Springy Trees

Wow! Thanks for all the sympathy and kind words about the house! Our search continues. Last Sunday we took a little family drive (after a spur-of-the-moment lunch outing at Dog N Suds, the local hotdog drive-in/rootbeer stand) out to a house in a nearby town. It looked interesting in the pictures and was nearly ten acres. Intriguing, right? We got there and were blown away. In both a literal and a very bad figurative way. The nine acres was okay, but it was mostly field and was surrounded by bigger fields. And it was a really windy day. It was so windy I almost couldn't get Greta out of the car because the wind kept closing the door on me! And then there was the house, which was really something. had at least one gaping hole in the roof, but the best part was the tree that was branching out of the windows--FROM THE INSIDE!!  If it hadn't been such a long, whiney drive to get there (evidently church, followed by lunch in the car, followed by a thirty minute drive to the middle of nowhere is not an ideal day for a three year old and a four year old) it would have been really, really funny. I'm kind of excited to see what kind of other miserable places we find during this search!

Later that night on Sunday Martin and I went to a grownups-only dinner with my sister and her husband. I wish I would have gotten a picture of the four of us. It was a really fun night! Good Indian food, free henna, and since we slipped out early from the dinner due to an early bedtime but then it turned out the kids were all having a baseball game up at Ooma and Oompa's (or something like that) we all went out for a cup of coffee as well. It was a really nice evening!

For Easter I knitted up some little eggs for the girls. I ended up making five or six of them, and then I made a nest out of mohair. (I got the eggs and nest patterns from the blog Small Things, thanks to my sister who got me reading that.) The nest turned out super cute, but I didn't get it done as quickly as I would've liked, and since I didn't have it done by Easter morning and I couldn't finish two in one day (that day being Easter Sunday) I gave the nest and a few of the eggs to my niece Bella for her birthday (which was what I had intended, except I was going to make a second one for her. But in the end, it doesn't really matter at all and this long rambling paragraph really has no point up to now.) So anyway. I eventually did make a second nest and instead of using the original egg pattern (because those eggs turned out pretty large...) I made up a straight needle pattern for smaller ones and they turned out alright. Then I found the pattern on Clare's blog for the little chicks, and I made one in this funny unspun natural colored wool I had and then I added wings to make it more birdish. And this is the completed project all together, as it sits on our dining room table now:

I really love the mohair nest. On Holy Saturday we cut a branch from one of our oak trees which barely even had buds on it and the girls covered it in little playdoh buds. It turned out cuter than it sounds. We stuck the branch in an empty wine bottle and have been using it as a table centerpiece with some springtime animals underneath (except Greta likes to make all the animals take naps, so she lies them down on their sides... so our cute little springy table arrangement just looks like a pile of knocked over toys every day.) Now that we have this cute nest and bird, we moved the tree to the dining room table and Anja has put the bird up in the branches of the tree and it is really cute.

And here's a little picture of Greta from a few mornings ago when she decided to draw on her face with blueberries while I wasn't looking. She was pretty pleased with herself.

Geeminy, can it really be true that I am only seven weeks away from my estimated due date for this baby?! That seems almost impossible. The other day while I was feeling sorry for myself being so big and preggo and tired, I thought "how did I do this when I had baby Anja to take care of too?" I must have been so tired! I really don't remember much of Greta's pregnancy at all (too tired to form memories, I guess) but it must have been really hard. However, everyone we met who said they'd had children about that close together in age said it was hard at the beginning but in the end, the best thing ever and boy were they RIGHT! I can't imagine a bigger space between my girls. I love, love, love that they are so close together in age. Everything is so easy! They can share clothes, they can play the same games, they can both buckle themselves into their carseats.... my life these days is a cinch! If I were smart I would be making and freezing meals, or making cloth diaper covers, or doing something else productive that would help me out in that time coming soon when my life won't be nearly so cinchy.

I'm also really excited to have a June baby! I've never had a warm weather baby before, and I'm looking forward to it. I'm also really looking forward to not being pregnant anymore, haha.