Rain, rain, go away

Stories at the end, but the pictures are thus:
Anna's first day of school. She is loving it so far! Side note: She's really picking up with reading, and it's fun to watch the enjoyment she gets from being able to figure out what the words say. Her current best-book is "Red light Stop, Green Light Go" a great first reader.


Melanie on Anna's first day of school - enjoying her time with Mommy and showing how much she knows too. She loves matching!

Anna and Mel making mud pies the day after our first rain. Anna had gotten chunks of clay from around our sandbox, put them in a bucket, and lo and behold, perfect mud was ready the next day!


I wanted to get a picture of Melanie soaked from clearing drains tonight, but she and Anna were having a hay-day quibbling over whether or not they wanted the other touching them, so our final picture... :) Note Melanie's "Emma Smith" hair.


Melanie playing in the leaf piles before the downpours.

Josh enjoyed homemade chocolate cake on the eve after turning in his final summer paper. :) He is officially a doctoral candidate now! On to the dissertation!


It is amazing what Anna can sleep through!


So, stories. Melanie has gotten lots of practice singing "Rain, rain, go away" the last few days... It has rained almost non-stop for 3 days now. In our Northwood family housing community, with this comes the excitement of small lakes forming- some over 10 feet across, easily... (which, incidentally, if left unchecked, lead to flooding of apartments... Thankfully we don't have any trouble spots right next to us.) So, to allay cabin fever yesterday, we went on a walk in the rain, barefoot (but with umbrellas), throughout our neighborhood. We tromped through ankle deep (4-5") puddles, formed where the storm-drains were clogged with leaves. We also took pleasure in unclogging the drains, watching and listening to the water swirl down. The picture above is after hitting the 3 local drains tonight with Melanie - she wasn't too concerned about staying under the umbrella, and consequently got soaked. Oh, and the humidity does wonders for her hair!
It has been nice to enjoy the rain while it's still warm enough to!

Hand-quilting the girls' blanket is done!

The Democratic and Republican National Conventions were a wonderful source of time to sit and quilt, enabling me to finish the hand-quilting! :) A close-up of the design and the entire quilt:

Now I just need to machine quilt the purple diagonals and possibly the center green boxes where the diagonals cross. If you have any feedback, let me know, if you have a different idea.

And now, a picture gallery: Jonathan on his favorite perch. He climbs up and down proficiently. And he's enjoying working on standing up by himself finally! :) He can do a couple seconds now (next to a curb).
And our beautiful blondies, right after a bath, in jammies (you can't tell really well, but Anna developed this interest in layering jammies (no matter how hot it is), so they both have shirts on top of their jammies.

New doorknobs

At long last I bought a couple bedroom (locking) doorknobs for our room and the girl's room. I was pretty pleased with myself for figuring out how to take the old ones off and put the new ones on. I know, it's not rocket science, but I'd never done it before. :)
So, anyone have ideas on what could be causing the diarrhea in the youngest two and bad behavior in our eldest? I don't know so much about Anna's toilet time, since she's potty trained, but they all get their symptoms together, so I'm ready to have our water tested - any other ideas? Thankfully the diarrhea hasn't been as awful as it used to be, but we were doing so well, it's a pain to regress.
Sigh.