Montessori chickens!

The upper elementary kids have four chickens on campus that we've been visiting pretty much daily.

They are let out of the coop in the afternoons, and since Hannah is out at noon on Fridays, we've started a new Friday ritual in which we picnic with the chickens. Of course, this involves far more chicken chasing than picnicking. At first I worried about keeping the kids' fingers away from the bird beaks, but then one nibbled my toe, and since it just felt like a little pinch, I figured no big deal. Jacob has been nibbled a few times at this point, and he acknowledges the nibble with a "what the heck" face that fades pretty quickly.(I caught a nibble on video. Fair warning: it's another terribly shot vertical video.)

After watching a few of the big kids pick up the birds, Hannah wanted to give it a go. She picked one and followed it around for a long time, waiting for that perfect moment when she was close enough and brave enough to pick it up. After that she was a natural and just walked around picking them up at leisure.

There is also a new family of adorable foxes living on the other side of the fence. Yes, convenient location for them. Potentially inconvenient for the chickens....

 

I love Hannah's school. We end up hanging out for an extra hour or more after I pick her up every day because the campus is so beautiful, and this amazing weather makes it hard to come home to this yard-less city row home. We want to be outside as much as possible right now, and since Jacob hates getting in his car seat and often requires an arm bar to get buckled, I try to avoid getting in and out of the car multiple trips. Anyway, he spends enough time in the car just taking Hannah to and from school, so there's no reason to add a destination to the trip. Fortunately, Hannah can't get enough of her school; even after being there all day, I still end up pulling her away kicking and screaming when it's time to come home and make dinner. I seriously love that she spends so much of her time in such an awesome environment and that she gets a daily respite from the concrete jungle.

The baby walks

I'm interrupting my normal stream of backlogged posts to provide an update that is less than a week old: Jacob is walking. April 30 was the magical day that he went from taking one or two tentative and wobbly steps propelled primarily by momentum to taking about 10 steps. Every day since then, he has added steps and lost some wobble. I've tried a kabillion times to get video, but I always hit record either too late or too early and since I don't know how to edit video (and really don't feel like learning at this juncture in my life when I already have enough to obsess over), I end up scrapping the ones where I start too early. I did get a short clip on day three of walking that misses the first few steps but is better than nothing. You can watch it here if you are so inclined. Fair warning: like all my videos, it's really the kind of video that only grandparents and aunties would be even remotely interested in.

Speaking of boring videos, I have been uploading quite a few of them to my channel lately. A couple months ago, we were watching all the baby Hannah videos and realizing that there was a big gap in videos and that Jacob's baby years were all but lost, so I started to ramp up my game a bit. My only lament is that cell phone video cameras take horizontal video. Vertical video really sucks.

On the hunt for eggs

An egg hunt is pretty much just a more elaborate game of hide-and-seek, one that eliminates the need for large people to squish themselves into small places and then stay there until small people find them. If, like me, you have a super small person, then the super small person has to hide with the large person and quickly gives away the hiding spot to the slightly larger small person. This is not a bad thing as it lessens the time spent crunched up uncomfortably. Still, I'd much rather hide eggs and follow the small person around the house as she locates them.

We went big this year with both an indoor and an outdoor egg hunt. I had bought an absurd amount of eggs and stuffed them with random items I picked up at the craft store like jewels that are flat on one end and can be glued down, jingle bells, small plastic animals, and coins from Eric's non-piggy bank. I put close to 30 eggs in a plastic bag to be hidden outside and hid at least 15 all around the house. Hannah knew about the outdoor hunt, but the indoor hunt was a surprise.

She ran around the house excitedly collecting eggs and even pointed out some to Jacob to help him grasp the concept.

When they were all collected, she got to work inspecting her booty and organizing it Montessori-style into separate bowls which Jacob continuously knocked over and then thrashed around to make sure that each little jingle bell and jewel scattered far and wide. He is an excellent destroyer.

My dad and Sondra showed up around 10 bearing Jacob's birthday gift, and after enjoying it for a bit, we all went around back to meet our friends and commence egg hunt number two. The park in the alley behind our house is where we sledded a lot this winter. We had never thought to use it for an egg hunt, but fortunately a neighbor without kids shared her genius idea, and those of us with kids were all over it. There's not much there other than some grass, but that's pretty much all that's needed for an egg hunt. We rallied together with three other families with homes backing to that alley, all of whom have daughters around Hannah's age. Parents from each family hid the eggs around 10, and then the kids went crazy at 10:30. They aren't terribly visible in this shot, but I wanted to share a group action shot of the four of them spreading out to cover more territory.

Jacob found a few too.

Running was the means of movement to each new egg as soon as it was spotted. I wish we were all like kids and just took off running at the drop of a hat. At what point do we stop running excitedly everywhere we go? 

I couldn't pick my favorite posed group shot, but it's one of these two.

More post-egg hunt booty inspecting commenced while the parents mingled and enjoyed the amazing weather and the awesomeness of our neighborhood, specifically because of the people who live here.

 Having so many people around meant extra hands to snap family photos.

After the egg hunt we went to the bookstore where the kids each picked a book that the grandparents bought them. They're wanting this to be their new Easter tradition in lieu of giving the kids an Easter basket full of stuff I don't approve of and end up sending to work with Eric, and it's an idea I couldn't be happier with! Hannah picked out this hysterical book called Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich. It's pretty rad. Jacob picked Goodnight Spot, a lift-the-flap book. Brandy bought him Where's Spot for Christmas, and he loves it, so that warrants starting a collection.

