This weekend we began the weaning of Madeleine. This weekend Madeleine demonstrated that she can talk.
We had the following:
- when I walk into the room Madeleine looks at me and says “mama!”
- when Madeleine is particularly enamoured of Maja she says “yaya!”
- when Richard walks into the room Madeleine says “dada!”
- when the bottle appears she says “baba!”
- when the bottle appears and she KNOWS I’m in the house she says “baba! mama!” and then smacks the bottle away
Ahhhh, that’s my little girl! Any guesses as to how long before she learns the word “no!!”?
Madeleine has also started to clap. Alot. Everything these days deserves a clap — and she is particularly delighted when we join her and say Yay Madeleine! at the same time.
One of the things I love about spring is that I can once again get out into my garden and play in the dirt. I was trying to explain this to Maja as we were planting pansies on Saturday afternoon — I was instructing her on how to dig a hole for the pansy and then to smush the dirt back around it. Maja refused to join in and just sat on the edge of the garden refusing to get dirty. She has much to learn.
The beginning of May will mark 8 years that I’ve been in Philadelphia. This summer will be the second year where I will have a backyard that I can spend time in — the first summer I could spend time in a backyard was at our old house. Anyway, I’m looking forward to it.
As a reminder, here are some shots of our backyard when we first moved in and of our re-do in progress from last fall:
On Saturday afternoon we headed up to our favourite gardening store, Primex. I was in search of a forsythia shrub and a miniature flowering weeping cherry tree. And to my utter delight we were able to get both!
Richard and Maja planted the tree together on Sunday morning.
The tree is a Snow Fountain Weeping Cherry. It will eventually look like this, growing to a height of 8-10 ft. (it’s probably around 6ft. right now). We chose this tree because we wanted something small that was visually interesting. This tree (providing it thrives) will give us white blossoms in the spring, green leaves in the summer, and orange leaves in the fall. You can also see our new Forsythia Lynwood Gold in the top photo. I don’t intend to let the forsythia get too bushy, I want height instead of width. The tree, too, will require some strategic pruning so that the weeping branches don’t overtake my wee garden.
Now we just need a new fence.
This is another vintage toy that my mother saved from my childhood and brought down with her on the latest trip to visit the grandkids. I received this music box for my baptism … almost 35 years ago.
…Lord only knows why. I admit it, I can be a cranky b*tch at times. Thankfully he sees past that (I hope).
My darling ordered my birthday present the other day and because I couldn’t wait (and since he told me and then brought it home!) I am now using it. I asked for a Mr. Bento lunchbox from Zojirushi. Happy days.
I’ve had a mini must-have love affair with bento boxes since my days in Vancouver. Although it is getting easier, they’re still hard to find. So, imagine my happiness when I saw some up on Amazon.com!
There’s a fine art to doing bento properly (hell, I probably just misused the word! Can one bento?) My very primitive and cursory understanding of it is that it’s all in the presentation of the food in small, portable containers. As you can see from Monday’s bento lunch pictured below, I have to work on the presentation. Eh, whatever, right? It all tastes the same in the end.
Clockwise from the top: leftover perogies (with onion, apple, & bacon), salad with dressing (bad bento form!), fresh!! strawberries, butternut squash soup
Of course there’s a whole Mr. Bento community out there. Just to get started try doing a search for bento in Flickr.
So, tell me: what do you pack for lunch and how do you pack it?
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