Happy Halloween!

(Liam and Kieran went trick-or-treating tonight with two friends.)

At Liam’s school last week, the 5th Graders came over to help the 1st Graders carve their very own jack-o-lanterns. Here is Liam with his creation. He was very proud to have carved his first pumpkin, and told me that the only help he needed from the older children was scooping the inside seeds and strands out of the pumpkin.

Have a spooky Halloween, everyone!

…petting the lion cub…

…playing with Galapagos tortoises…

…and then, the next week, he was at Work Day at his school, helping set up the classroom and picking out a desk…

…and finally came the first day of school, during which each new 1st-Grade child was introduced the the school community and welcomed into the grade school with a bouquet of wildflowers presented by our 7th Grade Lead Class. This is the Waldorf School Flower Ceremony, which is performed the first day of each school year at each Waldorf school around the world. The wildflowers were grown over the summer in our school garden by the Lead Class, and they are used for this ceremony because they symbolise the unbridled spirit of young children. It was a beautiful day, perfect for celebrating a beautiful group of children.

Welcome to Grade School, Liam. May the years ahead hold many adventures, big and small. We love you and sre so proud of you.

Love,

Mommy, Daddy, and Kieran

]]> http://menageriehouse.com/2010/09/16/the-times-they-are-a-changing/feed/ 1 liesl Liamlion Dolphin Day Week 9 035 IMG_6381 1stgrade http://menageriehouse.com/2010/08/14/meet-willie/ http://menageriehouse.com/2010/08/14/meet-willie/#comments Sun, 15 Aug 2010 03:06:05 +0000 lieslf http://menageriehouse.com/?p=871 ]]> He’s our new pet here at The Menagerie House. Obviously he is a guinea pig, and he’s eighteen months old. Some clients of our vet needed to rehome this gentle little creature, and so our vet gave them our name as being an animal-friendly family. The last of our ferrets, Houdini, passed away in January, and our vet knew that we were missing having a small and fuzzy friend in the house.

Guinea pigs need a steady supply of fresh veggies, particularly greens, in their diet, and the boys and I have been having fun picking grass and dandelion greens for Willie. The boys ask to feed him his morning parsley when they get up, and they love to give him tickles and kisses.

We’ve had him for two weeks now and he has settled in well. Initially he was a bit skittish with us, but now he runs to the door of his hutch and squeaks when he sees us. Liam is looking forward to introducing Willie to his 1st grade teacher when she comes by for a visit this week.

Guinea pigs often live to be 6-7 years old, so we’re looking forward to lots of fun times with Willie.

Here we have Liam swinging away and pretending to be an Army helicopter pilot while Lieutenant Kieran mans “The Fort”.

Thank you again to Kevin, Grandma, and Pop-Pop – we love our swingset so much!

Hugs,

Liam and Kieran

We spent a week in Texas just after the July 4th holiday weekend. Kevin was able to stay only a couple of days due to work pressures, but the boys and I stayed all week and had a truly great vacation. Our first day there, my cousin Scott, my Aunt Tess, and my Uncle Jay were able to come up from Houston and spend the afternoon. This was a great experience since believe it or not, it has been almost twenty years since we’ve been together as a group. Tess and Jay were at our wedding in 1990, but Scott and his family were living abroad at the time and couldn’t make it. So it was really wonderful to see them again and pick up our relationship where we left off. As my Aunt Tess mentioned, if it wasn’t for the children running around, you would have thought that no time had passed at all since our last visit. It was fun to introduce Liam and Kieran to them, too, and Liam is still talking about how nice Tess, Jay and Scott are.

From left to right: Aunt Tess, Scott, me, and Uncle Jay (WordPress is giving me trouble with image size tonight, and I’m hoping I can come back in a day or two and enlarge the photos here.)

Kevin’s sister Janet and her children, Ethan and Alexa, came up for Sunday as well, so we had a full house and a lot of happy, excited children running around and screaming. It was really a fun day all around.

