Bowling.

Last night Jessica and I took the boys bowling (Nanna’s in town and watched Netta and Bailey). Good fun was had. But man, bowling is expensive! $25 to rent shoes and play one game. A rare treat. We had fun and there are some wonderful photos to prove it.

Art celebrating a spare by Jessica.

Jessica especially enjoyed watching Lewis take his time lining up the ball.

A spare!

For the record. And for fun, we entered our names as ‘mom’ and ‘dad’. Even the boys got a chuckle by that.

Playing hide-and-seek. I love this photo! And watch the audio-less movie below to see Arthur discovering Lewis.

Aerial photo flight with Josh.

Last night was the finals of Crashed Ice, a made up sport designed as a vehicle to advertise Red Bull, a crappy drink that’s bad for you. But more than 100,000 people showed up in downtown St. Paul so we pull out all the coverage stops. Last night Josh came along in a little 4-seater Cessna for some aerial photograph. It was fun and scary! He held a couple lenses and shivered in the back seat (I had to have the window open to take photos). Here were are up high:

 

Here’s a gallery of all the aerial photos. I blogged about other videos and stuff for the paper, including some ‘cinemagraphs.’

A sad turning.

Things change so gradually with children that in some ways it’s hard to notice anything changing at all. It was easier to see things change this morning as Jessica decided yesterday was the last nursing of her nursing life. She’s warned the babies for a while and had slowly begun to wean long ago so it wasn’t a surprise to anyone. But it still makes me sad.
“Nurse?” said Netta as she stood in the hallway looking up at her mother. “Nurse? Nurse?!” she chanted in a slightly panicky voice. Of the twins it’s Netta who has always seemed to truly love nursing. She started to cry as Jessica answered super sympathetically, “no more nurse, nurse all gone.”

I generally have really bad memory as a parent but I think that’s an image image will last, Netta standing there crying, looking up at her mother. A couple days ago I had a dream about this. I don’t remember much except I, too, was crying because the girls stopped nursing. I don’t know why I lament it so much. There’s a loss of true innocence and of absolute closeness to Jessica that I loved seeing. But that moment in the hallway, Netta’s tears, it also abruptly ends a long and often harried chapter in our parenting lives when we had babies and tiny kids. We don’t anymore. We’re parents of boys and girls, not babies. And I love babies! I know change is good but I’m still going to sit here and wallow in this sad feeling I have.

Lewis is a show-off.

We have previously shared that Lewis is at times – often times – a f*@!ing angel.  Well, today I took the girls and Lewis to music class and asked Lewis to be my helper.  I need help juggling the two toddlers, especially since Netta likes to be help for every standing up song.  Well, he excelled at his task.  He patted them in time, he asked Netta to sit on his lap, he tried to hold Bailey’s hand when we walked in circles.  All in all he was stellar.

So, after class another mother (of twins!) asked, “Is your son always such an angel?!”

F*@!ing angel strikes again!