PS...

Lydia cut her first tooth last week too! She's getting so big!

Catching up....

 A couple weeks ago we had a fair at church with face painting and games! Micah was super excited to have a "green snake on my face. with grey stripeys and an ornage" (tongue). Two weeks later, he asked me today out of the blue if he could have a green snake on his face. Where did that come from?

 Yesterday, a local kids' bookstore sponsored a performance of two kids' plays at a cafe. I got a free coffee and Micah (and Lydia) got to see "The Giving Tree" and "Little Red Riding Hood" acted out by a drama group from an English speaking university. Micah pretended to be pretty nonchalant during the performances, but when I asked him about it later, he was quite happy to tell me he saw "two stories - a tree and another story". Lydia was fairly happy rolling around on the big comfy chairs at the coffee shop....why is it that coffee shops sometimes have chairs more comfy than our house?

 We topped it off with a trip to our favorite park...and Micah even let sister play this time! She cackled at him coming down the slide after us and he got pretty stoked to have mom and sis chase him on the big pirate ship.

 I love these two kiddos!!

Is it nap time yet Mom??

Lulu gets her talk on

Lulu turned 6 months old last week! We are astonished. But even more so at all her amazing feats. Last week she began to keep herself up when 'sitted'. She started eating homemade veggie baby food - carrots first. She's 'talking' A LOT. And, the hat trick - she started crawling this weekend! Quick, baby proof the house! I thought we were doing pretty good...until Micah started using the mini rocks from our candle centerpiece for his dumptruck quarry. Mommyhood must take it up a notch. While visiting friends, Lydia got to play with an exersaucer and one of those things that dangles over your head. She thought both were amazing. We knew she was getting bored staring at the same 'baby toys' all the time, but I'm afraid Micah is not ready to share some of his more exciting toys yet. Ah sharing. Someday it will come.

Fantastic Night Out

While scouring a website for fun things to do around the city, I discovered a local art festival with "kids activities". Not knowing exactly what that might mean based on my translation skills, we headed out at 3:30 last Friday afternoon to meet Rick at his office and attempt to find this festival. Thinking this area of the city to be quite small and thus a festival quite obvious, we boldly started walking in the vague vicinity of where we presumed the section of the city to be. To those familiar with Chicago, this would be like hearing about a festival in Lincoln Park and then trying to find it by walking from Navy Pier without knowing very much English. After an hour of walking through neighborhoods, we had just given up and decided to eat a nice dinner and head home when God heard the cry of my heart....and there was the festival on the same street of the restaurant we 'randomly' picked to stop at for dinner. Wahoo! Live music, painting, and yummy hamburgers to top it all off.

Micah could not get enough of this music and danced himself silly. I wished I had brought a video camera to document this blondie dancing amidst the locals.

Lulu was more interested in what Moo was doing than the band.

This is Micah's new "cheese" face. A bit scary, but what can you do. Here he is painting the only part of the wall left without paint....the drain pipe.

Proud dad.

The next station had watercolors on paperplates...perhaps we should try this for Christmas tree decorating this year? Micah's is the yellow and pink masterpiece on the left. ...And a family photo!

5 months

I took Lydia to the doctor today and got the following advice for a 5 month old:

Don't take her to the mall. There is air-conditioning there and people are breathing in the same air. You can take her to the outdoor mall though. No problem there.

Take her to the bazaar or the boardwalk as there are lots of people of different sizes and hair color to see there (which is comical to me, because the only people with different hair color are the foreigners and the women that dye their hair).

Invite older children to your house. Bake a cake. She will like watching them.

who needs new clothes?

This is Micah admiring himself in the mirror and then telling mom that he would like to wear his "blue how shirt" today...translated..."I want to wear sleep dog as a shirt instead of whatever commoner type of shirt you would desire me to wear today."

playgrounds

 I'm not sure why I have stressed for a whole year about walking up and down the hill to distant playgrounds. This dream playground has been right under my nose the whole time (literally right across the street from our apartment)! Maybe when Micah turns 3 I'll let him live out the great adventure of playing on wood piles with miscellaneous pipes and who knows what else. Just another way that city life and suburban life have different definitions of play. :)