Found this little guy in Indea’s hair while we were eating lunch by the pool today.

He’s about a centimeter long - that’s a paper napkin and an upside-down paper plate he’s on.

Indea and I visited Chinatown today for some fun and shopping.

She was especially impressed with the live turtles, eels, crabs and fish for sale. They EAT them? she wanted to know. Hmm.. she added.

Somehow the squid snacks didn’t go over quite as well as the idea of eating a turtle.

We usually do shopping in Chinatown for our annual Christmas eve dinner, but I haven’t taken the kids there in a while so everything was new. Lots of fun. Indea was especially taken with the fans and dresses and porcelain.

We had a new babysitter this weekend, another Rachel (not that she held a candle to the original Rachel, who visited this weekend, but more on that later). She was clearly flummoxed by Emma’s bedtime story request: “Here, can you please read me facts about hippopotamuses from this encyclopedia?” As she pulled out a notebook she added, “I’ll just take some notes.”

We built this sandbox this week, took 3 days. Yesterday we spent the entire day, from about 9 am till 6:30 pm outside under the tree working on it.

Indea got her first toolbox and we practiced hammering and sawing, while Emma got a toolbox upgrade. She spent all afternoon building her own something. At first it was a bench, but then it transformed into something else.

The giant 8×8s are very heavy white oak leftovers from our landscape construction a few years ago. 750 pounds of sand.

Once we finally added all the sand the girls proceeded to bury themselves, pour sand on each other, in their hair, in their pants, in their shirts. Making up for all that lost sandbox time, I guess.

As we pulled into the driveway yesterday with 500 pounds of sand for the sandbox we built (pictures to come) :

Indea: Daddy, I’m going to be a dancer.

Emma: and I’m going to be a scientist of animals and plants and rock climbing will help me climb up to find things!

Indea: But Daddy, we’ll still come and visit you sometimes

I’ve been waiting since Indea was 3 for this question to come in some form. She continued I’d really like to have a horse. I could feed it every morning, and brush it.”

Yes, I do have wifi up there.

Some recent Indea shots

Playing with kenai:

Checking out the black beans that sprouted nearly over night:

Indea is a great lover of black beans. Rice and black beans (with nothing added) is one of her favorite dishes.

She was sad when we had to thin the plants.

Emma is searching for interesting things in the stream

Spontaneous painting by Emma

though, now that I think about it, most of the kids artwork is spontaneous.