Aug. 28, 2008 - dThursday

The dog wakes me up every morning at 5:45!! She stands at the top of the stairs. We have the baby gate still from when the boys were babies so we close it all the time. She likes to come up and eat toys and stuffed animals. So every morning I hear her sit at the top of the stairs by the gate whining at first and then little yips. Our rooms are all right there at the stairs and I don't want her to wake up the boys so I get up and get her a snack. Now, Dan is already up and sitting in the livingroom, but that isn't good enough for her. He doesn't get her a snack! I tried giving her a chew stick and going back to bed, but it only gave me another half an hour. No big deal though. If she didn't get me up, I would probably sleep until 9am each day and then sit around waking up until noon. Back to my pre-child days! Ahh...memories.

We went to Irvine Regional Park today for a picnic. We walked around the pond and hunted crawdads with sticks. They swim away backwards if you startle them, but will fight a stick poked at them! We saw big snails, small clams, and a few fish, not to mention two kinds of ducks. We found a bee hive in the hole of a tree, watched squirrels run, and pet the ponies. Then we had lunch. A big peacock decided to join us. It snuck up on Jake and took his cracker. Then we started feeding it. It didn't like apples, but loved crackers and raisens. We went for a walk around the park. We found a tree with a plague that said it was around 200 years old! Yikes! We played at the playground for a long time. I practiced my drawing and drew a picture of the playground equipment. It came out pretty nice. Tom was so proud of it he had to "show the world" and held it up for the maintnance guys to see. Then we headed back to the truck.

We are still thinking about goals. Jake wants to go to the lego store and see how much a huge Star Wars set is. I think we will do that tomorrow morning. I'm not sure about the piano now. I think I will keep thinking about it. ;)

Oh! The boys finished "The Return of the Indian" last night. Great book, they said. Tonight we watched "Bad New Bears". The boys were riveted. Now Jake wants to take a bat and ball to the park and practice! Me? I'm still working on "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Which, by the way, is completely awesome. It has me crying every night. I have a hard time putting it down, hence the early dog wake-up call is NOT appriciated!