party success!!! it was SO FUN! i am very proud of myself, if i may say so. though i let the ice cream cake melt by accident. we refroze it, and it was fine, if not a bit droopy. the kids took to the painting instantly, and they all made a huge mess, but one that was pretty much on the paper and table. some clothes were shot, but i don't think anyone minded. the bucket of suds was a huge hit too. ava was so incredibly excited that her friends were here, at her house, playing with her, for her birthday. she was a great host, and really rose to the occasion. the kids all liked the food, and then ava started spreading the word (without input from me) that it was time for cake...she started a minor revolution, and all of the kids finished their snacks asap. ice cream cake is the way to go. she actually eats it, vs licking just the icing off. after cake, we had presents, and after presents everyone sort of slowed down, and ava and leena made a fort in the living room, and they were sort of relaxing when suddenly leena said "LET'S GO SWIMMING!!" and off to the dock we went--everyone got in the water, and continued to have fun. there was a struggle over the diving rings, but it worked out. ava showed off her swimming skills, and then we all decided that we were cold, came back up to the house, got dry and then it was time to go.

the party was 3 hours, and it took me 4 hours to clean up. well worth it though. carter and dad arrived home just as i was putting the finishing touches on the house, so that was perfect.

another thing i have to write about: ava waterskiied! well, it is called a ski-skimmer, and it is basically one board that is shaped a bit like a tooth, with a big flat area and then a wide stance for her feet on the 'roots' of the tooth -- and then the rope attaches to the board, and ava holds another rope with a handle that is attached to the board as well. (one guy said "you could tow a horse on that thing!") this way the boat pulls the board, not her arms. it is super cool, and she started out on the platform behind the boat with dad holding the rope and then slowly he started letting her out as we idled along. when she hit the water the board went back and forth a bit, and she looked a bit wide-eyed, and then it stabilized and she was out there, on the water, standing up, cruising along. she looked so cute--because of the width of her stance, she sort of looked like the girl at the top of a waterski pyramid. if she had let go and waved it would not have looked out of place. she never got dunked (which is more than her mother can say, but at least i got to ride), and she did not want to stop. we all cannot wait to do it again. carter thought it was too funny.

he loves to give the animals in his books wet sloppy kisses. it is pretty endearing.

ava's "friends" birthday is tomorrow--she is so excited, we have been counting down the days, and she just could not stop asking me about it. it is so cool that she is so interested in having friends now. i think i am ready, sort of. we have food, nothing fancy, just fruit and veggies and cheese and hummus and crackers etc., all finger foods, and we have drinks, and we have an ice cream cake and candles. we have some balloons for the mailbox and for other non-carter accessible places, and we have our art supplies. i got a bunch of paint and put it in spray bottles with some water and a little liquid detergent, and am going to hang paper from the clothes line and have the kids spray it to see what happens. then i have regular paint and brushes and sponges and glitter paint, paper to paint on, and then a bunch of glue sticks and a box of 'things to glue'--pom poms, ribbon, feathers, etc, and a bowl full of little wooden boxes that are very shaker-esque. so, presumably, the kids will take it from there and decorate paper or the boxes. we have favors as well--i got little plastic buckets and there is the requisite bubble solution, and this cute little wooden wind twister thing that you hang and it twirls, and we also put a flowering plant in each. not sure what the kids are going to think of that, but ava thought it was neat, and everyone is pretty crunchy, so i figure a plant will go over well. then of course, there is swimming. it will be extremely messy.

hopefully ava has a really good time. peter is going to take carter to the wild center, so at least i do not have to worry about him becoming an art project.

he fell on his face in the driveway tonight. he has a really nasty shiner from it, but he never complained, save for a bit of a cry in the beginning. it looks horrible, but he could care less.

well, i am definitely becoming a real mom. i have a 'gift wrapping' section in my basement--with a box for wrapping paper/bags/boxes etc, and a box for bows/scissors/tape. and i am efficient too. i floored myself this evening by coming home and wrapping ava's presents without even a twinge of urgency or stress.

this may have something to do with the fact that we are spreading out ava's birthday celebrations over the course of several days, and i am still 6 days from the big 'friends' party on saturday.

today we went over to nana's and da's for their presents and cupcakes--and it went very smoothly. ava got a thomas the train addition to her collection (as she opened this, she kept saying "oh boy. oooooh boy! oh boy" --it was very cool, it is supposed to be a rollercoaster, and it is a big hill that turns around in a 180 under itself. it provided peter and da with a bit of a challenge, but they figured it out. and she also got a bead stringing kit, that she immediately set to work on. we now have one lovely chunky necklace, with more to come, i am sure. and also, non-popping bubbles that made a disaster of the screen door--they must have a LOT of glycerin in them. or something. glad nana bought them and not me--though they are neat.

tonight i set up ava's new doll and her doll bed, put a red bow around it, and put it in her room for her to find tomorrow morning. this is a BEAUTIFUL doll and bed, and i am so excited--it is from a german company, and the doll is all fabric and the bed is all wood, and both are handmade and i hope she loves them. and then there are several wrapped presents for her in the living room. it should be fun.