We spent the rest of the week doing a little of this and a little of that. There was lots of time in the pool – even though it was actually cooler in the Hill Country than it was back home, it was still pretty warm and a swim in the late afternoon was really refreshing.

Here are Kevin and the boys cooling off on Sunday afternoon.

There is currently an exhibit of dinosaur skeletons and other interesting dinosaur-related items in San Antonio. The boys, Grandma, and I went there one afternoon and we all really enjoyed it.

Here is Liam holding a jaw from one of T-Rex’s smaller relatives. It must have been quite a vicious time back in the Dinosaur Age judging by the looks of those teeth.

After the exhibit we were all hungry, so Grandma treated us all to lunch at a nice Italian place on the Riverwalk.

Kieran loved his ravioli (he calls them “pillows”), but the best part of lunch was still the dessert.

During the week we also took a trip to Sea World where we saw many beautiful marine creatures. The boys got to feed dolphins and alligators, and they loved Shamu’s live show. We also had time for a couple of trips into Blanco to visit GiGi and Uncle Bob at their apartments there, and we even stopped to do a little wading in the Blanco river. It was a full week, for sure.

Then on Saturday we all got up nice and early and flew home. The boys really missed Kevin and were so glad to see him at the airport! Pop-Pop had business on the weekdays, so Grandma stayed with us then, and it was fun having her here. We did a lot of playing and visiting and somehow the days just sped on by.

Then, on the last weekend of their visit, Gran-Gran and Pop-Pop helped us put together the boys’ new swingset. We bought it from a neighbor who was moving right before we left town. During our stay in Texas, Kevin did some repair work on the beams, and then after we returned home Grandma did an amazing job of painting the set. It wasn’t easy as it is a large structure, and the heat has been intense this year. She spent several afternoons out in the soupy afternoon air painting the set for her grandchildren. Then on Sunday, Kevin, Pop-Pop, and Grandma put the whole set together. It was a lot of work from start to finish, and we are so grateful to Kevin’s parents for all their labor on this project!

It was worth all the work, though, as the boys just love their swingset and are spending several hours a day playing on it. It really is terrific to have such a wonderful piece of play equipment in the backyard, and I know we’ll get lots of years of enjoyment out of it. With my camera missing, I can’t show the finished project right now, but I’ll pop out tomorrow and grab a shot with my phone so everyone can get a look at out new toy.

That, in a nutshell, has been our July. Add in swimming lessons for Liam, and lots of playing with neighborhood friends, and you’ve got pretty much the entire story. It’s been a lot of fun, and now we’re looking forward to a relaxing August before we have to get back into school mode in a few weeks. I’ll be back soon with  pictures of our swingset, and our first August news – a new pet at the Menagerie House.

Thanks for reading!

]]> http://menageriehouse.com/2010/08/04/july-wrap-up/feed/ 3 liesl family pool SM icecream http://menageriehouse.com/2010/07/01/weekend-update/ http://menageriehouse.com/2010/07/01/weekend-update/#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:48:07 +0000 lieslf http://menageriehouse.com/?p=847 ]]> It’s been a busy week here since Liam started the first of his two weeks of camp at his school. Kieran and I have been driving him over and back each day, stopping of course to let Kieran spend an hour or so on the playground and then running any errands that need to be done. And also Liam started swimming lessons this week -two lessons each week for the next 8 week, in the evening. It all adds up to a full week.

I did however promise myself I would post a couple of fun things we did last weekend. Kevin’s company is working “summer hours” this year, which means he goes in an hour earlier in the mornings, but then he comes home at lunchtime on Fridays, which is great because every weekend has a bit of a long weekend feeling to it. Last Friday we drove down to the beach in the afternoon. We walked along the boardwalk for a bit and got some dinner at a rooftop restaurant. The food is average, but really, sitting up there in the sea breeze, watching the people swimming, and the boats coming in and out of a nearby river, is just a wonderful finish to the week.

