March 23-30

One beautiful day last week, we decided to go to the playground.  It was, predictably, swarming with children (because who wants to be cooped up with their kids at 5:15 on a Friday that also happens to be the most spectacular day we've had since last fall?).  The last time Olivia went to the playground, she still required help climbing up things and coaxing to come down.  Not so anymore.  She was a whirlwind.  Her feet hit the ground running and she spent an hour racing from one slide to the next, climbing the plastic rock pile, and riding the dinosaur individual see-saw things.  She even tried hanging from the monkey bars for about a second and a half before deciding they weren't for her.  Bryan hung back a good six to ten feet (a distance that makes us all so proud, especially given that some parents were right up in the faces of their four-year-olds, narrating every move), just walking around and keeping Olivia in sight, and Gretchen and I sat off to the side and picked up all the grass and dirt that had the temerity to stick out from under our blanket.  Gretchen tried to sample the grass and dirt as well, but her mother took mean pills that morning and wouldn't let her eat the local flora.

Do all children sleep folded in half, or is it just mine?  Olivia slept flopped in half with her head next to her feet all the time.  I remember trying to get pictures, but being unsuccessful due to the darkness of her room.  Gretchen does not prefer this sleeping position nearly as much, but sometimes when she is sitting up and looking for her pacifier, she will just collapse forward (instead of laying back down) when said pacifier is reinserted.  It looks incredibly uncomfortable, but both girls seem to sleep fine...  (Side note: Olivia does not sleep like this anymore.  It must only be comfortable when your legs are short enough that your feet are pressed up against your cheeks.)

Gretchen has learned that the best way to convince me that she's really ready to get up is to hand me her pacifier.  What better proof than to voluntarily relinquish the plug?  Sometimes she'll just spit her pacifier into her crib as I get closer, but most of the time she takes it out of her mouth and holds it up to me when I reach down to pick her up.  If she's in an especially good mood, she'll wave it at me as I come through the doorway.

And speaking of waving, Gretchen does.  I guess we don't do a lot of waving in our house, because I hadn't noticed her doing it, but one of the ladies at church has been waving at her during the weekday services, and Gretchen waves back.  She has a very similar motion that we think is her version of crossing herself.  Waving is horizontal, crossing is more vertical.  :)

My choir is finally up and running!  I've been drafted (for lack of a better word) into the position of choir director at church.  Never mind that I have two small children or that we miss one Sunday a month, minimum (to visit my family).  They know I'm musically competent, they know I care enough to like having a choir, and they appear to only even attempt to organize one on the days that I'm at church.  So I finally took it upon myself to start making things better.  I reorganized the books so they're more intuitive, I found music that had printed notes instead of hand-scribbled ones, and I made sure all the books were fully equipped with English, Greek, and phonetics.  After several weeks of false starts (because we didn't have enough people, because the organist was late, because the sky wasn't quite the right shade of blue that day...), I finally got people to come stand in the front with me and tossed them in.  Baptism by fire, that's my method!  "Here are the new books, sing in English instead of Greek, and oh, by the way, it's Lent, so half your music is wrong anyway."  We struggled through the service and then had a rehearsal on Wednesday to iron some things out.  Now that I've got the choir going, I plan to be there one more Sunday and then abandon them for four weeks in a row...

Pictures:
Gretchen wore shoes for the first time.  She was NOT impressed:

Got some good ones of the girls: