Beau, second from right, with a graduation cap that is too small for his off the charts head...
The other major thing that has been occupying my time and thoughts is a project I am doing for a friend. She is paying me to draw a comic book for her husband for Father's day. The comic book will contain "stories" of some of his greatest moments as a husband and father over the past thirty years. It is a really fun project, but also really intense as I am trying to convert memories into stories complete with humorous dialogue and pictures. When I'm done drawing and coloring everything I will take it to a company that will scan in all of the drawings and turn them into an authentic bound and published comic book. I am SO excited for the finished result...but I admit I am a little stressed about getting it from rough sketches to finished product. I just keep thinking, "this will be EPIC, this will be amazing, this will be priceless, I have plenty of time!" Positive thinking, right?
I guess I'll share a few random thoughts as I wait for the 300+ pictures on my camera to load. (Rus has been photographing the birds in our backyard so he can identify them with one of his two bird books. Nerd. I love it. And Jacob has been taking pictures of ants and lizards and rocks in our backyard. Junior Nerd.)
A few days ago Jacob came inside from the backyard with a 1"x1"x four foot long piece of wood. He said, "Mom, is it okay if just you and me go to the garage for a minute and use the sander and we sharpen the end of this to a point?" I replied, much to his frustration, that sharp, pointy sticks are dangerous. He countered, "But if it's not sharp it won't stick in the ground when I throw it!" And I reiterated that throwing sharp pointy sticks was really dangerous. This really mad him mad and he stomped out of the house with his dull, flat stick yelling, "you NEVER let me do things I want to do!" I'm afraid he's right. I never let him make wooden weapons, because I'm sure if I did he would somehow accidentally wind up maiming one of his siblings.
Also: Marianne's arms seem to be permanently covered in permanent marker. I am not sure how she does it - I can't seem to find a permanent marker to save my life when I really need one, but she finds them all over the house in random places. And then she colors her arms and her legs and if I'm really lucky, nearby books and furniture. My cousin watched her a few weeks ago and she was wearing long fleece pajamas. I changed her into cooler clothes later and found that she had completely colored one of her legs. I'm not even sure my cousin knew she did that because the pjs covered it up!
Here is Marianne "smiling" for the camera in the dress my mom bought for her when she was just a few months old.
Marianne is certainly the prime source of entertainment in our family. She loves to sing (it sounds more like an indian chant), and if you ask her, she'll sing you the happy song or the doggy song, where she sings that particular word over and over. She loves to twirl and fall on the floor, and her vocabulary seems to increase hourly. She still loves my ipad and I find myself hiding it from her all day long and sneaking away from her to check emails when I think she's distracted. If she sees it, she has to have it, and she has a disturbing ability to operate it as well as my other children.
Lastly, I have to admit that I am not afraid to get dirty. In fact I sometimes invite it, like when I ran the Dirty Dash last September, or when I laid out paper and dumped paint on it and let Beau and Marianne skate on it with their bare feet. We needed large sheets of painted paper to make collages in Jacob's class on the last day of school. So Beau and Marianne were my helpers and we painted three large sheets of paper with vivid colors and lots of texture. The kids in Jacob's class made good use of the paper and his teacher proclaimed it the easiest last day she'd ever had. Success.
(Note our finished raised flower beds and fountain in our back yard!)
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