Crazy, hazy, and yes, even lazy

Summer, with its sky-high electric bills and lightning bugs, has plopped its uncomfortably humid weight onto our fair town. It always amazes me how the fellers are oblivious to this 90-degree weather that requires you nearly sprout gills to breathe the air. If the outdoors suddenly burst into flame, I'm sure I would still find Jacob standing at the top of the kitchen steps, pointing in the most obvious fashion at the red wagon on the patio. I have come to know this is a gesture that means "Take me to the park, woman."

We kept busy last week. Dada has been working his kiester off, with the sweet reward that we are headed home July 8th for some well-deserved babysitting from the Grandmas and Grandpas. In the meantime we have had a lot of time to kill, and I have insisted that we take advantage of this late sunset business to go to the park almost every night. Lucky for us, our homegirls Ella and Ella's mommy agree, and have met us at Turtle and Dolphin park quite frequently for a last-ditch effort to run all the energy out of the little people through their legs. Even Dada could get down with my park plan Sunday night. Dada's park presence is extremely important now that Isaac is training for the Russian gymnastics team. He needs a spotter, you know.



Saturday morning we went cherry picking with our homegirls Ella and Ella's mommy. Our favorite "farm for family fun", which entertains us so well on the weekdays with its gigantic playground...




...had a very, very light cherry crop that lasted through only three hours of public picking. We were there for over and hour and a half and picked a little more than a pound of cherries. Jacob ate that much, at least, and sparked several comments from onlookers with his all-over purple staining. But, though we didn't succeed much in the cherry-finding business, it was a highly relaxing adventure. Ella's mommy and I discovered that the best way to find what few cherries there were was to sit under the trees and look up. What better way to spend a Saturday than lazing around under cherry trees with your friends?



Photo credits go to Ella's mommy for the top picture and the pictures of the kiddos in frolic-mode at the farm.

Berry Bliss

If there is one thing I can honestly say I miss more about that stupid West coast hippie town more than anything, more even than the mountains and the unbelievably gorgeous summer weather, it's the fresh produce from spring till fall. You have not lived until you've eaten two pounds of cherries, picked fresh that morning and bought at the expensive grocery store, for under $2 a pound.

Luckily the area we moved into is apparently psycho-fertile for fruit-bearing shrubbery, and there is at least one U-Pick farm within 10 miles of us offering some sort of berry or stone-containing fruit to stain our chins with juices all summer long. AnthonyCarlos's mommy introduced us to a new-to-us farm nearby that specializes in U-Pick strawberries, for $1.65 a pound. And that's not counting the ones you eat.




While we wait with bated breath for this particular farm to begin its U-Pick blueberry season on Wednesday, we have a date with our old standby family farm for the opening of their cherry-picking season tomorrow. Because it's just not summer unless Mommy is eating her weight in cherries.

Happy Father's Day

We had a great weekend with our Dada. It was so awesome, Mommy even cooked a meal for lunch on Saturday. For lunch! In the end, we needed that extra nutrition because we all stayed outside most of the day playing in the park or the backyard, and we stayed out till 9 on Saturday night catching fireflies.

For Father's Day, Dada told us that what he really wanted was to go to the Big Zoo. Geez, twist our arms, Dada. It was very lovely and even relaxing at times because the boys mostly wanted to play in the fountains. We also learned important things about each other. For example, did you know that, while Isaac's favorite animal is the crocodile and Mommy's favorite is the snake-necked turtle, Dada's favorites are the penguins? Now you do.

Jacob enjoyed himself immensely at the zoo, but then promptly came down with the most awful cold in the history of summer colds upon our return, perhaps not helped because neither boy napped properly on Sunday. There is much coughing and snot-rivers and 100-degree-fevers and not sleeping. At first we were concerned that he may have inhaled a lot of smoke from our backyard fireplace; or that he ingested a bit of zoo-fountain water, which is surely contaminated with peacock poo; or perhaps that he is getting yet another canine tooth, since a regular pool of drool keeps forming under his chin. But with the copious amounts of snot and the weirdo barking cough, and especially that I am feeling a bit woozy today, after sharing beverages with him all weekend... my guess is that it's just a run-of-the-mill virus. Not that that diagnosis makes things much better.

Last night was spectacular in its awfulness. Jacob was so miserable he refused to go to bed unless it was in the Big People Bed, with the Mama, so I went to bed at 10:15. That was a good thing, because Isaac awakened, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, at 2:30, only grudingly nodding off an hour later, and then Jacob awakened for good at 5.

This is the point where I go on and on about how delightfully wonderful that Dada is. When he and Isaac awakened at 7:15, they found Jacob and I passed out on the living room couch, Wiggles blaring.

