Sixteen Things

16 things that have made me happy in the last three days:
1. Ray LaMontange's new single "You Are the Best Thing"
2. Aaron Espe's song "Faith and Doubt" about Jesus and Peter walking on the water, off his new album Songs from a Small Town
3. My brother Jonathan's new wire metal bowl creations
4. The children's section of the downtown public library
5. The movie Shawshank Redemption
6.The birdcut tulipwood sideboard and glass daisy cabinet knobs in the new Anthropologie catalog
7. Digging up 42 dandelions out of my very green, fairly "clean" lawn
8. Most of the nausea fading away from this pregnancy
9. Feeling energetic enough to not take naps with Atticus and Dietrich (hence I get alone time again!!! for the first time in months (-:)
10. The Cubs making it to the playoffs
11. Our new storm windows making the original exterior wood frames "magically" appear on our house
12. Teaching jr. high/ sr. high Sunday school for the first time in years and years
13. Getting one of the 16 illustrations for my current project to turn out how I see it in my head
14. My sister calling me as she goes to and from and in between classes in college (she returned to school this fall -- and is actually going to class and doing her homework and enjoying it)
15. My boys faces when they see me after waking up from naps
16. Brad walking up the back sidewalk home from work

Go Cubs!

Dietrich began crawling in earnest this weekend. He gets wherever he wants and pulls everything off shelves and opens cabinets and eats dog food and is very very cute as a naked cub.

"Underwear" model

Hike with Grandma & Grandpa

Sunday afternoon we met Nancy and Tom down at the state park in Albert Lea. It was a glorious day for hiking. The boys were both in great moods and, despite leaving my house in utter disarray and being gone since 8-something a.m., I was relaxed and enjoyed myself too. The only bad part of the visit was Nancy stepping in something truly truly awful -- akin to dog diarrhea -- and maybe like a pint of it, with sandals on, with nothing but one napkin and half a water bottle to clean it up. When we headed home that night, we passed a field that had recently been cow-manured. Atticus say, "P-U! Grandma's yucky shoes!"

Grandpa catches a beautiful (celadon, saffron and gold)
grasshopper for Atticus to (try to) hold

Milk-break for Dietrich

Licorice-break for Atticus

(Atticus isn't pouting -- he's making what he thinks is a funny face)

Artistic Partnership

Here is a drawing Brad made at the breakfast table to show the lighting plan for a city building project from work. All the added "doors", "windows", "airplanes", "sharks", etc. are the carefully thought-through penwork of Atticus. I love this thing. Atticus magnet-ed it to the refrigerator when he first worked on it, but he's been taking it down and elaborating on it at various times today -- getting it just right.

Calvin Makes it to Four!! Good Job, Leah & Eric!

Last Saturday the Millers celebrated Calvin's 4th birthday at an apple orchard outside the cities. Here Brad is showing a nicely fuzzy caterpillar to Atticus and Calvin. I must say that when Brad does this sort of thing it makes my heart hurt with love for him.

Feeding oats to some horses. I especially liked that Brad picked oats off the ground around the pay-by-the-quarter oats-dispenser instead of actually paying. That's awesome. (I also love that he's cheap at the right times and extravagant at the right times (-:)

Brad and Isaac Joslin supervising

My serious boy...

gives me a smile

Madeleine Joslin with her great smile enjoying the horses -- Laura, her mom, getting horse-smuzzled

The big ole pile of straw...

Look at all these boys -- the four in the front are with the birthday party

Isaac Miller taking it on -- younger than every other boy on the mountain, as always, undaunted and unstoppable

I know this is too many pictures of straw, but I love this daddy-son striding moment

Dietrich wishes he could run with the big dogs...one day, my son, one day soon...

Picking apples -- ours magically turned into an apple crisp...

Isaac Joslin (I swear there were a number of other families there and yet all my photos are of us or the Joslins...anyway) holding his special apple: a perfect, shiny apple found on a completely, really completely, dead tree.

Riding the John Deeres

Leah using her super-unbelievable strength to pull three toddlers in a red wagon -- Yes, it's true and you've seen it here.