Ponytail and skinny jeans

Dash rocked quite the eclectic look this morning. He had the bottom half of a hipster in his skinny jeans and slip-on shoes. His torso went lumberjack chic in a plaid shirt and L.L.Bean fleece vest. And then there was the hairstyle which was inspired by his sister's ponytail so can fairly be described as a small bit of cross-dressing. I love this dude and his hilarious style.

Backyard play

When we bought our house nearly five years ago, we had neither pets nor mobile kids, so we had no idea what an advantage our fenced-in backyard would turn out to be.  Five years later, that yard gets heavy activity for all sorts of outdoor play.  

Dash's current obsession is the rain barrel.  He can fill up a tiny cup of water, carry it across the yard, dump it into another container, and go back for more for approximately forever.  He usually ends up soaked but it's a small price to pay for free, happy, outdoor fun.

Careful water transport

Ella uses the backyard as her own personal gym these days.  She practices cartwheels in the grass and does all sorts of dangerous leaps from the small plastic slide set.  She also continues her love of making 'cakes' from sand, dirt, and other detritus she finds in the yard.  They always sound tasty (chocolate peanut butter blueberry cake!) but I have thus far avoided having to actually eat them despite her pleas that I do so.

I used to be scared of her climbing onto the platform of this 

little slide.  Silly me, I should have saved my worry for the day 

(that has now come) when she insists on balancing on top of 

the side rails and then leaping off.

Working mother fail

Last week, I had to travel for 3 days for work.  Before I had kids, I used to love work travel. It was fun to get out of my routine and to see and do new things.  As soon as I had kids, work travel ceased to be much fun at all.  If I'm going to be away from my kids, I'd much rather it be for a vacation.  And the logistics related to work travel with young kids is exhausting for me.  We have to arrange additional childcare during the week, make changes to our carefully orchestrated routine of school and activity pick-ups and drop-offs, and then of course there is the simple fact that I miss the kids and they miss me when I am gone.  I used to think that leaving a little baby was much harder than leaving a bigger kid.  All that lugging of breast pump parts and arguing with TSA agents about the coolers full of milk and ice.  But I've come to learn that that was the easy phase of working mother travel.  Now, I have two people who are big enough to really miss me, and they are not shy about articulating their feelings of sadness in ways that make me feel horribly guilty.  Last week, I planned my travel so carefully to be home for bedtime on Friday night.  My flight was supposed to arrive at 7 pm, I didn't check my luggage so I could avoid baggage claim, and I even bought the seat upgrade so I could sit at the front of the plane and shoot out of there as soon as we landed.  On a good day, my flight can land at RDU and I can be in my house 35 minutes later.  But you know what they say about the best-laid plans, right?  I arrived home at 12:40 a.m., 5 hours later than planned.  Needless to say, I missed bedtime.