more and more unusual) but woke up in time for dinner. He even went to be before 10 o'clock. He's having a rather unusual day.



In addition to pulling up on things, Benjamin's army crawl is morphing (ever slowly) into a true crawl and he can now get from his tummy into a seated position (though he's often content to make it into a kneeling position). He's up and down and go, go, go all day long.



His favourite activities include forcing the printer to print test pages, pulling all the shoes off the shoe shelf, eating, and trying to get outside.

We've been spending a lot of time outside lately, trying to get our yard up and running. We built an official place to keep our garbage cans (since they've been sitting in the middle of our lawn) and we really like it. It tided the yard up so much just having those can out of sight.

While we were making it, Miriam kept trying to show me these green spiders she was seeing all over the place. I told her that spiders aren't usually green...but I was wrong. We have green spiders all over our yard. I'm not sure what they are. I don't think they're green lynx spiders but they might be some sort of orb spider (doesn't that web look orbish?). They're pretty little, and rather green.

It looks like spider season is upon us. We've already found some freakishly huge spiders lurking in our yard. I try to tell myself that they're good for the garden but still find them shudder-worthy.