Here is Kieran waiting for his dinner to arrive.

After dinner, we went down the boardwalk a bit so the boys could ride some of the fun things they have there.

Kieran loves to ride these pink elephants.

Liam’s current favorite ride is the Ferris wheel.

After we’d tried some rides, we walked out onto the sand for a bit of digging and wading.

The boys played in this crater for quite a while. Every time the waves came up, it would fill with water and become their own private pool.

Here the boys are running in to escape one of the higher breakers.

Kieran was enjoying having Daddy swing him around through the breaking waves.

After we had had enough wading and digging in the sand, we rinsed off our feet and legs, put our shoes on, and walked back to the car. The boys managed to stay awake for the drive home, but fell asleep shortly thereafter. It was a fun evening, and being this close to the shore is one of the things we like about summers where we live.

The second fun thing we did this weekend involves some manual labor. Neighbors of ours are moving, and their new house has a swingset already. The set in their backyard however, is only a couple of years old and is in great shape, but the new owners don’t want it, so for a couple of hundred dollars and some assembly, it is now ours. The set is in pieces across our backyard at the moment, but Kevin will spend tomorrow afternoon sanding and desplintering the beams, and since he has Monday off, we can use that to start putting the set together. When we get the set put back together, it will look something like this. Obviously, Kieran and Liam are quite excited about the new addition to our backyard!

However, there is one very sweet thing that the boys and I discovered today that I just have to show everyone. First a little background-we have a little red birdhouse that we bought from Duncraft two summers ago. Each March since then we have faithfully cleaned out the house and hung it from the light on our back deck, outside the toy room door. Birds have used it each year to raise young ones, and this year is no exception.

We have had Carolina wrens nesting around our house for several years now-readers who have been around for a while will remember our little wren who accidentally got inside back in 2007.  Anyway, about three weeks ago Liam and I spent an afternoon watching a “Mommy and Daddy Wren” pair fly back and forth from a place where our neighbor had cut down a pine tree and left lots of needles to the birdhouse. Back and forth they flew all afternoon, flight after flight, each time carrying in one long pine needle. A wee bird would fly through the entry hole of the house, carefully tug the needle into the house, stay there a few seconds apparently arranging the needle, and fly out again back to the needle pile. This went on for several hours, and then the adult birds seemed to disappear.

Several days went by, and we did not see the wrens, although the nest remained in the birdhouse. In the meantime we were distracted by a pair of downy woodpeckers who have been raising a family up in our redbud tree. We have seen the parents visiting our feeders and feasting on peanuts and sunflower seeds. We have heard them calling to the babies, but the nest was too far up to be easily seen. Then on Monday, Kieran and I were sitting on our dining room floor and looking out onto the deck. We saw the adult downies come down to the feeders, and then within a few seconds they were joined by four juvenile birds who were very clearly just learning to fly and navigate the collection of feeders we have out.

It was very sweet to see the youngsters fly inside the feeders and peck at the seeds. It was not unlike watching human babies learn to feed themselves. Just as babies inevitably spill food and end up wearing some of it, the birds had a similar experience. Each baby would peck gingerly at the seeds. Once in a while each little bird was rewarded by being able to grab one or two seeds, but a lot of the pecks resulted in either not getting a seed out, or else dislodging a small cascade of seeds that would travel down and slide off of the birds’ backs. Eventually they got the hang of it and were able to get a decent meal out seed by seed.

Since then the downies have been out and about at the feeders and flying around the yard. I still was not sure what became of the wren nest until Tuesday when the boys and I were combing Casey on the deck. We were finished and went back inside, leaving a football size pile of dog fur on the boards. Not long after we went inside we heard the Carolina wrens calling to each other, and all of a sudden they were down on the deck grabbing bits of fur and flying them up and into the birdhouse. Evidently dog fur makes a great lining for a nest made of pine needles!

