Summer days, driftin' away...

The past few weeks, I've kind of allowed myself to be swept away by summer a little bit.
The warm weather, the walking paths, the play dates, the new things we've had going on around our home.

I feel like it's really easy this time of year to want to just step away from the computer and the inside for a little bit and focus on spending every waking moment soaking in the sun and the soft breezes. Especially after the winter we just had!

The kids have been growing like weeds as well.

I feel like I just randomly looked at Little Man today and he's turning into this tall, slim little boy compared to the teeny squishy baby with the rolls that I once knew. Each day he has more questions about really significant topics. One explanation is never enough, there are always at least four sub-questions to each topic still, but it's so fantastically amazing how much he is learning and how quickly he is learning it. Each day, I'm really learning over and over that Little Man benefits the most and prefers to learn the best when he is given not opportunities to do - but really explanations of why for each and every point through the day. I'm still trying to give him opportunities to interact and learn with and from his environment, but it really is the second best option when it comes to how his brain works. It's fairly obvious his thought processes are so similar to DH and my dad in their engineering ways - Little Man has to research how it works before he jumps in to try it!

One of the few activities that never needs an explanation - washing his ride!
Little Lady has really hit the big, looming, pre-two-year-old language boom. She has gone from around 20 words at her last check up to probably 40-50 words now, and gains more words each day. Some of the words she recently learned being owl, swing, I love you {swoon}, rock, nursies, and many more. She is so in that fun stage where, when repeated enough, every isolated word has a chance of being repeated back by her teeny little mouth. With this new boom of language though, Little Lady has very much realized she cannot express all her needs and also has the new-found joy of the exceedingly dramatic, throw yourself on the floor, flail a little bit, and then look up to see if it worked tantrum. I remember Little Man went through something very similar for a while, and I will be so relieved when she's able to express herself enough that she doesn't need the frustrated slumping on the ground! For now, if you see us out around town and I'm carrying a wailing, flailing darling - don't mind us a bit!

Both of the kids have been showing me the most adorable snippets of love these past few weeks as well, though. As I mentioned, Little Lady recently learned to say "I love you." Typically, she had only been saying it right before bedtime when I said it to her, but recently Little Lady also said it just randomly after I gave her some grapes with her dinner. Be still, my heart. She additionally has found comfort through some of her frustrations or upsets in being held so close to me, with her arms squeezing around my neck and back, her face buried into my shoulder. She is a fierce hugger, and it's absolutely lovely.

Little Man has been having some difficulty getting himself to sleep the past week or so, but I honestly almost don't mind. Each night, he'll come out of his room and call for us {which we've been encouraging him to do} to use the bathroom an hour or so after we put him in bed. Once he's finished and put back together for bed though, he doesn't want to go back to sleep. Some nights I am pretty tired by that point, but other nights I'm just soaking in the extra snuggles, one {or three} more stories, looking out his window and talking about how astronauts reach the big, round moon, or just how he wants to lay quietly together in his bed - reaching out his hand every few minutes to rest on my cheek to make sure I'm still there.

If this is the start to our summer, I think it's going to be a fantastic season of our lives.