Later we walked down to The Charmery for ice cream, which pretty much iced the cake of an awesome spring day.

Flipadelphia!

We took a weekend family trip to Blue Bell, Pennsylvania at the beginning of the month for a wedding and stopped off in Philly on the way home. I hadn't taken the time to plan the trip terribly well so we just parked in Old City and walked around fairly aimlessly until my friend Adam showed up and led us to a yummy Indian lunch buffet. Prior to that Eric had picked up tickets to tour Independence Hall (the building behind Hannah in the picture below). I learned a few things, like that back in the day, the person on trial actually had to stand and that's why we say "standing trial." The The highlight of that tour happened at the very beginning when our tour group was seated around a painting of the Constitutional Convention. The park ranger had just finished talking to us about the convention and the room where it took place (which she led us to next) and asked the group if we had any questions. Hannah, standing on her chair in the back row, raised her hand, and when the ranger acknowledged her, she said, "Um, what's that frame made of? Wood?" The ranger smiled and said she thought so, and Hannah replied that it looked like gold too. I love her.

Edited May 11:
I was shuffling through pictures on my phone and found two more pics from Philly.

Here's one of Hannah and Grammy in front of the Irish memorial.

And here's one of super dad carrying both his kids on his back.

Jacob's various birthday soirees and dedicated birthday update

Jacob's reaction to daylight savings time has been completely backwards and beyond brutal. Prior to DST, he woke up around 7. Since DST, he has been waking up at 5:30. Who does that???  On top of that, he is still waking up every 2-3 hours all night long.

If I had written this post on time it would have the sort of energy one has after being permitted to wake naturally for 3 nights in a row. I probably would have been bubbling over with enthusiasm, certain that those 3 miraculous nights were a harbinger of many more to come, and that this would be the year that we phased out sleep deprivation. He slept through the night 3 nights in a row!! It was a freaking miracle, and I was feeling better than badass as a result.

Alas, those stars have not aligned since then, and I am worse off as a result of them because those 3 nights in which I experienced full sleep cycles and woke naturally were enough to start to normalize my body, making it that much more painful when Jacob resumed every 1 to 3 hours. Fortunately, he's no longer awake and screaming for hours at a time during these wakings. Usually he's asleep again after a short snuggle, so I'm assuming it's some sort of separation anxiety which I read peaks around this age.

So, sleeping leaves a lot to desire, but he's otherwise a happy, healthy baby who still smiles constantly and has an infectious laugh. He's crazy curious and will bulldoze anything in his way to get to an object of interest. After nursing in the morning, he climbs over my face, dropping a knee into my neck if it happens to be in the way, and makes his way to my nightstand where he first picks up the monitor and, after inspecting it, drops it on the floor. The books are next, and then I pull him off my head and plop him on the floor just before he grabs the picture and lamp.

This tendency he has to bulldoze anything in his path when he sees something of interest makes picnics incredibly stressful. I spend the entire time shuffling the food around in an effort to keep him from crawling through it, but inevitably he crawls through something, smashing his knee down on someone's food and dragging it under him as he makes his way for someone else's plate.

On the bright side, he's eating less sand and sidewalk chalk these days, but it hasn't been that long since he shoveled dirt into his mouth. He also managed to pop a fistful of wet cat food into his mouth the other day before I yoked him up, and since he immediately locked his jaws, picking it out  was no easy task. 

In true family fashion, we celebrated his birthday on multiple occasions and managed to drag it out for most of the month. On the weekend before his first birthday, Hannah and I made Jacob blueberry muffins, and my mom and brother and his kids descended upon the house in a flurry of fun and chaos, the good kind that comes about when four kids under 5 end up in one row home. Zoey and Amy showed up in time for lunch and cupcakes and chaos too.

Jacob sat on dad's lap wearing the family birthday headdress and staring curiously at the fire while we sang to him.

 

Chip's present was (and still is) a HUGE hit. Jacob is totally obsessed with computers and constantly trying to bang on my keys the way I guess it looks like I do. This little LeapFrog computer is my go-to when I need him to just sit still.

Amy and Zoey got him That's Not My Dinosaur, a textured book that he reads daily, and this really neat plastic ball that changes back and forth from green to blue every time you throw it.

Grammy got him a Rody, a really soft stuffed tiger to snuggle, and a lift-the-flap book.

 

His present from Grannah and Granpah arrived in the mail a few days later, but since he opened it over video chat, I forgot to take pictures. They got a him some really fun cars, a stuffed dog, and a lift-the-flap book with farm animals.

Also, my aunts both sent cards stuffed with $20, which became the first two bills deposited into his piggy bank. Hannah has quite a stash of twenties at this point since that's where she always puts her birthday money too.

A couple weeks later, my dad and Sondra came down for an egg hunt and brought Jacob's birthday present: Elefun Busy Ball Poppper. It was a big hit.

Baby picture time!! From left to right, Eric, me, and Hannah after 1 year in this great world.  I think Jacob looks the most like his sister, except for his lighter coloring.

At his 12-month appointment he weighed 22 pounds and 6 ounces which dropped him down into the very average 66th percentile. The little giant who came into this world in the 99th percentile at 10 1/2 pounds is letting his peers catch up now. He is still in the 87th percentile for length (31 inches), which makes him a beanpole, just like his sister. I think she was usually 80th for length and something like 20th for weight. And his head, which seems like a totally arbitrary and pointless measurement to me, is 48 cm (92nd percentile).

We are all completely smitten with this baby brother and looking forward to more fun-filled days and (hopefully) more sleep-filled nights.