Dada, because he is a god among men, asked me, "Do you want some coffee or some sleep?"

I chose sleep, and we agreed he would wake me up at 8:00 so he could get to work at a reasonable hour. I woke up on my own at 8:45.

Dada: "Sorry if we woke you up. [they didn't] Isaac and I were running races."

For Father's Day, we got Dada one of those Starbucks mugs that you can put your own photos in. We are using it to display our copious amounts of baby-generated artwork to Dada's coworkers. He loves it, of course.

And in addition to designer coffee mugs, zoo trips, and colds, we got some news yesterday that was quite appropriate for the occasion. Uncle Chrissy called to tell us that Aunt Jean is pregnant. She's due February 12th, one week before Jacob's second birthday. We are excited to follow her pregnancy, hoping dearly that her recently-started blog now turns into a mommy-to-be blog. But we are most excited for a new bitty cousin. Congratulations, hotties!

Jacob's poor battered brain

Jacob's ankle seems completely back to normal. We had a few spells when Chris and Jean were here where he tripped and it seemed that he had twisted it all over again, with more limping and crawling. That week, he also began battling a serious bout of sleeplessness, perhaps enchanced by the two top canine teeth he sprouted last week. He's not yet back to his normal waking-up-once-a-night, which is apparently just as painful for him as it is for me since it looks like another tooth is coming in on the bottom.

When he wakes at night, he won't fall back asleep most times unless I bring him in bed with me. This had been working out very well because he sleeps like a log in the big people bed, and because we have no regard for the slumbering health of that silly Dada and send him off packing towards the couch. But then, on Thursday night, Jacob started wrestling in his sleep hard-core. I wake easily when he sleeps with me, but this night I chose to stay up way past my bedtime, and only woke just in time to watch his body roll sidewise off the bed. His noggin looked okay considering and he wasn't too upset about it and fell right back asleep. I didn't worry about it at first. But now, perhaps coincidentally, he seems to be falling more than usual while walking around. I don't really know what to think, and of course I can't know if these things are connected. He finally has his 15-month checkup next week, so I will probably do some impatiently watchful waiting until then.

In the meantime, one way I can be sure he isn't too brain damaged from all the falling, big and small, is that the words keep tumbling out. Here is the most complete list of what he says that I can come up with now:

Mama
Da (for Dada)
Kee (for kitty)
Sheh (for shoe)
Gall (for ball)
Rah (rock)
Uhn-uh (accompanied by head shaking)
Nye-nye (upon seeing someone asleep or finding his blankie)
Der ee is (in peekaboo)
Der y'arrrr (in peekaboo)
Ruff-ruff
Meow
Hoo hoo (as an owl)
Roar (as a lion)
Moo
Ooo oo ooo oo oOOOO (for cock-a-doodle-doo)

He is also, to my surprise, interested in reading the 30-page-long books that Big Brother reads, especially Curious George and anything with Thomas. He will purposefully bring me books like these and flop down on my lap, expecting me to read them. This makes story time infinitely easier -- kill two boys with one book, so to speak -- and for that I am very grateful.

But his climbing, oh, please, lord make it stop. I have to close the bathroom door now because, if it is open, he will head straight for the toilet, climb it unassisted, and lean his belly over the sink to reach the faucets. He can climb into any chair unaided now, and screams and yells at me if I put him in a high chair. He enjoys his Big Boy chair, just like Big Brother, but unlike Isaac, Jacob insists on standing on his chair through most meals, protesting loudly and violently when I make him sit down. I'm thinking time-outs for him are not too far in the future, because he's starting to act like a little wolf-boy. And between him and Mister I-Don't-Like-That, Mama is going out of her stinking mind.

Lollipop guild tryouts

Isaac, our resident Lollipop Consumption Expert, demonstrates for Dada how to properly enjoy a free grape sucker:

Life's a beach and then you fry

In case you didn't get enough beachin' the first time around, this time we bring you it to you salt-water-style. Tuesday all of us O'Neals took Uncle Chrissy and Aunt Jean to Rehoboth Beach. We can all sit around and pretend that it was to play in the glorious weather and infinitely-long sandy beach full of rocks and seashells...


... or to sit around and enjoy the views of the sand, the surf, or the insides of one's eyelids...


... or to get a spy's-eye view of That O'Neal Family frolicking together...


... but it would all be a lie, because we know that, in secret, the real reason we went to the beach was to ensure our newest brewmaster Uncle Chrissy made his pilgrimage to his own personal beer mecca, Dogfish Head Brewery.


Oh, and I guess there was the sand and the ocean and the playing, too.



**note: read Jean's account of our trip here, including a not-to-be-missed comparison of a beer-enjoying Chris vs an ice-cream-enjoying Isaac.