Snapshots of the day

We had nice weather today for December, it was sunny and I don't know how warm but the girls and I spent quite a bit of time outside playing with the dog and cleaning up the yard and chicken house. I set the baby on a sheet and she happily scooted about (she doesn't crawl, she scoots) while I moved chicken litter from the hen house to the garden beds and raked leaves into the pen. I think I'll do fine this winter if we have lots of this kind of weather!

At one point I overheard Ellie calling Julia "Baby Chestnut" as part of some game they were playing. Sophie told her that was a weird name, to which Ellie replied "what else do you want me to call her, Baby Chester? Now THAT would be a weird name!"
Ah, the impeccable logic of the 6-year-old.

Anna now has an imaginary sister named Daisy that rides in her flower car and follows us as we drive around town. Anna has taken to shouting to me at regular intervals as I'm driving, "I see her, Mom, look, it's my sister right beside us in her car!" If I don't acknowledge Daisy, she'll just keep screaming at me until I do, which can be pretty distracting in heavy traffic. She (Anna) also refused to get into the van today until I pretended to take Daisy's hand and help her into her car. Just add that to my list of things to do.

The day was pleasant considering we started the morning with a fire in the living room. Tony got up early, and went into the living room, and screamed "Fire!!" which woke us up pretty fast. It was a mess. I guess I left a candle burning and it ignited the plastic tray of Julia's high chair which was for some reason sitting on top of the bookcase next to the candle and some papers. I could have burned down the whole house had it all ignited sometime earlier in the night, or had Tony not decided to get up early. It has made me painfully aware of our lack of emergency planning, so we're making a fire safety plan right away. I'm also going to get a fire extinguisher and replace batteries in the smoke detectors.

I leave you with a several months old but really cute photo of Julia.