Then, this afternoon, we heard an amazingly loud chorus of baby birds cheeping loudly and constantly. Whenever we got near the back door the birds would quiet down, so we couldn’t be sure if they were in the birdhouse or in a nearby tree. We tried to get near the birdhouse as quietly and slowly as we could, but each time the birds would quiet down, and it was too dark inside the house to see much of anything.

Finally I had the bright idea of holding the camera up just outside the opening of the birdhouse…I took a series of shots…

…not much to see here…

…I think maybe I see the edge of a beak??…

…mmmmm, I’m not sure at all…

…BINGO!

When I finally did get a quick peek into the nestbox I could see four little mouths all gaping open. Each little mouth could hold a blob of food the size of a pea, and the wee birds are just incredibly adorable. I have never gotten such a close-up look at baby birds before, and I feel so lucky to have gotten a glimpse this afternoon. Kieran and Liam are just as excited by our surprise babies as I am- we’ve never been able to get such a close look at the wren nests before. It will be fun to see the babies grow and fledge over the next few weeks!

We got home and wrapped up the gifts, and then the boys decorated the birthday cake.

“I know Daddy will wove his cake – it’s wemon, you know!!”

After Kevin came home, we had dinner, and then we had our cake and ice cream. Here is Liam putting the candles on the cake.

(Yes, we had a bit of a heat wave the last week or so – it’s been in the upper 80′s with humidity to match – but the heat finally broke today.)

Is this not a textbook picture of a “Made with love by young children” birthday cake?

A candle for each decade was about as close as we got to specifying which exact birthday this was.

And here is our birthday boy…

…and the loyal Casey, mooching around for fallen bits of birthday cake. The saddest day of his life occurred when the boys learned to eat dessert without spilling a bit, I tell you.

And then Kevin opened his presents, and we spent some time all playing together until the boys’ bedtime. Kevin loved his shirt, and the cap was a big winner, too, as he’s been feeling a bit strange without a baseball cap to wear around the house.

The rest of this weekend was a winner, too – since we live very close to Six Flags, we have always gotten season passes to the water park. It’s wonderful just to be able to pop over for an hour or two in the heat of the day and then come home again. This year, though, Liam has gotten tall enough to ride a number of the rides in the amusement park, and there is now a “Wiggles’ World” for the nursery-school set, so we decided to get the combination pass that is good for the water park, amusement park, and safari all together. So on Saturday we went over to the amusement park, rode a few rides, and had a pizza lunch before deciding we’d had enough of the heat. The boys loved riding in the Wiggles’ Big Red Car, and Liam and Kevin rode one of the intermediate roller coasters – it has a runaway mine train theme. Liam was thrilled and scared at the same time about riding it, and although he’s proud that he actually did it, I have a feeling it will be a while before he asks to go on another roller coaster. However, the big Ferris Wheel was a hit – the boys loved looking out and seeing all the places we’d been in the park, and even being able to see over to the water park was exciting for them.

Then today, Kevin took the boys back for a swim at the water park while I stayed home to enjoy some peace and quiet, pay the bills, and finish up some loose ends on some fundraising work I’ve been doing with Liam’s Waldorf school this winter. Liam’s last day of school is next Thursday, and so he’s quite excited about that. There will be a party, of course, and the kindergarteners will be putting on a puppet show for their parents and siblings. I’ll definitely post about that later this week.

So, all in all, it was a fun family birthday, and a great first weekend of summer around here. I always love summer – it’s nice not to have to be anywhere in particular most mornings, and just being able to do fun things with the boys is great. Hopefully I’ll get lots of blog material out of our adventures!

]]> http://menageriehouse.com/2010/06/06/birthday-weekend/feed/ 4 liesl OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA http://menageriehouse.com/2010/05/29/laundry-adventures/ http://menageriehouse.com/2010/05/29/laundry-adventures/#comments Sun, 30 May 2010 01:02:42 +0000 lieslf http://menageriehouse.com/?p=803 ]]> Kieran has reached the age where he wants to help with household chores. Never one to turn down offers of assistance, I let him rinse dishes, take things out of the dishwasher, squirt soap, whatever he can do, really. Kevin does the same, and since he does the bulk of the laundry in our house, Kiri has lots of fun adding soap and vinegar to the washer, pulling the fuzz off the lint screen of the dryer, and pushing the buttons on all the machines. At our Parent-Child class at Waldorf, Kiri has recently been the first in line after snacktime to help wash dishes and empty the compost. As soon as he finishes eating, he rushes off to the apron rack and then asks me or his teacher to help him tie the strings. He just loves to be involved in household work.

He often pretends to be doing household work when he is playing. I’ll hear him mumbling to himself about folding clothes, or reminding himself not to spill the “water” when he is “washing” toy dishes in a sink set up in a tub on the piano bench. It is very sweet to hear his little soprano voice describing how to load a dishwasher-”the gwasses go on the second shelf-see? Shelf one, shelf two! And the pwates go on the bottom-see them standing on their sides? They never do that on the dining table! And now we add the soap-not too much! It rinses out in the water and we need to keep the Earth healthy!”-and so on.

The other afternoon Kieran helped me throw in an unexpected load of towels for the washer. I thought I was watching him closely, but I guess I missed something, or else he came back later to finish the job. Anyway, not too long after we started the machine I heard an awful thumping coming from the washer. Wondering if we would be shopping for a new machine in the near future, I entered the laundry room and opened the lid:

After I rescued Rocket from the water and dried him off, I asked Kieran why he had put the flyer in there in the first place. “Well, Mommy, actually, Rocket transformed himself into a submarine just so he could learn to do the laundry even better than I do!”

If you look closely, you’ll see that Rocket does indeed have his periscope up. At any rate, I just love helpers who take their jobs seriously enough to want to share the joy!

The big event was this afternoon, and we had a good time. During the last couple of weeks Kieran has had us a bit confused by saying he only wants Daddy, Mommy, Liam, and Casey at his birthday party. When I would suggest that we invite friends of his, he would refuse any company at all. So finally we asked him if instead of a party he would like to have a play-date with ice cream and cake. That solution was happily accepted, and so we  had our “play-date”today.

We spent the morning running errands, and by the time we got home, our birthday boy needed lunch and a nap. After lunch he napped for a bit,but soon he was up and ready for his birthday playdate!

A quick game of tackle proved quite effective in waking the sleepyheads, and they went on to play with their guests.

We had a beautiful day and pretty soon we had eight children on top of the dome, enjoying the sunshine.

The dome was a present from Gran-Gran for Liam’s birthday. Kevin put it together on a mild January weekend, but now that Spring is here it is getting a lot of use. Thank you, Gran-Gran!)

Then we came on inside to open presents – additions to his GeoTrax Town!

Liam was right there making sure that everyone knows that the GeoTrax town is a joint ownership venture between him and Kieran.

Kiri also got a bunch of his favorite paints and crayons, and my friend Lisa knit him the sweetest doggie puppet you could imagine. The doggie has been named “Squiggles”,and he lives in a shoebox doghouse made for Kiri by Lisa’s children, Isaac, and Violet.

It was a fun day….

…but all that present-opening was just too tiring for certain big dogs.

You’ll be relieved to know, I’m sure, that the mention of the phrase “Birthday Cake and Ice Cream!” somehow enabled Casey to make it to his feet again.

Kiri was SO EXCITED by his cake – “Look,Mommy! Daddy! A Fire Truck With a fire dog driver! Wowoee-kazowee!”

It was a chocolate-chip cake with vanilla butter cream frosting, and several lucky children discovered that the fire engines tires were made from chocolate doughnuts!

(No, my cake making skills have not improved that drastically – it was done by a local bakery known for fun birthday cakes.)

It was a happy day for one sweet little boy:)

Happy Birthday, Kieran, and always remember that Daddy and Mommy love you from the Earth to the stars and back again!

And thank you to my readers for sharing this big day with our family!