Weekly recap

Five good things from the past week. Sorry this is not on a Friday. I was busy on Friday with taking care of the kids and trying to plan a menu and write a grocery list so Christopher could pick up groceries for us after work.

1. Eric is growing rapidly. He is 6 1/2 months old now. He started crawling a few weeks ago.

He can pull himself to standing. So you might be lying on the couch reading and suddenly a beaming face will appear over the edge of the cushion. If you smile and say hello he will start bouncing up and down with happiness, which usually makes him fall down. A few seconds later the smiling face reappears as he pulls himself back up.

He started saying "Ba ba". He says it a lot. Our days are full of joyful "Ba ba ba"s.

This week's development was that he got his first tooth! A barely visible sliver on the bottom.

He's perfected the art of constantly waving his hand around behind him and blindly swiping at my phone while I'm nursing him. A funny but kind of annoying habit. I'm sure it's affected my Connections score.

2. First grilling of the season -- Christopher grilled hamburgers for us on Sunday afternoon. There's still quite a bit of snow outside but the cement pad in front of our apartment building was clear enough to set up the grill.

3. One evening after the kids had been tucked in bed an outraged child came storming out of his bedroom and yelled, "Silas grabbed my hair! Make him stop that!"

"Silas, don't grab people's hair, please."

Silas followed his brother out. "[He] came up on my bed and said 'Catch me!'"

So then I was laughing too hard to say anything else to them and I think they gave up on me and went back to bed.

4. Micah spotted the first rhubarb shoots. We had about an inch or two of snow in the morning. It melted away, and when he went out to play after lunch he found the bright pink rhubarb poking up through the dead leaves. A sure sign of spring in Alaska. In my opinion, no Alaska home is complete without a rhubarb plant.

Rhubarb 1

Rhubarb 2

5. One of the senior ladies at our church paid me to do some cleaning for her and I used the money to buy Micah a new pair of shoes. He told me he wanted green shoes. I prayed about the shoe shopping before we left because I was worried about his size being in stock and I could not go over budget. Plus it's nervewracking to take a 7 year old, 5 year old, 2 year old and 6 month old into the store by myself. When we went to the store it took only about 10 seconds for Micah to spot the green pair that he wanted. In spite of the shelves being poorly stocked, they had his size. It was the easiest shoe shopping trip I've ever had.

Bonus: There was a sweet moment here today where I was in the laundry room folding towels and the boys were outside with Christopher. I heard Silas come inside and as he hurried down the hallway he was saying to himself "I have to show her!" He was eager to show me some colorful little plastic gems he had found in the driveway. After we washed them off he wanted to borrow my phone to take a photo of them.

Silas's gems

As he went back down the hallway I was charmed to realize he was humming a chickadee song. Black-capped chickadees are year-round residents here so we hear their songs on repeat.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Black-capped_Chickadee/sounds

Heartwarming!