The Weekly Review: Week Seventeen

Best Blog Post of the Week

I hate to be repetitive, but All and Sundry appears here again. However, this time she is featured not because she was funny, but because she was brutally honest. It is hard to be honest about a parenting experience you later feel guilty about, but she is. By sharing, she not only makes the rest of us feel less alone about our own questionable parenting moments, but she also got some amazing advice in her comments.

The Weekly Michael

Michael is finally moving from being able to say his name, then spell his name, and then type his name to trying to write his name. He somehow got the idea in his head that writing with an actual pencil on paper was hard and he refused to even try. Now he is working on it because he wants to. It is very cute and watching him succeed and be proud of his own efforts is a lot of fun.

Ava this Week:

A while back Ava felt the need to anounce every red light while we were in the car. If we encountered 6 red lights and 3 stop signs during the trip we would hear "Red light!!!" about 27 times becuase she often needed to anounce each red light (or stop sign) multiple times. That stage, while adorable at first, drove us a bit crazy and thankfully passed.

This week she is anouncing every time the road is bumpy. "Bumpy Mama, bumpy!!!" It is beautifully articulated, and actually still at the adorable stage, but I wonder when hearing "bumpy" 30 times per car ride will start to get annoying?

The Weekly Trip Report

Our trip to Arkansas for the 4th of July / my grandmother's 80th birthday went amazingly well. It has been 6 months since the last time we went on a visit. Those were an important six months of development apparently, because the travel went much more smoothly with a 2 and 3 year old than it did with a 1 and barely 3 year old.

Let's see. Highlights of the trip include:

• 10 total hours of a successful car riding
• first experience with fireworks for the children (Michael loved them. Ava hated them.)
• reconnected with 17 relatives
• watched 5 cousins between the ages of 1 and 3 play together - mine were neither the youngest nor the oldest of the group
• waded in a creek, threw rocks to watch splashes, and caught crawfish in nets to study and then release them
• played in a water park (one of those that is simply a slab of concrete with many jets of water streaming up from the ground)