Scarecrows and Dolphins

Miles is one special boy.

He amazes us everyday.

He became the older brother to 3 siblings in just 2 short years. He went from having all the attention on him to sharing the attention with 3 other little bodies. Not once has he complained. He has only shown us excitement and happiness at the addition of his sisters and brother.

He’s helping Masie learn to use the toilet. He takes Lyla by the hand, sits her down and takes her shoes off. He’s made up a song he sings to Lars while dancing in front of him.

“Baby-baby, baby-baby, bay-beeey LARrrrS!”

He is a swimming star. He just moved up to become a DOLPHIN. He is a master at the backstroke and will now be learning breaststroke and butterfly.

His greatest interest of late is scarecrows. It started because of a BOOK he reads over and over again, the movie CHARLOTTE'S WEB and our new garden boxes.

 

He asked for about a week if we could please, please, please build a scarecrow to keep the birds out of our new planters. Luke and I were making plans to start the scarecrow project until we discovered we could buy a scarecrow from Home Depot. Saved us since we don’t find time to be very creative these days.

This last week Miles liked to show us the face a scarecrow should pull to scare away the birds.

Unfortunately he wasn’t very impressed with the smiling one we purchased.

The “scarecrow” face.

Miles goes to the window are runs outside several times a day to check on the smiling scarecrow. He says even though he doesn’t like it, it seems to be keeping the crows away.

Sleepers, or lack of

I always thought that it would be the girls who’d join me in bed.

Our boys have staked claim of Luke’s side of the bed every morning usually before the 6 o’clock hour.

Guess Who

  

What does Sunday look like?

Does it look like this?

 

And this?

It does at my house.

Breaky

Last week was HOT again!

Too hot to play outside in the afternoon, so I thought it would be a fun to have breakfast at the park before it became unbearable outside.

Yummy waffle sandwich with banana, raspberries, and blueberries

Our “bus”

Pretending to be lions

ROAR!

  

Raspberry-fingers

Lyla was the only one to eat her meal (besides the banana she threw in the grass). What a mess she made!

Sweat, sand, and snot. Proof positive that they had a blast!

Deep Racing

Swim season is quickly coming to an end. Outdoor swim anyway.

Our kids have indoor swim lessons year round.

Miles’s new trick is to race Masie by swimming beneath her.

Isn’t it fun?

Are they related?

A very sweet gal at the gym asked me this yesterday. I use to attend her body pump class. She has a 2 year old daughter that shares my 2 year olds name.

“Oh! I didn’t know you had another! Are they related?” She asked as she glanced from Lyla to Lars and back to Lyla as I was attempting to check them into the Kid’s Zone. Masie just stared at her. Luckily, I didn’t have Miles with me at the gym that day.

“Do you mean are they biological siblings? No. But they’re most definitely related.” I said while staying reasonably calm on the outside. I think I pulled it off.

I think people are thrown by the fact that we have two brown babies. Lyla’s and Lars’s features look nothing alike, but right now their skin and hair colors are the same shades. The gal knew that my kids were adopted. It’s pretty obvious. So why phrase the question that way? I don’t want to take offense, but as our kids get older, they hear and take in what strangers observe about our trans-racial family.

Strangers would ask a similar question when the girls were younger.

“Are they sisters?” or “Are they twins?”

The second question just made me want to laugh because they’re almost a year apart and Masie is about a head taller besides being a different ethnicity. I do dress them alike fairly often so maybe I’m bringing on that question myself.

“Are they all yours?”

That use to really offend me. But I’m over it now and smile while nodding my head.

Do I run a daycare? Am I babysitting? Does she look more like her dad?

Now it isn’t  just an issue of their different ethnicities,  it’s also that we have so many little ones. I get it.

We love adoption. I love to share how adoption has brought our family together. I love that friends refer me to other friends hoping to adopt.

But, I have to set some boundaries for when I’m approached by a stranger or someone who isn’t very familiar to me. Our kids have a right to privacy. A right to tell their adoption story when they want to or not at all.

Please don’t ask me in front of them if they are “related.”

Our kids love each other so much. Of course they are related.

Freestone Park

Our usual evening routine involves

hide&seek,

tickle monster,

and races up and down the hallway.

With a newborn (ok, and 4 kids 4 and under), we don’t go out much after dinner.

I’d had enough this week though.

I HAD TO GET OUT.

Saturday evening we raced out to Freestone Park in Gilbert loaded down with Happy Meals.

(Photos courtesy of my cell.)

Lyla was more enamored by her sippie than by the ducks.

 

Lars’s first train ride!

Lyla’s first carousel ride!

I’m so glad we got out and I got a break from our routine.

We had a blast.

The evenings aren’t as hot now.

We can walk to the park without melting, and the kids won’t blister their undersides on the slides.

All Tied Up

3 happy faces

wearing 3 new pairs of laces

 

that cost me less than 30 bucks.

“Laboring”

Labor Day weekend for us meant a little down time spent at home. We were sort of deserted by my mom and brother, yes, deserted. Mom don’t worry I’m not upset about it.

We spent time lying around.

(Lars is now my best photo subject. He holds still and smiles on request.)

   

Playing in the mud.

 

Eating yummy pumpkin cookies.

AND getting rid of pesky, dangerous pests.

 

I have arachnophobia.

I do.

I can’t even believe I’m going to let these photos publish to my blog.

We watched Charlotte's Web as a family on Sunday night. You know, the one with Dakota Fanning playing Fern and Julia Robert’s voice as Charlotte. Masie loves animals and I was hoping to watch something with a little culture. She loved Wilbur. We were all slightly freaked out when the spider appeared, and I had to stop from gagging and running from the room near the end of the movie when the sack of baby spider eggs was flung around.

Ugh, I remember why I refused to watch the film when it was released.

Miles couldn’t get over the fact that the spider died. We spent an hour after the flick talking about where, why, and how a spider’s life comes to an end.

I’m glad we saw the movie because the kids weren’t so scared when Luke cleaned out and around our gazebo on Monday and found FIVE black widows living in the curtains. We tossed the curtains and fumigated. Besides being really grossed out, I’m annoyed because we pay for monthly pest control.

YUCK!

I’m going to have nightmares every time I refer to this post.