Hold the Phone

A friend of mine jokes that when you're a stay at home mom, every day is a Saturday. It's true in that we don't have to get dressed up and go to a job and have much more freedom about what we want to do on any particular day. But I still always look forward to the weekends and having Zach home-- both for the sake of his company in general, but also as an extra pair of hands to help out. He usually gets up with Donovan Saturday mornings, letting me sleep in for an extra couple hours. By about 8:30 he usually gets bored, I think, and he and D will come into the room while Zach sings "On va reveiller la mere" (we're going to wake up mom, a song he made up and which I find really adorable) and as soon as Zach opens the door D makes a beeline for me laughing and smiling, so happy to see me. I'm not always completely ready to get up, but he's so darn cute that it's hard to turn him away.

Yesterday afternoon the sky clouded over and today we continued with cloudy, almost-cold, almost-rainy weather. We headed to the mall to use up a coupon I had, and while I shopped Zach let D walk around in one area of the mall where he made lots of new friends by being unbelievably cute. He also started trying to re-arrange the GAP display windows. I got to take a luscious 2 hour nap in the afternoon while Zach took D to the park and to pick oranges with his new fruit picker. He's so funny, coming back with reports of which house has the best fruit, and the one house down the block that has a great orange tree and the owner doesn't even like oranges so never picks them (he does at least try to ask permission first, of course), etc. He then opens up the oranges and tangerines, determining which types seem better for eating vs juicing, noting how one type makes juice with lots of pulp while another has hardly any. This is the man that also loves the apple and grape stands at the farmer's market that have as many different varietals as possible so he can taste test the different ones. Most of us grew up buying produce from grocery stores where your choices are red vs green grapes, or maybe 3 or 4 types of apples, and he's fascinated by how much more variety nature holds that most of us have no idea about. True story-- I always wondered why grape flavoring tasted the way it does, as it didn't taste anything like grapes to me. It seemed so strange. Then a couple years back I tasted concord grapes for the first time at a market stand. OH!, I thought. So THIS is where that flavor comes from! I'd had no idea.

For dinner tonight we treated ourselves to Panera, then I put D to bed while Zach headed out to watch a local soccer game with a friend. It's always a bit of a bummer spending the evening alone, but I did manage to get a lot of little things done tonight. One of them was catch up (I'm always catching up!) on recent pictures. Below are a few cute ones from the other day-- D's had this toy phone since his birthday (a gift from my dad) and he's had lots of fun playing with it and pressing the buttons, even holding the phone up to my ear so I can talk into it, but this past week was the first time that he put the phone up to his own ear. I swear he even said "Hello" into the phone, then started just babbling. So. Friggin. Adorable.

"Hey, Sophia. Yeah, I'm calling from my purple phone. Pretty sweet, huh?"

"SAY WHAT?! OMG no way! That's CRA-"

"Um, hold on, my mom's in the room and can hear me talking. Gotta go. Text me later?"