The winding down of summer vacation...

Well, the last week or so of summer vacation was slightly crazy with the move to Etna, moving in with my parents, Brian starting school, all of us going back down to Winters to pack more boxes for another load and then Joshua starting school & Nathaniel turning 2.

One thing Joshua looks forward to on visits to Grandma and Grandpa's house is to play with our old Lincoln Logs...they aren't a complete set anymore after roughly 30 years and 4 girls playing with them, but he had fun...he created a house for his mini Star Wars guys...I think it was actually supposed to be Mace Windu's house.

The day before school started, I wanted to get Nathaniel's plaster hand print (Thank You Aunt Carrie) painted and Joshua's been asking and asking to paint ceramics. So we got set up at the table for this. Joshua painted a little Mexican wedding vase for Great-Grandma Darlene's birthday. I painted the hand and the frame of a bulletin board...Nathaniel painted a teddy bear bank. This was his first time getting to paint and boy, did he have fun! He started with brown, but liked my dark green and ended up with what we fondly refer to as the "Camo Bear" (camo as in short for camouflage, not to be confused with the word CAMEL). He also managed to paint himself quite nicely.

However, I think my favorite activity was Nathaniel's decision to eat raisin bran one afternoon. I was fixing dinner or washing dishes or something and he grabbed something out of the drawer (he loves Grandma's cabinets and drawers). I didn't think anything of it until Joshua called in from the living room that he thought Nathaniel had something he shouldn't have. I thought he'd just grabbed a granola bar or something and said I'd be in there in a minute. The next thing I know, Joshua's calling me and saying that I'd better get in there fast. Well, Nathaniel has decided he likes raisins. And the easiest way to get the raisins away from all those icky bran flakes is to just dump the bag out on the floor and pick them out. Luckily, the box was almost empty. After I took a couple of pictures, I had the boys pick up what they could while I went and got the vacuum cleaner. Just as I walked in with the vacuum, Nathaniel dumped the bag out a second time. Well, at least he didn't decide to get his cup of milk and dump it out too!