Dd turns 3

Before the month is up, I want to document Dd's third birthday!   His sense of humor, imaginative play, strong opinions and desire to do things for himself have all increased lately.  It is fun to watch his imagination which often stays on a theme for a week or more: the couch is a garbage truck, we're going camping, let's build a houseboat....

He has a really funny idea of what baseball is.   It involves falling down a fair bit and he shouts baseball words in a way that doesn't quite make sense, like "two ball strike!"

We've also been allowing him a bit more independence in the house.   Both kids have been excited for D to supervise Dd a bit.  The other day we felt confident enough that they'd play on their own that we did about 45 minutes of work on the stair lights while they stayed upstairs on their own.   D often reads to Dd and Dd is interested in words on signs and identifying letters.

At three, it's been a while since he was a baby, but now I find that I really see that we're done with the baby years.   A few things he said recently, really show that he's growing up:

Grammy said we needed some balls and I said "how about baseballs?"

I got up and went potty on one and I didn't bother you.

I live in this pool.

On his birthday weekend we stayed in a cabin at Dosewallips state park with friends in the cabin next door.  The following weekend, the weather was nice and D helped make a wacky cake for family.

a japanese maple for the roof

 I always look at rooftop gardens, as much as one can from down on the ground.  Japanese maples appear to be a successful option for our climate, so I finally bought one and planted it today.   It is a variety called iijima sunago.  Here’s hoping it works and is slightly protected from the wind   

We also put pink and a white snowberry bushes down by the street.  

new old table and a gallery wall!

We got a great big sturdy table, with two leaves, on Buy Nothing, a couple of years ago.   It was just right for our family since some people still occasionally stab the table with forks or put bowls of dry ice on it for fun.  Then, over the summer, the ratty finish on it started to fail catastrophically, to the point where hot soup or a cup of tea would stick to the table.  Next things that weren't even hot started to stick, including the placemats we tried as a stopgap.   

With helpful insistence from my parents, the loan of scraping tools and lots of muscle we scraped off the old varnish over the course of a month.  Then the kids started to stain the bare wood... so just before it got really cold, we put on three coats of smelly varnish.  I enjoyed adding some stripes that are trying to say "I know I'm still rough, but hey, think about mountains."   Over the summer we also got matching red chairs (pictured), from Buy Nothing as well, which look nicer too.

This month we finally hung a Monet picture from a Christmas gift card from Jack's parents and put together a gallery wall above my desk.   I haven't decided on the pictures for the smaller frames yet, but am still very satisfied with how it looks.   It's been five years in the house and now we've hung a few things in more permanent positions.  I feel lucky that we've got a pretty good office set up, with large, personal desks.