I love going through photos. Sorting and editing the best pictures is almost like editing my life. I get to focus on the smiles and good things. Times that are not great are trashed.

Life is normal. But normal is awesome when you have two cute kids. The weather isn’t as hot, so we’ve been playing outside. There are still plenty of mosquitoes, and we have the bites to prove it.

Some of the pictures are from Stone Mountain: we visited with friends on Saturday.

And just a hint to make this post prettier. Come to my actual site and click on a picture to enter the gallery setting on WordPress. The photos will be large and beautiful, as is intended.

At bath time, I was doing dinner dishes while Joe was bathing the kids. Not too long after they headed out on their pursuit of cleanliness, I hear a commotion…and soon after my husband appeared holding a naked, crying baby. Joe had undressed baby CD and PB ripped off his diaper and climbed in. Normal procedure, but PB had neglected to tell Daddy until after he had climbed in that he was poppy. The bathtub was filled with poop. At the same time CD, who was luckily not in the bath yet, peed all over my dear husband. Joe yelled to me for help, which made CD upset and he started crying.

We transfer the kids to the second bathtub and during the process CD peed on Joe again. I was laughing my head off after all that. I got the kids clean, Joe changed, and the original shower cleaned up easily. This story provides a good example of why potty training is good. But PB wants nothing to do with it.

Tuition was paid for the last time! Excitement! One more semester and we will finally be done with school! On the same note, I just bought tickets for the flight home for the kids and me. Just a few more months out here.

When people have babies for the first time you often hear about feelings of fear and not knowing what to do. I’ve heard people say jokingly, “Wouldn’t it be nice if children came with instruction manuals?” My Lamaze teacher had a better view about it. She said that there’s no reason to not know what you are doing and feel helpless, there are plenty of books out there. She suggested Penelope Leach. I bought the book Your Baby and Child.

It’s divided into chapter based on age. I read each section right before PB entered that age group. It helped me understand my kids and how to handle them. Sometimes I have a parenting issue, read a section (re-read now, I’ve read the book cover to cover) and feel much better. There aren’t  magical solutions, but it’s good to know that first; your child’s erratic behavior is perfectly normal and second; there are good ways to deal with the erratic behavior. I don’t follow everything in the book, but I get a good place to start from instead of starting from nothing.

I also read and loved (again I think I made it through this book cover to cover), The Nursing Mother’s Companion. I ended up nursing Peter past a year, nearly exclusively. Curtis is on the same track.

In one of Bill Cosby’s albums he says, “Intellectuals go to study things that people do naturally.” Reading up on child-rearing can be like that. But I believe that all my book reading has helped me be a better parent. What books do you like to read about parenting?

My son is growing from a toddler to preschooler, and I am suddenly confronted with the task of education. As I was thinking about school my mind turned to my own schooling.

I loved biology in high school, and felt a strong push to go into a science related field. I choose horticulture. Plenty of my peers had no love of science, but loved the art of designing and showing gardens. My peers complained over the science classes we had to take–chemistry, biology, genetics. They would rather take flower arranging, advanced landscape design. A professor told me that horticulture was a science degree. He did not look highly on the artsy design classes.

Both my professor and my peers lost the beauty of horticulture. Horticulture is a wonderful combination of both art and science. Nowhere is this more evident for me than in pruning trees. My favorite class in college was a graduate level class on environmental plant physiology. It involved a lot of hard-science and math calculations to determine exactly how plants grew. It also gave me the best education on pruning. As I understood how plants grew, I knew what I was trying to achieve in pruning.

When I’m in front of the tree, I’m not running calculations through my head. I use the science I know and turn it into an art. I envision how that tree can best get light and grow healthy and strong. With the skillful stroke of my pruners, I shape it into my vision. Pruning is my favorite art from. But if I had no understanding of the science behind it, it would not be beloved art, but a misunderstood chore.

I went  into horticulture as a scientist. But horticulture taught me to be an artist too.

This last week I happily was able to break out my beloved loppers and prune some shrubs. I miss having a garden. I am hoping that next garden season I will have a place to live that is not a temporary pit-stop. Apartments stink. I want land.

Most of life is simple, repetitive. But joyful too. I’ve been thinking about how sometimes life feels like a washing machine cycle. Wash, rinse, spin, repeat. Laundry never seems to get done. But even though life can get repetitious, it never does truly repeat itself. The varied repetition is the best way that we can learn and grow. We learn repetitiously, like performing math problems over and over. Muscles grow by doing the same exercise over and over. So life is the same way.

Ready? Go! Step on the yoga block, go under the chair, over the mat, bounce the ball, go under the baby gym, rock on the bouncer and jump over the finish line. Repeat. A lot. Then go play cars. Eventually:

I thought he was getting to old to do that. Apparently he got tuckered out by the obstacle course. And if you need something else to make you laugh: