these last few days

Well, here I am, playing catch up again.  But it's worth it, to document the little moments of the days that add up to the weeks that morph into years and before I know it Luke will leave for college so I better at least include this picture, right?

My baby boy almost never naps.  But when he does it's angelic.  It helps that his hair is white, and glows halo-like in the afternoon sun.  This day I laid down beside him to listen to a podcast and he was out within minutes.

Isaac is the newest fan of these books from the Childhood of Famous Americans series.  I adored these books as a child and many of the ones one our shelf are actually third generation - books first read by my father in the late 1950s.  Dad has been a faithful book-sherpa, ferrying books across the Pacific and filling our home with great reading material, much of it with oodles of history in the pages and on the pages.

Anna and Luke.... Luke is truly our caboose, often lagging behind the crowd as he attempts to cover the same amount of ground that his siblings do, and finding he just can't (or doesn't care to) keep up.  With Anna in town this is a common sight, me turning around to make sure Luke is still on his way, and finding Anna as his caboose-side-kick ;)

Not sure what to say about this one, hoping it speaks for itself!

Sunday afternoon, both these girls sporting gray tees and denim.  [Side note that it's so nice to have someone else to help Julianna with her hair!  Also I should document that after years of Julianna insisting that her hair stay long and questioning every centimeter that hit the floor during a simple trim she randomly said, "Maybe I'll cut my hair short" one day last week.  I couldn't believe it!  No commitment yet and she hasn't mentioned it again, but times are a-changing if this girl is even considering short hair!]

Home school math on the iPad.  Bonus that he gets to lay with his feet on the back of the couch.  As a first grader Isaac spends about an hour per day in "formal schooling' - and I include this chunk of time he spent on the couch in the formal category :)

This photo could be captioned "without Anna this never would have happened".  Super busy morning, running behind on dinner, should be packing for a trip and the kids want to make ice fruit pops with four different kinds of fruit.

And my favorite picture in this whole post.... my boy John Paul wrote his first word.  HELICOPTER.   It's not the first time he's asked me how to spell a word, but it is the first time that the result was clearly legible.  I called these letters his direction while I flipped quesadillas on the griddle, and when I turned around to see what he had done I couldn't believe my eyes!  Usually the letters are a jumble, and not in a straight line.  [He even told me that he wrote the C wrong and it looked like a D.]

I doubt helicopter pilot is a potential career but I have no doubt he could (and would!) dismantle a helicopter, bolt by bolt.  Give him a few more years and he might even figure out how to put one together :)  [Maybe I should apprentice him to his Uncle Andrew?!?]