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A Gardening Party

Weekly Happenings: This week was pretty low key. We went grocery shopping, there were piano lessons, music play time, etc. We also got the windshield repaired from when a rock dropped out of the back of a trailer in front of us on the highway. Luckily they were able to repair it and didn’t need to replace it (it doesn’t cost us anything out-of-pocket for repairs, just replacement). Saturday was a big day because Paul finished off the garden plot and we went to our ward luau. The luau was a lot of fun. The food was great, the entertainment even better (a lip sync by the bishopric, hula dancing by the Relief Society and Young Women, and a stomping dance by the Young Men), and then we went outside for games, snow cones, and a dunk tank. Joseph was really upset when we had to leave. He would not be comforted for anything. Finally, Paul pulled out his phone and started playing “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” on his phone. It reads the book and shows the pictures from the book. That seemed to calm him down right away. Isn’t distraction great? 🙂

The Weekly Weather: We had a monstrous thunderstorm with quite a bit of rain (though no hail or tornadoes as was predicted…it is very rare for a tornado to actually happen here) on Monday night. The rest of the week was gorgeous…warmish, breezy, and beautiful. 🙂

What Paul’s Been Up To: Work is still great for Paul. Mostly I want to talk about all the hard work he did on Saturday. For a couple of weeks now, he’s been working to clear a space to plant our tomatoes. It’s been difficult since it seems like we have just a couple of inches of topsoil and then a bunch of clay. So once he got the grass up, he mixed in a lot of dirt, fertilizer, and compost (we have our own compost) with the clay to get a better quality soil to plant the tomatoes in. Then he made a border to keep the grass from creeping back in, laid down cardboard and newspaper as a weed barrier, planted the tomatoes, and then spread cedar chips down to cover it all. It looks so great!!

What Sarah’s Been Up To: I’ve mostly been just plugging away at my piano teaching and keeping Joseph well entertained. Today was my first practice as choir director, and I think it went pretty well. We have a really awesome choir. 🙂

What Joseph’s Been Up To: Joseph has figured out how to lock our doors that have the doorknob lock (he uses his play keys to turn the slot) from the outside, so I find random rooms in the house locked with nobody inside. Now I triple check the house at night to make sure that doors that shouldn’t be locked, aren’t, and that doors that should be locked, are (since he’s figured out how to unlock some of our doors). He also plays a game that he calls, “Where’d it go?” He rolls a ball away, asks me where it went (“Where’d it go?!”), and then proceeds to find it for me. He also will hide his face and then ask me, “Where’s Joseph?”. Another fun thing was seeing him discover that corn on the cob is hidden until the husk is removed. He thought it was pretty cool to watch me shuck some the other day. He’s also been practicing giving me dark, mean looks and then big smiles when I laugh at the mean look on his face. Oh, and he has been taking his lovey monkey (the mini blanket with a monkey head) into his confidence: telling it secrets, tattling to it when I do something he doesn’t like. He has become rather possessive of his parents as of late. While at church today, the baby that was in the pew behind us tapped on Paul’s back and Joseph said, “No touch! No touch my daddy!” We assured him that it was okay, while trying not to laugh. Finally, he has discovered peel bugs…only he calls them “roller pollies”.

This Week in Pictures:

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Playing with the little house that he got for Christmas.
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He seriously will still play with it for extended periods of times.
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Peek-a-boo!
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Caught in the act…locking the bathroom door.
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Beginnings of the garden plot.
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Getting all the soil smoothed out.
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Laying down the cardboard.
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Then the newspaper…
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The finished product.
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Playing in the sandbox.
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Pool time after sandbox time…for more than one reason. 🙂
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He loves the pool. 🙂IMG_20140517_182428 [13]

Chowing down at the luau.

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He got bored after a little while…
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Things got much better once we went outside.
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He loved running around the field, throwing water balloons, and playing with the bubble machine.
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Pretending he is Superman.
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I seriously love this shirt.
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Trying to hula hoop.
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Trying to hit the target on the dunk tank…he couldn’t quite get it, much to Brother Katherman’s relief.
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Chilling out this morning, playing video games. 😉