Building Houses and Scary Spiders!

Nicolas will happily spend 30 minutes in the morning building houses or caves out of my cushions. He gets very frustrated when Adison knocks them down, but she is getting better as crawling under the cushions rather than walking through them!

He has also rediscovered his duplo blocks and loves to make me 'pecial towers'. He can now say his 'f's' and we are working on 's' sounds. He just drops the s so he says 'nake, 'pecial, 'now and it's very nasally. If he tries, he can say the 's' sound but part of me doesn't want him to speak properly, I love his little boy voice and all the cute things he says.

When Kirsten gets home her relaxation time before homework is to play with Nicolas and she made some great houses last week with him.

Adison is always carrying at least one or two babies, so Kirsten made her a baby sling for her pony out of a scarf. Adison was very impressed!

We also had a trial run making scones for Jaden's class.

The passed Jaden and Blake's taste test and Nicolas and Adison even thought the dough tasted good.

Adison rarely looks like Kirsten but the picture below is one of the few times I can see a resemblance.

Adison is still obsessed with geese so she was so excited when we went to the park and saw a family of geese with goslings.


I was less excited when we were packing up to go camping and Adam told me he'd found a black widow spider in the shed! He had just sprayed it with ant killer so it was dead but it was pretty big. I found lots of brown recluse spiders in the yard at the old house so I know what they look like and I'd always worried I'd not recognize a black widow, but the red patch was very red, so I definitely would if I ever saw one again. The joys of living in a hot country!

Spiders don't bother me but because I never know if they are poisonous or not, I have to squash any that I find. Yesterday I was weeding outside and Nicolas was on his bike in the driveway and he shouted 'look Mommy a snake'! We've found little snakes in the yard before so I presumed it was a little one, more like a worm than a snake. I nearly had a fit when I looked up and there was a 3-4 foot black and white snake raised up about 4 feet way from him! I calmly told him to cycle away from it down the yard and thankfully he did. It slithered off under the truck and into the neighbor's yard and I calmed down a bit. Again snakes don't bother me but as I don't know which are poisonous, I assume they all are. That was the first time I've seen a really big snake here.

Adam of course was all excited when he got home from church and took the kids off with a rake and pillow case to try to catch it! Thankfully the snake was long gone or it would probably be in a tank in Jaden's room!!