Life in the Slow Lane

The past couple of days have been perfect. Messy, but perfect, in a When I'm 50 This Is How I'll Remember Our Lives With Little Kids way. On Thursday we had friends coming for dinner. Berit was at Trevor's parents' house, so Marta and I went to the farm market and to the grocery store, hunting for just the right fresh ingredients, smelling them, touching them, picking out decorative pumpkins and thistle and altogether relishing a few hours of sensory enjoyment and togetherness. We came home and met the new babysitter who's going to start looking after the girls for a couple hours a week so I can (big, excited breath) do some freelance writing. She played with Marta for a few minutes while I prepped dinner, then our friends came, lovely dinner and conversation, appropriate bedtimes and all was well. 

On Friday morning we went to Bill's Farm Market for a hayride with a group of our friends. Berit was so thrilled by this that she was screeching with delight -- especially when the cows came right up to the hayride. Marta kept yelling out "MOO-MOO!" It was the quintessential fall day with sunshine and full-color trees, and it was even warm outside. We picked pumpkins, ate apples and generally got in lots of autumn fun. 

Later that evening we went to the waterpark, where Berit was whiny and didn't want to try anything -- full-on sensitive child mode. Trevor took her down a big slide and she got soaked and for much of the next hour was an emotional wreck. But we ate a junk-food dinner and she livened up enough to truly enjoy another hour's worth of play before piling into the family restroom to get the girls into their jammies (imagine Trevor insisting in increasingly loud tones that Berit HOLD STILL and NOT WALK AROUND because she was wet and the floor had GERMS and I kept waiting for him to say something like, "How do you do this all day?" but no, so I just cleaned up Marta's poopy swim dipe and looked annoyed). They fell asleep after 10 minutes of driving and smelled like chlorine when they woke up this morning.

Speaking of this morning, I set Berit and Trevor up with a super easy, super fun craft project that I thought I'd share:

You'll need coffee filters, washable markers, water, thread/string and paper/an old tablecloth to lay down under the project.

Spread out the paper/tablecloth and secure.

Give child a coffee filter and have her color all over it. 

We used a medicine dropper to take the water out of a cup and drip it onto the coffee filters. The marker will run and look like watercolors.

Let dry, then poke a small hole on the top of the filter and hang with the thread/string in front of your windows. 

Here are a few pics of us doing it. (OK, they're in the above post, because I can't figure out how to paste pics in certain places.)