Busy Summer Days

I was talking to a friend of mine online the other day and I mentioned we've been really busy lately. She laughed at me. You see, she works full time and has to be clever all day, then she goes home to her toddler and nurses her and plays with her. During the week she goes to preschool performances. She spends every minute she can with her baby, but she also has to go to work all day. She is a busy Mama.
My busy days are not quite the same... but are still busy. My friend says it's "the best kind of busy" and think she's very right.

Baby Girl and I wake up every day and go outside right away. Some days I can get Rosie to eat breakfast first, but other days I feed it to her on the porch. We walk out to the goat pen and hang out with the goats.

Rosie walks around and says hello to all the goats. We check and make sure everyone is healthy, make sure they have food and walk and we bottle feed one of the babies.

Rosie stays very busy climbing on the logs and rocks with the baby goats.




When Baby Girl doesn't want to go for a walk outside, she wants to be pushed in her stroller. She loves her stroller. She can climb up in it all by her self, and then she asks to be pushed around the house or out side. Some times we just go around in circles and  sometimes we even chase William around the kitchen with the stroller. Baby Girl always loves that and laughs and laughs.

We take walks at sunset and admire the wonderful sunlight, walk down to the mail box and chase each other up the hill.

Sometimes we chase the cats too.

At dusk I like to go out and watch the fireflies dance. They look like fairies sparkling up from the lawn. Actually I just call them fairies when I show them to Baby Girl.

In my ideal world I would never live in a place that didn't have fireflies. They are so magical.

Despite how it sounds we do spend some of our day in the house.  Especially if it gets really hot outside. Rosie doesn't like to be hot.  We come inside and count the rocks in her rock collection, read books, stack blocks and of course have dance time.

Rosie is so creative and sometimes I just like to sit and watch her imagination work.

Of course there are normal life things that have to be done, like laundry and cooking dinner. Sometimes I even manage to clean the house a little.

By the end of the day we are all exhausted. We watch some Doctor Who (Rosie loves SciFi) and Shawn the Sheep (Rosie calls them goats) to wind down and then we all fall into bed.

We do have to convince Rosie that she is indeed tired. She fights it so hard and we usually end up running circles in the house and playing chase in the evenings. I am definitely more tired than she is.

So at the end of the day I can't always tell you what we've done or how productive we've been. But we are busy. I agree with my friend Diana. It's the best kind of busy and I'm so thankful for it. I wouldn't give it up for anything.

It is the best kind of Busy.

Ice Cream, Vines, Goats and Sunset: It must be Summer 142/365

 I only like to eat ice cream if I'm hot. Sitting on the porch at dusk, watching the plants grow and the sun set is the perfect time for an ice cream treat.

 Speaking of plants growing. I'm pretty excited about this vine we have growing in my rabbit shaped vine guide thingy. I swear  you can see it growing. It grows about 6 or 7 inches every day. Soon I'm going to have a lovely rabbit shaped vine with pretty purple flowers.

 Baby Girl likes to watch the vines grow too. This is my cat shaped vine guide thingy.  These seedlings popped up over night.

 Baby Girl's favorite part of the day is also dusk when she gets to walk out with the goats to the back pastures and watch them eat. She's guarding their water bucket here and making sure they are all drinking plenty of water.

 William calls this time of day "The Golden Hour" I really do love it. The more I'm here the more I fall in love with living in this area.

The beauty of the nature all around us is so peaceful and perfect.

tea for fussy babies and fatties 73/365

Today was a weird funky day. Baby didn't feel quite right and was fussy all morning. She's such a happy baby all the time so when she's not happy it really worries me. I held her and tried to comfort her as much as she would let me. Finally I gave her some chamomile tea and read her some books till she calmed down enough to nurse herself to sleep. After her nap she was our happy baby girl again.
She played and laughed and ate lots of dinner and then had a nice long bath. I'm glad she's feeling better.

And speaking of tea, I have the box of tea that a friend in China gave me...

From what I can tell from translating the box, it's lotus root tea. Apparently it's good for losing weight. With my weird food allergies and because I'm nursing I don't like to try things without researching them first, especially weight loss stuff.  So I looked online and tried to figure out if this was ok for breastfeeding moms.

My favorite breastfeeding site, kellymom.com, doesn't have much on Chinese herbs (although it does have a lot of info on other herbs that should be avoided) so I was trying to translate Chinese sites and figure it out. I'm so out of practice is sad.

I did find this site www.zixiutangusa.com and thought the Cheng-lish description of lotus root was very funny.
Here it is EXACTLY as it's written on the site.

 [Tageted Group] Pure fatness .postpartum fatness,induding fatties unable to reduce and control their weight with diet controe or sports
.
[Not suitable for ]pregnant and breast-feeding women ,adolescant,people with serious disease and allergic to this pruduct.

 So there you go. This tea is good for fatties!

our beautiful spring sunset

the sun set over the pond

22/365

Just some pictures tonight:

Bonita Rose likes to drink Miso Soup from her own coffee cup

The sunset was amazing tonight after raining all day long:

Bonnie Rose feeds her self dinner for the first time!

She's eating re-fried black beans.

She also enjoyed feeding every one else.