First word

We played with magnetic letters this morning (they make great imprints on the magna-doodle, by the way).  Calvin is engrossed by letters lately and has been spelling things for some time now, such as "train" spelled "pqrifds", so when he came running into the kitchen while I was making lunch saying that he had spelled "zoo" and I should come look, I expected nothing less than his usual wonderful and creative spelling exploits. Imagine my surprise.

I realize that we can't say he wrote his first word today–his letter writing still closely resembles an abstract of a tumbleweed–but we'll forever say that on this day in history he spelled his first word.  All by himself.  Seeing how excited that made his mom, he then asked how to spell more things, of course, so I started with cat and he went to work on that one, too. 

Sponges.  They are quite definitely little sponges at this age.

Make believe

This will be another quick post, short and to the point.  Mostly we just haven't done much out of the ordinary lately, or, perhaps that alone is worthy of mention.  Calvin, as I mentioned before, had a successful swim class on Saturday, then this week he had wonderful music and library classes.  We're all healthy again, and the weather has been warm enough to entice outside for short periods of exercise.  Maybe the only notable events this week (aside, that is, from the new era of hope that was beautifully sworn in on Tuesday at noon) were the sighting of the sun, the discovery that we have a rabbit living under our deck (we can tell by the track patterns), the darling little bluebirds who have started hanging out on our deck again, and the fantastic make believe play in the train town that has been built in our play room.  Actually, come to think of it, it really has been a great and busy week.  And if you want to see more pictures of our fantastic train town, you can visit our January photo gallery.

Balloons

We are now completely healed and healthy as a household. Calvin's first day in his new semester of swimming lessons went by without a hitch (he missed the actual first day because of his absorbable stitches) and all of our household schedules and planned events are back underway. Right about now we are finally ready to greet the new year, how about you?

Oh. And balloons are fun.

Accomplishment. It's a wonderful thing.

A slippery slope to normal

Sometimes you come home from vacation and *WHAM* reality hits you in the head like a snowball.  Other times, not so much.  When we came home from our winter vacation last week we fully expected to return to our previously scheduled programming, including work for Jon, work for me, and classes for Calvin, but a few colds here and there, a few falls, and one ER visit later and we are still trying to get our feet under us.  I think it's mostly me, but the whole stitches under anesthesia bit really threw me for a loop; now every time Calvin goes running through the house I feel the urge to reach out and slow him down.  Of course, he's two and a half and if I expect him to nap in the afternoon that will never work, but I can't seem to stop that niggling fear of injury.  And thanks to the aforementioned stitches we had to skip Calvin's first swim class of the semester (thankfully toddlers heal quickly and we are back in business this week), plus Jon missed nearly a full day of work for that lovely afternoon at the hospital, so we've both been trying to get caught up on some of his projects, which has made for some late nights.  But a whole new week is now underway and things are healing up nicely (by the plural I mean both Calvin's nose and my nerves), we've completed our weekly projects and chores on time, and Calvin's semester of classes is now successfully underway.  Okay, normal, I'm ready.