Weekend bits

This weekend's sunny and mild temperatures meant lots of outside time. Yesterday the highlight was an engagement party at a beautiful park for D's teacher. Mizz amused himself with a golf club set, the swings, and doing calculus from the park benches. D, on the other hand, occupied himself with meeting and greeting every dog in the park. The engaged couple had brought Boomer, a bassett hound, with them. Boomer was leashed to the table and could not escape from D's "DOGGIE!" and follow up grunts (which I think is his current version of barking). He couldn't get enough petting and seemed to finally really get the concept of gentle. The big score was an Australian Shephard who was extremely friendly/docile and pretty much let D do whatever to her. It was really cute to watch D chase her. The whole episode kinda made me want a dog. Until I remembered the fact that it rains here 600 days a year. And that we don't have a yard. And I never have enough time as it is. So no dog for now, but we will have to make lots of visits to our friends that do have them.

Today we mainly laid low around the neighborhood. I continue to be amazed at how our tiny front yard can be a source of endless amusement to our kiddos. Even Little D's short attention span is captivated. This means I get to prop my legs up and read in the sun, perhaps, one of my greatest pleasures. The only catch is that I have to occasionally fish a rock out of D's mouth or reassure Mizz that the bees are more scared of him than he is of them. Although my credibility on this issue is somewhat mitigated by the fact that I managed to bee sting myself for the second time in two months today. Last month, I stepped on a bee and felt a stinger (it has barbs, all the better to damage your skin!) for the first time in many, many years. Today, I took D down a spiral slide and managed to mangle a bee and myself in the process. Mizz was understandably upset, not mind you, about the noxious venom coursing through my veins, but because we had to leave the park to get some ice. He recovered though when he realized that he could try to take pictures of my boo boo.

I swore I would go to bed early tonight

Instead here I am.

We went to the zoo, zoo, zoo! (and some other stuff too)

And you can come too, too, too! This weekend we took advantage of the perfect weather and hightailed it up to the zoo early Sunday morning. D loved it! He is big enough to some walking now and thought all the paths, fences, and, well everything, were awesome. And he LOVED the animals! He has developed a simple taxonomy of animals--everything is either a DOGGIE! or a CAHT (sic)! So according to his scheme a zebra was a dog, an otter a cat, a tiger was a cat (YES!), monkeys and sea lions were cats. We didn't get close enough to the crocodile for him to offer up his opinion, I am rather curious what he would have said. Mizz actually paid more attention than usual to the critters and was especially curious about the sea lions and crocodiles. He also walked up to a woman eating a sno cone and asked her what it was and then why he didn't have one also. She cracked up.

In fact when Dave and I are not ready to lock him in his room for eternity, Dave and I are spending a lot time cracking up at recent Mizz antics. It seems that overnight he has developed some seriously refined negotiation and prevarication tactics. In other words, his bald face lies are getting bigger and his arguments are getting more complex and, sigh, drawn out. It cracks me up that he continues to blame D for things that D clearly couldn't have done, like, ahem pissing in a trash can. I can only imagine my life in a year or two when I will have to start seriously ferreting out who did what.