Last week after spending altogether too much time in the car I took the girls out to a field near my parents house that I’d had my eye on for a long time. Big patch of weeds in several directions, a little brick building and green grass. Josie was in a good mood, Celia not so much. But we all got some good running in.

To get these shots I have to run up ahead of the two of them far enough that I can stop, turn around kneel down and focus before they run past me again. Otherwise I end up with a lot of shots of the back of their head.

One of my favorite full body shots of Josie now. Right up behind the wall on the hill we saw two bunnies eating the grass! They stayed around long enough for Celia to find them!

I put the camera on the timer and actually got a picture of the three of us! I ran and stood at the wall and somehow this enticed them to do the same and actually look at the camera.

I love the single splash of color. These pictures I also learned how to bring back the sky a little, meaning when I take the picture to make Josie’s skin look right, the sky looks just white because it’s so bright. I learned how to use lightroom to bring it back to a bit of blue and some clouds. But it really was a cloudy day.

This was Josie’s idea for a pose, I don’t think she believed I’d even take the picture. We do a lot of play with sticks and dirt lately.

When it was time to go Celia just took off and ran in the opposite direction and so I had to bring her screaming back across the field. The only highlight for her was finding this ball and watching the lacrosse players setting up for practice. But she was not happy when I made her give it back.

This year we returned again to Honey Pot Hill Orchard for hay rides, apple and pear picking, goat feeding, and apple cider donut eating. It was a hot day but we were out pretty early thankfully. With Josie and Celia getting bigger now the actual apple picking portion of the event is over very quickly and right at the end. We liked the hay ride and remembered how I only hoped the previous year the bumpy ride would have sent me into labor! Both girls loved the animals and enjoyed some lunch, but oddly were not interested really in the cider donuts. More for us grown ups!  Celia walked around the orchard mostly just eating an apple, dropping the apple, us grabbing the apple to clean it and her taking it back again for more eating.

We decided against sending Josie to preschool at age 3 for a number of reasons, we thought she’d be happier at home, we can use that money for other things since I’m home already and she’s clearly as very sociable little girl already. She will be going this next fall to prepare for school the following year. But for this year I’ve been working with a neighbor and friend Saralynn doing a homeschool preschool once a week with our kids. Her kids are both just a bit older than both of mine, with her eldest being a girl too. We’ve been meeting once a week all year studying a big range of topics, mostly derived from what interests us and what the girls ask for. We’ve studied different animals, plants, maps, terrain, government, currency, foods and use those topics to pick books to read and arts and crafts projects to make. We have made copious use of our libraries and their lending system. Some topics are a hit, others not so much.

We go on field trips when we can, to the aquarium and science museum as well as just the great outdoors. It does seem a lot easier to handle 4 kids with 2 parents instead of just 1 parent on 2 kids. We divide and conquer well! We stick in math and letter lessons wherever we can and the girls seem to be making great progress. They can identify most if not all of their upper and lower case letters as well as write most of them. Addition and subtraction has been our latest work and Josie is starting to recognize how to put letters together into words in books as we read.

Generally Celia wants to be involved in all the art projects and activities whereas Blake is often content to have all the toys to himself. Here’s a few pics from the school year, pardon the low quality ipod ones.

We got a big box from amazon, with diapers in it. Who needs fancy toys? this gave hours of fun.

Oh and we rearranged the living room because it’s been over three years without anything moving. Might have had a little to do with me wanting to have better light where the girls play for taking pictures too.

We’ve had an incredibly warm March and winter here in Boston this year. A few weeks ago we got fantastic weather and so I invited friends to a nearby park to play and let me take their picture. We brought some balloons because I wanted to have some fun photos with them, which didn’t quite work out according to plan. We lost half of them 30 minutes or so into playtime as they came untied from the weight they were attached to, which was a BIG TRAGEDY for the three year olds. It was this set of photographs that made me convinced something was wrong with my camera too, as I was focusing behind adults sitting still and not getting the results I was careful to make sure it was set up to do. So the photos are a bit soft sadly, but I like a bunch of them still and enjoyed playing with the light and shadows!

Josie has a new sentence structure now, which is “When I have kids…”. Apparently she doesn’t agree with all of my parenting choices. Just recently she declared:

• Her kids will be allowed to eat as many cookies as they want
• Her kids will be allowed to have as many (fake) tattoos as they want

Last year for his birthday (in Feb) I got Jordi red sox tickets, for September. Just how the schedule worked out. We all went and so Josie and Celia saw their first red sox game in Fenway Park! The game was LONG and the girls carried on through it, eating, drinking, people watching, and cringing at the drunk guys behind us yelling. How is it that the people behind us are always drunk yelling guys? Must be a lot of them at Fenway. Josie got a new hat. Our team lost, painfully. But at the end we snuck down to the good seats and got an up close view of them losing. It’s still so awesome how the park is so small and close up, even if we are in the cheaper seats! I don’t think we’ll bring the girls again for a while as it was just too long for them but the weather cooperated and we had fun.

over the shopping cart color at the grocery store. Celia wanted pink, Josie wanted red. It was Josie’s turn so we went with red, but Celia literally stood up in the pink one and tried to cross over to the other one while they were next to each other!

Celia is currently packing her sister into a shipping box that just arrived and saying ‘yummy yummy yummy’…

And we’re all still sick. Jordi even took a half day at work today since we’re feeling so crummy.