Ready or not, here we grow!

I cannot believe how quickly the kids are growing up!! Liam turned 5 last weekend and we had am "Enchanted Garden" birthday party. Liam wanted a costume as a garden fairy in yellow with green buttons and an orange wavy border.

This is how it turned out (together with the costume design drawing he made):

Here he is wearing the garden fairy costume with his fairy crown:

We had a puppet show, balloon animals and a wading pool set up for the kids. It was a lot of fun! And we were so lucky with the weather!! It was one of the rare sunny days of this summer.

Yesterday I was helping Liam brush his teeth when we noticed that one of his front teeth is loose. I almost teared up... It seems like yesterday that we went through many tears while he was teething and those teeth came through...

Anouk is talking more and more every day. She loves to sit on the front steps and say "hi!' to everyone who comes by, "hi doggie!" "hi people!" "hi bike!".

This morning when I dropped her off at her daycare and said "Bye-bye, I love you" she looked at me and smiled and said "Love you!" and then ran off to play. She is so full of energy and full of life - and already so independent!

I am very proud of these growing children!! ... although I did make Liam promise not to play with that loose tooth, because if it falls out it really means that he is growing up and I'm not sure I am ready for that. He just gave me his Liam grin and told me it was inevitable, he was going to grow up whether I was ready or not.

How true.

Flying

As we walked to daycare today Liam announced he had a big project today. He was going to work on it all day.

"Oh, that's great" I said, wanting to encourage him to dedicate his day to his wonderful, creative project.

"What is your project?"

"I'm going to fly."

"?"

"Yeah, it will be great."

"OK."

Then I thought of him jumping off the climber, the roof or any other high structure to fly. I saw us in the ER with a broken arm...

"...so you know that flying is only pretend, right?"

"Hmm, I think I can do it. I'll work hard on it all day."

OK, so the whole, if you dedicate yourself to a project and really work hard on it, your chances of success are high thing - he got that. Good. Just not that it won't work for flying.

"Humans can't fly, we don't have wings." I said, hoping that this very reasonable objection would make sense to him and make him realize that nobody is flying around town...

"Oh, well, I am going to use a broom."

OK, I blame that entirely on Harry Potter. So now my picture of him jumping off a high structure has been modified to include a broom.

By that time we were at the daycare. I went up to one of the teachers and let her know about Liam's big plan for the day. Just as we were discussing climbers, brooms and broken arms we overheard Liam announcing that he was going to fly to another parent.

We then talked with Liam about birds and wings and pectoral muscles and how we humans don't have any of those. The we talked about helicopters, paragliders, airplanes and other flying devices. We talked about how a broom is just a broom and can't fly. But, it didn't seem to matter. When we saw his determination, we, the adults mouthed "Ikarus" to each other.

OK, so now my image is Liam on a broom on a climber flying to near to the sun and then falling and breaking his arm.

When I left we had decided that he would illustrate and write a book about Liam flying.

Hopefully this will work. I will be waiting all day long for the phone call that I need to pick him up since he just jumped down from the climber and has a broken arm.

Happiness is...

I just wanted to share a couple of happy moments with you:

We got a new dishwasher ( - the old one was leaking floods into the kitchen...)

And dishwashers come in big boxes and Liam was very happy to be allowed to sleep in the box for one night:

This weekend we had Nutella on bread for dessert. When Anouk woke up from her nap she found the empty jar on the table - it's amazing how much Nutella you can find in an empty jar and how happy that can make you:

This is my windowsill over the sink: rocks that Liam finds for me and the dandelions both Liam and Anouk pick for me on our walks:

I will try to share one happy thing a week all summer, maybe more :)