Random tidbits

Last week I realized that I hadn't shared any silly stories in awhile and thought I could come up with a few.

First of all, we are in full park-visiting mode. It's hard to NOT go to a park on days like we've been having this week. Plus, the girls are at such wonderful ages for playing at parks and are such good friends that they will play together for at least an hour, especially if we bring along a couple of stuffed animals, too. Anna often leads the charge and directs the play, but Kate is right there with her and certainly won't let herself be left behind.

This weather not only encourages running around at parks, but also helps build a blooming flower/plant vocabulary. Both girls know their flowers very well, and are also relatively good at identifying different kinds of trees, at least the more obvious ones (willow, crabapple, magnolia, etc.) Anna even remembers the names of flowers that she learned last summer and will recall them without much effort. If you ask just about anyone who knows these kids, they'll tell you that they both have a pretty remarkable memory.

We've also been out on the bikes a fair bit in the past several weeks. Awhile back we picked up a used tag-a-long (a.k.a. trail-a-bike) for Anna. As we've told her, she's great with her pedaling and steering, but just needs to practice her balance before we start working on riding without training wheels. So in order for us to use this when Matt's at work, we had to rig up our family "train" - which means my bike, pulling Anna on the tag-a-long, pulling Kate in the trailer. After a few test rides, I decided to bite the bullet and take the train into preschool to drop Anna off today. As a bit of reference, last summer I could pull both girls in the trailer to and from McFarland (about 4 miles each way), but the ride home would usually be a struggle for me considering I was pulling between 70 and 75 lbs. of kid, plus a 15+ lb. trailer. So now the kid weight is about the same, but there's an addition 15+ lb. piece of equipment, too.

Well, it worked. The ride in was rough, but after losing the 40 lbs. of Anna once we dropped her off, the ride home was much easier :) We may have to do our train again this spring. On a side note, our train attracted the attention of some construction workers on the way in to town; they gave us a thumbs up and some chuckles ;) I wonder how many odd looks Kate and I got on the ride home, though, when the middle part of our train was missing its rider ...

And finally, lately we've had to work with Kate (and thus Anna by proximity) on appropriate and inappropriate words. Kate loves to rhyme words and make up lots of silly words, most of which don't have any real meaning. However, the situation needed some intervention after she started calling Shadow her "shitty kitty" repeatedly. I've also caught her saying "sticky icky dicky" and "witchy bitchy", but those were only one-timers and we just let them slide :)