October/November Gyres

Hi, it's been a while.

You know how some people can have a job, kids, and a spouse, make dinner, clean up, and still manage to do other stuff like art or blogging (or, incredibly, both)? Those people amaze me.

Personally, I feel pretty accomplished when we can all eat, sleep, play, and keep the house more or less habitable... which has actually been happening more often than not recently. I feel like, almost a year in, we're finally getting adjusted to this two kids thing. Blogging, though, not so much yet. Maybe next year.

Anyway, it's been an eventful couple of months, especially for the kids. Halloween was a pretty big deal this year, and River was an adorable pirate. We've been getting out of the house at least a little more, too, for a trip to the playground, science center, or just outside to play in the first snow. It was pretty awesome for all of us to watch the leaves do their fall thing here for the first time...it was definitely good to be reminded of the wonderful things here as we start to batten down the hatches for another stupid Pittsburgh winter.

Most days, though, I just hang out with the kids at home. River has been developing a couple of intense new interests recently, most notably cranes and dumptrucks. He has a toy crane, and likes to make lego cranes, crane trains, etc.  He also got interested in Venus' flytraps somehow (oh, I remember how - watching BBC nature videos), and we spend a good bit of time building and/or impersonating those, too.

He's also still playing around a lot with numbers and letters...he can now count to ten reliably and recognize those numbers and most of the letters, and he's been pretty into experimenting with those concepts...he even wrote the first letter I've seen from him (J) although he continues to mostly be more into building than drawing. He made a block sculpture of our family the other day that reminded me again that although he's not that into drawing, he has a pretty good idea of how things are structured. When he's not busy with all that, there's also been a lot of Thomas the Tank Engine - possibly where he got the idea for the cranes.

There's not too much to say about Violet and her interests, except that she's gotten really mobile - definitely walking these days. She loves, of course, to get into whatever River is doing, especially taking apart his lego creations. Oh, and music! She loves banging on drums or anything that makes a noise, and bopping to pretty much anything. And she has teeth, four of them now. Mostly, though, she's still the same squishy ball of giggles.