Beautiful Day

I just got in from spending about four hours doing yard work, so I thought I'd take some time to update. 

When I last wrote, I was getting ready to leave Tristan and Ronan at my mother-in-law's while I went to a conference.  The conference went well - I presented a paper, got some good questions and feedback, and then headed home.  Turns out, Tristan did not have such a great time.  He caught a stomach bug and spent most of the day throwing up.  The bug also spread to my mother-in-law, Tom, and Tom's cousin, who had gone over to my mother-in-law's house the day after Tristan was there.  Thankfully, and I don't know how, Ronan and I both managed to avoid it. 

But aside from that, we've been doing well.  The weather here has been a bit of a roller coaster, but we've had some absolutely gorgeous days.  I'm determined to make our yard look better.  I've been raking up all sorts of fallen sticks, dead leaves, and other debris and, in the spirit of the three Rs (recycle, reduce, reuse), I've been using all of it to fill in the big holes the dogs have dug around the fence.  It doesn't look pretty at the moment, but it's doing the job.  My hope is to then put soil over it and hopefully get some grass to start growing.  I also took Ronan to the Garden Center around the corner in his little wagon and bought some plants.  Tom and I got most of them planted, but I still need to get the hostas I bought into the ground.  I just finished weeding out the area where I'm going to put them, which was a huge ordeal.  We had a very invasive vine growing there and it took forever to get it all out.  I hope this works out - I have a vision in my head of how it should look, but I am not a gardener by any stretch of the imagination.

Tristan is also beginning to speak a lot, though still not in a language we understand.  It's so fun to listen to him though, since he seems very intent about whatever the topic is.  I can't wait for him to start using words.  Ronan's at an age now where it's a lot of fun to listen to him - he comes up with all sorts of stuff, though I'm not sure where he gets it all from.  The other day he was telling me about how the earth moves, but it wasn't moving right then because his bed was holding still.  I've tried to explain to him about orbits and stuff when he kept grilling me about where the sun goes at night, but I think he only half gets it.  Plenty of time to learn though.

Both boys really love playing outside, which is good.  The only downside at this point is that Tristan still needs near constant supervision, since he's obsessed with climbing stairs.  But he also likes to chase Ronan while Ronan rides his bike, so that's a good distraction.

Finally, Ronan started soccer two weeks ago.  I've really enjoyed watching him play.  It's an interesting program - they don't seem to really focus much on teaching actual soccer skills (they mostly do warm-up exercises, let the kids kick the ball around, and then divide the kids up into teams and play a mini-game), but it's fun, good exercise, and lets Ronan play with other kids.  He seems to like it, once he gets started.  Last week, he refused to go on the field for the first half.  I finally convinced him to go and then he had fun, but man, can he be stubborn!  I have no idea where he gets that.  :)