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.

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

Aunt Mae, the girl in the mirror, tacos and marshmallows 41/365

Sundays are usually restful days. Baby likes Sundays because every one gets to play with her instead of go to work. Yesterday Aunt Mae needed some help with her internet so we went over and played with her while my mom worked her magic in the computer. Baby thinks Aunt Mae is a lot of fun and always gives her lots of smiles and laughs.

She even lets Aunt Mae tickle her.


Another thing Baby Girl likes to do is kiss the baby in the mirror. I've been trying to get a picture of it for weeks and yesterday I finally did. Baby Girl thinks the baby in the mirror is very cute. I tend to agree with her...

and here she is giving the mirror baby kisses.

Then she was trying to see behind the mirror. I guess she's looking for the other little girl.

After our visit with Aunt Mae we drove around and my mom showed me the old farms around us. It was such a beautiful day. We enjoyed the sunshine and even drove around with the windows down.

For dinner we had one of my favorite meals of all time. Tacos! I love Taco night. I always have. When we lived in China we used to make tacos for our Chinese friends. It was alot more work then though because we had to make our own tortillas.

Not only can we buy corn tortillas now but we discovered that we love to make the tacos with spicy Tennessee Pride sausage in stead of seasoned beef.

Oh how I love taco night.

Baby likes taco night too!

And for dessert pink marshmallows. For Valentine's day I bought William a coffee mug that I can write love notes on with chalk and heart shaped marshmallows. He seemed to enjoy both of them. Who says boys down like heart shaped things? Especially when you can eat them.

And what better way to end a Sunday than with a lovely cup of hot chocolate.

Sunny Days 19/365

 I know I just wrote about how wonderful the snow was a couple of days ago, but today was blue skies and almost 60(F) degrees! (15C)

The weather in Middle Tennessee is so much fun. The snow is beautiful but melts off before it has time to get gray and disgusting and then it's sunny and warm!
So today we all spent the day out side. William and my dad worked out in the field all day and took advantage of great weather for pouring cement and doing fences.

While me, Baby and my mom (Nana) spent time in the yard with the animals.

With all the cold weather the goats and dogs were feeling a little neglected. Usually my mom goes out and sits with them and pets them and makes sure they all feel loved.  They were all so happy to have her sitting in their midst.

When Baby and I met her outside she looked like Dr. Doolittle with all the animals all climbing on her at once.  Of course Baby wanted to get in on that action too.

Bonita Rose had so much fun watching and petting  every one. She wanted to try and chase the goats around but they were too fast for her.  










Here's a picture of Baby Girl doing the sign for "Goat". That's how she would tell me that she wanted me to carry her to be closer to them.

 After we spent a good bit of time with the goats, we decided what we needed was a good picnic lunch. So we called the boys in and made Angus hot dogs and Dad's Famous BBQ Chicken. 

Oh, and Sweet Tea. After all, this is The South.

It was so wonderful to be able sit in the sun and enjoy our lunch together. I really love that about farm/country life. William can work all day but we still see him for lunch!

Baby got to have a treat too. She really likes V8. We call it Nana's Juice.  She also likes drinking from the glass by her self. She's such a big girl!

I will leave you with this adorable picture of Bonita Rose giving the goats a look. She's so much fun!