Rain, rain, don't go away.

It's tough being a kid.  We've had such beautiful weather lately that Calvin has become accustomed to going outside to play after naptime every day.  In fact, forget accustomed, he's down right expectant.  When he went down for his nap this afternoon all he could talk about was "painting the driveway" when he got up (with water, of course).  How dare the weather have different plans!  So when he got up, and it was raining pretty steadily, we tried to talk him out of his usual outdoor tromp before dinner, and decided that he might as well see for himself why it wasn't such a good idea.  That went about as well as giving him the hot pepper he asked for the other night and expecting him to give it back (the crazy kid ate it and asked for more).  His initial reaction to the rain was some mix between disbelief and disappointment - painting the driveway in water was certainly not a worthwhile activity anymore - but if we expected him to come inside we were in for another hot pepper style disappointment of our own.  After a moment of despondency, and several minutes of refusing to give in to fate, Calvin discovered splashing (or splatting, as it may be, since improved drainage has cut down severely on puddle enjoyment), and this new activity kept him in giggles until the rain stopped 30 minutes later, at which time he promptly begged to come inside again - now without the rain all the fun was over.  Nature just can't win.

We're now a three car family.

And the newest car gets amazing gas mileage.  Heck, it doesn't even have a working tank.

The first haircut

We figure this milestone needs no catchier a title than just that - his very first hair cut.  It probably wasn't altogether necessary - I've trimmed it up myself a few times over the past year or so - but we were getting tired of the patchy look, not to mention waking up to crazy hair guy every morning, so we planned for today to be the day.  We'd heard enough horror stories, so in preparation we spent the last week reading books, singing songs, and telling stories about big boys getting hair cuts, and the last few days talking about the specifics (the big chair, the mirror, the cape, and the scissors), so that in the end, rather than shock, the kid probably suffered from day-after-Chrstmas magnitude let down.  But for all that, the actual haircut went by without incident.  Calvin was classic Calvin - contemplative, curious, watchful - and neither cried, nor cracked a smile, until one of the stylists handed him a yogurt covered pretzel.  He got a certificate with a pouch of hair to take home, too, and as we were leaving remembered to thank the nice lady, too.  Probably the best part about the whole experience was the whole experience.  In an effort to embrace our new small town existence we actually walked to town and patronized the local (and old fashioned) shop in downtown Dexter, complete with old-style barber chairs filled with chatty older men (all of whom were greatly entertained, but whether by Calvin or by his camera happy mother it's hard to say), then finished our errands by walking to the bakery, the card shop, the library, and lastly the grocery store, with Calvin happily chatting away about his new haircut while reclining in his buggy, er, stroller.

The rest of the multitude of pictures can be found in the May 2008 album, of course. 

A touch of irony.

Sooooo.... raise your hand if you need a long week to recover from your long weekend.  And now, if you're raising your hand, you can put it down because you look silly - we can't see you.  But if we could, we'd be all for commiserating.  We fully understand that the long Memorial Day weekend is a time to commemorate and remember, and we spent Monday morning doing just that while sitting at the side of the local parade route and watching young children maul each other over thrown pieces of candy, but the rest of the weekend we used to get started on the plans we have for our new yard.  We started this task at ten in the morning on Saturday, armed with a couple of shovels, and finished our work just before dinner on Monday after putting away the pick ax and sledge hammer that we'd added to our selection of handy tools.  If we've learned one thing this weekend it's that clay, especially bone dry clay, is not a digging friendly medium.  But even taking into account such breaks as the pizza party with Jon's family on Saturday, the BBQ ribs party with my family for Sunday dinner, the bonfire with the neighbors on Sunday night (have we mentioned how much we love our new neighborhood?), and the parade on Monday morning, we have a long list of accomplishments to tack on our refrigerator door before bed tonight.  We ripped out two to three feet of sod all the way around the house, and improved the grading where needed;  we extended our sump pump pipe by five feet, dug a trench, hauled in a trunk full of free rocks from a local farm, and installed a dry creek to disperse the flow of water; we removed a large area of sod from the SE corner of our backyard, added a property defining garden, then transplanted two bushes and one tree from our overcrowded front garden to populate it and hauled in ten 40lb bags of topsoil to mix into it; and we removed two rather large and rather dead bushes from by the front walk way.  It may not sound like much, but ask our muscles and I'm guessing they'll disagree.

And what about the above mentioned irony?  We spent hours upon aching hours chopping at the sod with such inefficient tools as shovels, trowels, and even the aforementioned pick ax.  Then the very last thing we did on Monday night was ask our neighbor if we could borrow his lawn mower again (since ours is still at the old house that we are still mowing), only to have him ask if we might also want to borrow his sod ripper.  Say what?  At least the parade was fun.

Garden pictures in the Yard Transformation album. 

Parade and other new pictures in the May 2008 album. 

Found an ant.

The walk will now take at least 10 minutes longer.