It's been kind of a busy month. You've been doing school and lessons. I'm still not working, so we still go to the park a lot. We have been meeting some of the other kids who play at the park, and sometimes that works out pretty well. One day we were walking back to our car and another car pulled up to the curb to park. You stopped and were staring at the car. I thought you might have been a little scared or startled, but then you pointed and said, "Mom, it's Uncle Alex!" I got very confused for a moment, but when I walked back to see what you were talking about, the man got out of the car and I saw that he was wearing military fatigues.
Uncle Alex and Aunt Lena and Lena's mom Maria did come up to visit on a different day. They brought the movie Ice Age 2, which you promptly made them watch with you. Uncle Alex played Legos with you for a long time, too. They also brought up an airplane model, which was far too old for you, but which you begged to put together. I managed to put you off until the following Saturday, but then we went to the Western Museum of Flight at the Torrance airport, and I bought you and Miriam little toy metal airplanes instead. So now hopefully the model airplane can live in a drawer somewhere until I'm reasonably sure that you won't glue yourself to a table while putting it together.
The Museum of Flight was small but interesting. They had big models of some aircraft and a large collection of little models. There was a small experimental aircraft that you could sit in, and a large fighter jet that you could sit in. One of the best parts for you was being able to sit and watch the actual runways, where the small planes were taking off and landing. That was very cool.
You still don't like swimming lessons, but we ended up out at the storage unit one day and I found the bin with our snorkels in it. So we brought that home and you've been playing with the snorkel in the bathtub. One day we even filled up the giant tub in the master bedroom and let you play in there. It's so big you even went diving for a quarter a couple of times.
We explored a new fruit this month. Grandpa walked past a pomegranate tree in a neighbor's yard. He asked if we could pick a couple of them and the man said we could. So we brought home a couple of pomegranates, and you've been having fun sucking on the little seeds when you need a sweet treat.
Our tomato harvest was quite large this month. Luckily, the tomatoes themselves are the small cherry tomatoes. We also discovered a bunch of caterpillars on the tomato plant. We got all excited at first, but when I tried to look up what kind they might be, it turned out they were a pesty type of moth. We still took a couple to school in the hopes that your class would be able to watch a moth come out of a cocoon. We'll see if it happens. Speaking of school, your school picnic was this month, over at Wilson Park. It was fun to meet other parents and put some names with faces. There were some parents that Dad knew from dropping you off in the mornings, and some parents that I knew from picking you up in the afternoon. There were some crafts to do, including decorating your school shirt. You painted a volcano on it, naturally.
I've been very homesick this month. It snowed in Minneapolis, which was just a reminder that we don't live in the Midwest any more. We had some cool days here, but this weekend it's supposed to be back up to 80 degrees. That doesn't feel like autumn to me. Dad and I celebrated our wedding anniversary, and we didn't get to go to our favorite restaurant. It's Dad's birthday this week, and while we haven't had a big party for him in a couple of years, we usually managed to do something with friends. And we're coming up on Halloween, which we usually spent visiting with other families on our block. I miss all of those things.
On another Halloween note, we've been reading a graphic novel called One Spooky Night. We just grabbed a couple of graphic novels from the library. You've started drawing pictures where there is so much action happening that eventually the image is indecipherable. So I thought I'd introduce you to graphic novels, in the hopes that you'll start drawing a series of images instead of one on top of the other. You've always liked comic strips and you seem to enjoy the graphic novel format. Now, if only they made a magna doodle divided into panels, we'd be all set.
For Halloween, you were a skeleton. You had decided on that at the beginning of the month, so I managed to find a skeleton hoodie and some skeleton pajamas. You wore your costume to school and the park and then to the Halloween Carnival, also at Wilson Park. Dad took the afternoon off of work and the three of us had a fun time playing carnival games. You came home with a good amount of candy--enough to keep you happy for a while. It was a fun day. Although, I do hope that you end up trick-or-treating in the snow or rain sometime in your life, just so that you can understand how Halloween used to be for your parents.
Love,
Mom
Oh, and PS, I cut your hair in a mohawk.
Tomatoes:
