Spring 2015

We had a very mild spring this year, warmer and drier than usual it seemed.  We got a nice little garden put in again, and we also bought seven ducklings to add to our homestead.  They should start producing eggs in the fall.  It’s been quite enjoyable to see the little flock cruising around the yard looking for tasty morsels.  They bring a nice pastoral element to our backyard, and I find them to be superior to chickens in every regard.

Some of the springtime highlights are pictured below.  Grandpa Steve and Nana took us to Dozer Days up in Vancouver, and Josef got to briefly operate several kinds of revered trash trucks, and got to sit in Grandpa’s lap while he operated a forklift.  It was a quite the feast for his eyes, but I think he was a little intimidated to see these giant noisy things up close.

In April, Josef and I took a trip out to a farm near Alsea to see some newborn lambs and have a picnic.  Again, he seemed to enjoy the concept of lambs more than the reality, so we spent most of the visit wandering around the farm.  It was such an idyllic Shire-esque plot of land, with horses and donkeys and goats roaming about alongside a creek and a little woods.  While exploring Josef wandered into some stinging nettles and got quite an unpleasant surprise.  He was quite stoic about it though.

In other news I started taking an ice hockey class down at the rink in Eugene, which has been really fun.  I only wish I didn’t have to drive so far to do the class.  I’m absolutely terrible at it, but after 8 weeks I actually had improved quite a bit.  Like from a 0 to a 1 on a scale of 10.  So mathematically that is like an improvement of infinity percent.

Josef has become fascinated by the way things work and is constantly asking about “mechanisms” and pointing at devices or pictures of machinery and asking “Papa how to show me that..?”  His inquisitiveness knows no bounds, and he requests that we “talk about that” several hundred times each day.  Sometimes, when trying to understand something, he will ask “what it’s kinda like,” I suppose in hopes of gathering more information, or maybe to help correlate things.  It’s handy for us too though, because if we don’t understand what he’s talking about we can ask him what it’s “kinda like” and he will usually describe something similar to help us get it.

Like most children he has always loved music, but lately he seems to have developed a real predilection for anything raw and folksy, like bluegrass or cajun music.  He stomps his foot and mimics either playing a guitar or a washboard, I can’t exactly tell which one.  He is getting adept at picking out which instruments are playing in a song, and at some point it became clear that he knows the words and melodies to all of the songs we sing him at bedtime.  The first time I heard him singing along with me was quite special.

He likes to do things all by himself whenever possible, like climbing in and out of the car seat, opening and shutting doors and drawers, etc…  It’s often important for him to do the whole task from start to finish, so if I open the drawer for him to get the spoon, he makes me close the drawer so he can do that part himself too.  It’s nice to see him developing all these little skills that I take for granted.  Watching the incremental and subtle progress from a completely helpless creature to an active little boy is such a pleasure.  Sometimes I forget that he will just keep getting bigger and more able, and find myself marveling with excitement at his new skill, thinking “oh yeah!  they learn to do new stuff!”

And of course, the human universal question is now being asked!  “Why?”  It’s interesting though–he generally only asks it three times in a row.  After that he seems to accept the answer given:

“I’m hungry.”  “Why?”  “Because I need to eat.”  “Why?”  “Because I need energy.”  “Why?”  “So I can do good things with my body.”  “Oh!”

We also had a sad little mishap early in the spring, when he was horsing around in the back of the car and tumbled out onto the driveway.  He began really favoring his left arm so we took him to the doctor and an x-ray revealed he had a broken collarbone.  It was quite pitiful to see him holding the wounded limb close to his body when playing, and to be reminded every single time I went to pick him up, “don’t touch my owwie!!”  I’ve always been under the impression that little kids were rather pliable and indestructible, but seeing my little guy get injured so easily made me understand how a parent can get so overprotective.  He is completely healthy now though; it healed up just fine.