A little artist

Here's a video of Fiona making a picture of herself at her easel. It was great watching her make purposeful marks with the paintbrush and to hear that she had a picture in her mind and was working at getting it down on the paper.

The end result of her painting was a totally blue piece of paper!

Dan and I started removing wallpaper from Fiona's room this past Friday, it's exciting to finally be making changes to the house, but it's exhausting to think of all the improvements yet to make. Fiona picked out 'French Pink' for her wall. It should look nice when it's all done.

When your toddler is more mature than you...

It's hard to admit when your two and half year old behaves slightly more like a grown up than you do. It started several months ago (before we even moved) when Fiona told me to stop picking my nose (come on, you know you do it too). Fiona has honestly never picked her nose and always politely asks for a tissue and daintily dabs at her nose when she thinks she has a "booga."

Then shortly after I got my contacts I was rubbing at my eye and Fiona told me not to put my finger in my eyes. Well, fine then.

Then, just a few days ago I thought I had lost her favorite turtle (Turt) at the grocery store and I felt horrible. I went into my room and started crying-it's also partially because I'm still stressed about moving and unpacking and therefore I am only slightly more emotional than usual. Turt is very important to Fi and she takes him everywhere. Fi came into my room and said, "it's OK mom, the hard shelled turtle can be my new turtle." The hard shelled turtle is a turtle puppet we found in the attic when we were moving. How can she have more common sense than I do and also be more level-headed. Although maybe it's not that hard to be more level-headed than I am, I hate to admit. She definitely takes way more after Dan in that respect than after me.. FORTUNATELY!!!!

We've been enjoying the warmer weather here so much! Today we took a walk to a small pond near our house. We packed a very small picnic for ourselves and brought along Mr. Bunglie and some of his friends and a picnic for them. I'm working on taking photos for a new Bunglie book called "Mr. Bunglie's ABC's" and 'p' is for picnic. In each picture readers are supposed to find other objects that begin with the same letter. For instance with the letter 'p' there is the pond in the background, pizza, plates, something pink and purple, a pear, a plum, a peach, pencil, paper, paints, and Puck the dog. The picture is still on my camera but here is the picture for the letter 'b'.



The text to go with this picture is "B is for bed, sweet dreams and good night." (it will be a rhyming book)
Find these other objects that begin with 'b'-- something blue, something brown, something black, a bear, ball, bottle, bat, bird, book, blanket, balloon, bow, bear. Sorry the picture is kind of small, it will be much much larger in the printed version of the book.

So far I've written all the text and taken pictures for 'b,' 'c,' 'p,' 's,' and 'x.' So it's coming along.

I did just finish two new Mr. Bunglie books this past week, Mr. Bunglie Down on the Farm and Mr. Bunglie's Talent Show. I really like the farm one so maybe I'll try posting it on here in book form at some point.

Animal friends at the "Duck House"

Yesterday, Fiona and I were having a picnic on the dock while Dan tried to figure out how to get the in ground sprinkler system to start working again. While we were watching the ducks swim by we noticed something swimming towards us that was too low in the water to be a duck. We thought it was a turtle at first just paddling around and just as it was coming into sight it dove under water and we could see that it was largish. I thought it might be an otter and Fiona thought it was a cat!

We watched the water for a while and saw the animal come up behind our neighbor's house so we went running over there and discovered that it was a beaver. It was so incredible. I've never seen a wild beaver before.


You can just see the beaver's head as it swims


Beaver chewing on log

Today we saw a wild turkey wandering around by one of the houses. For some reason it looked so out of place. They are super strange looking birds and it's hard to imagine why someone would have looked at one and thought it might be tasty. They have those weird long hairy patches on their chests that look like pony tails and then of course all the extra red bumpy skin on their heads and chests (the wattle). Any how it was still pretty cool to see one. The funniest was when there was one at the library where I work. In the middle of a really suburban place. This turkey was just walking around and then ran across a 5 lane street. Which of course solicited all sorts of 'why did the turkey cross the road' jokes.