and then we are going to bake a carrot cake together, because she insists that her cake HAS to have a carrot on it.

i tore a tendon in my wrist--or something like that. typing is hard, as i have a brace. but more to the point, taking care of kids is hard with one hand. two words: dirty diapers.

thank god grandma was in town. thank you grandma. i do not know what i would have done without you.

how did this happen? well, i was wringing out a wet towel, twisted it hard, and POP! my wrist was no longer functioning. the doctor said, well, this is not that odd, because though your muscles are strong, your tendons and ligaments are getting weak.

uh...are you saying i'm old, doc?

great. 36 and falling apart.

carter said "night night!" -- well, more like "naiiiii naiiiii" but it was unmistakable--he came over to me sort of whimpering and stood against me burying his face in my belly and then looked up and said it. i said "do you want to go night night?" and he did that little impatient bounce that babies do, and tried desperately to get into my lap and continued to say it--"naii naii naiii naaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiii!"

so, we have that and mama. and a lot of singing. he 'sings in this very high pitched a-a-a-a-a-aaa, that he will make louder if you ask him if he is singing.

both kids like the soundtrack from "Run, Lola, Run" and they like Timo Mass. More often than not, our house sounds more like Montreal at 2 AM than a cottage on a little pond.

We all continue to be sick with some gastrointestinal/achy thing, I am starting to wonder how long a human being can feel this gross.

Despite that, we all went to The Wild Center, a new natural history museum in Tupper Lake. Wow, was it terrific. I am so excited that it exists, and cannot wait to get everything that we can out of it. I will write more about it later, but right now I am off to bed, to deal with this illness crud thing.

we went to the beach today for six hours. it was a beach that you had to hike into, and i was pretty much determined to get my money's worth. no way was i going to hike with carter on my back, a backpack of assorted gear on my front, and a bucket full of toys for a half hour only to turn around again after an hour. we met up with a bunch of other moms and kids, much to ava's delight, and she was basically off. i think she interacted with me for all of 15 minutes. carter had a great time, sorting shells and seaweek (lakeweed?) and rocks and branches for hours. i managed to get him down for a nap as well, on a towel, protected by a barrier of backpacks. it was a grand success save for one thing. the sunscreen. apparently, it is safe, but not effective. we will be going back to the toxc variety tomorrow, because we are all reddish today. it kept the sun at bay, but not enough to completely block its effects. hopefully they will not emerge looking like lobsters tomorrow morning.

we have finally exhausted our hand-picked strawberry stash--we managed to get to the u-pick-em patch before they all were picked over to fill almost 4 quarts the other day. it was tremendous fun--ava and carter probably got another quart in them while we were there, and ava got a lesson in food origins. this sounds silly and nerdy, but it was very educational. ava kept saying "i am a really good strawberry picker!" and we had a long conversation about the route food takes to the table--it had a large impact on her. what was especially cool was that there were no pesticides--we had to search through tons of weeds, and there were plenty of insects, but who cares--they were not the biting variety, and we just checked our berries carefully--you had to anyway, in case they were past their prime. and they were DELICIOUS.

ava and i unearthed a box of michaela's old dance recital costumes that i had put away until ava had grown a bit, as she was too small to really get much out of them when michaela first gave them to us. well, it does not take a genius to recognize that a box full of chiffon and sequins would be outrageously excting to a 3-year-old girl. she has had more fun with these things, and last night even slept with a blue chiffon skirt/cape like thing with gold sequins (actually, i think it was an egyptian-style headpiece, but ava prefers it around her waist) over her jammies. her current thing is to put on a red, one-shouldered, flapper style leotard with fringe and sequins plus the afore mentioned blue skirt thing and insist on 'dance' music, which is basically an old house-music cd of peter's. it is like going to a club. and then ava just explodes in a frenzy of movement. if the music is too slow, or not loud enough, she complains.

after a bit of that this morning, she announced that she needed to go pick some peas. so there she was, in the garden, in red and blue and gold sequins with a little basket. it was too funny.

first, i need to remember to note that carter is and has been for a long time, very intent on putting puzzles back together. and it need not be a real puzzle, though that helps. months ago, i introduced him to a variety of puzzles, and he just got it, right off the bat. perhaps most kids do, but ava was not really into it, so this is new to me. by this point, ava was getting some entertainment out of them, but not like he does. he loves to fit things together.

he is better, i am not. still pretty sick.

but i ceaned out the bathroom today. chucked nearly everything. committed to it, and followed through. however, it was not as easy as one would think. obviously, my primary concern was to eliminate putting carcinogens on my kids, but there is always the other 'green' issues to be concerned about. first, recycling. great. all of those bottles can be recycled, so score one for me. but what about all of the stuff in the bottles? where to put it? i know that it eventually would get washed down the drain (well, the soaps would--not the lotions, etc), but at least at that would occur a little bit at a time. should i let it go into our septic? should i let it go into the landfill? it was a hard choice, neither of which was really ok by me. so, i split the baby, and put some down the drain and some in the trash. and i went to the dump and dropped off all of the containers. then i went to nori's (health food store) and got all new soaps and potions and so on. and now i am on a mission to find said lotions and potions online for a lot less than what i spent today!

aaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! i have just spent the last hour on a website created by the environmental working group, called skin deep, which is a database of all sorts of skin care products (and hair, nails etc), created to evaluate the safety of the ingredients in these lotions and potions. it basically was frightening. i consider myself relatively well educated on a variety of toxicity issues, and while i know that i take a risk when using some of the products i use, but this was pretty sobering. on one hand, most of the products i have used on the kids and myself are relatively low risk, but on the other hand, they are certainly "no risk." (what is?). this is one of those parenting black holes, where you can scare yourself silly, getting sucked in to a frenzy of fear that you are inevitably damaging your child's dna at every moment, and so you swear that by god you are going to rid their lives of every toxin. you start chucking everything out (recycling the plastic containers of course) and then you remember that just sitting in the car with all of its plastic and fumes and so on is probably more dangerous than all of the soap ever used on their bodies in their whole lives.

nevertheless, the concern is there, and valid, and so you return to the task at hand, detoxifying yourself and the kids, as much as possible, trying desperately not to sacrifice style, and you realize that this is worthy of its own blog. will she succeed or not? where will she start? the clothing? the bedding? the cosmetics? will she turn completely granola? can she pursue her dream of being hip AND toxin-free?

there have been some small successes: i have eliminated fruit snacks from our household. not a cosmetic, but a the bane of my existence for a long time. i have nothing against candy and sugar, believe me. i am very happy to toss a few skittles in ava's direction when she needs a little attitude boost, but these things drive me nuts. simply because they are housed next to the cereal and under the granola bars in the grocery store, as if they were healthy. they are CANDY. with a little vitamin c. how the hell the cereal companies managed to pull this feat of marketing off, i have no idea. the sad thing is, people actually believe that they are "fruit" -- and thus healthy. please. well, then again, most cereals are pretty much candy anyway, so i suppose i shouldn't be surprised. but they still bother me. "fruit snacks" -- my you know what.

but, yes, i did cave, and i did buy them for ava in a moment of desperation. but NO MORE! hah! general mills take that!

carter is sick with some ridiculous gastrointestinal thing that had him screaming for hours last night, today and a bit of tonight.

and now i think i have it.

and it is my birthday. hooray.

but, on the other hand, about two weeks ago, carter started pointing in earnest--he has been gesturing at things, but not with a directed index finger. now he has the real thing conquered, and is thrilled to point at everything--he knows now that he can point, have me reach for something, shake his head and point again at the thing next to whatever it was that i got, and clarify that he wants THAT. he is also talking up a storm. it is his own language, but nevertheless, he will sit and holler syllables at a toy, desperately trying to communicate with it.

First: Congratulations to Cathy and Marcus – all I know is that you had a little girl on July 1!! I am so happy for you! You will be the most wonderful parents. (My cell phone is still not here, so I did not receive the text message…).

Oh, I love summer!! It was beautiful here today. We did our chores, Ava painted and rediscovered her toys and inexplicably asked for a bath, then packed up and went to do three errands before going to the beach—first we went to the repair shop to retrieve the hose from the back of Big Red, Peter’s ancient and ailing truck, then to the drug store, and then to the dump to drop off our recycling. These weekly trips to the dump have made quite an impact on Ava—it is the Lake Clear Dump (really, the Lake Clear Transfer Station) and therefore everything in Lake Clear is named “The Lake Clear Dump (insert noun).” So, we go to the Lake Clear Dump Playground, and today we went to the Lake Clear Dump Beach, and sometimes we go to the Lake Clear Dump Post Office. While I am glad that she is appreciating the effort that goes into recycling, and she is getting a lesson in waste management, I do hope that she will eventually differentiate and not ask if I am taking her to a Dump Beach in public.

We made it to the beach, and it was great. Carter finally stopped fussing as soon as he spotted the water. It was extremely busy, but we carved out a niche for ourselves, and I got Ava’s floaties on her arms and she was off. While she cavorted in the water to the constant refrain of “that’s too far, Ava,” I got Carter ready. He took off like a shot when I let him go, straight for the water. Right in, crawl crawl crawl gurgle spit cough choke…he just did not stop. I picked him up, redirected him, and eventually just took him into deeper water with Ava where I could hold him. She was busy making friends with every big kid she could find. She would just march over to them and start up a conversation, much to their amusement. To their credit, most were very patient and nice to her. When she got tired of that, she would go to the shore, get into a “ready set go” position and explode straight into the water, running as fast and as far as she could go until it was too deep to run any further. I brought Carter back to the sand, and he was ecstatic. He only ate a few handfuls, then pretty much abandoned that effort for just running his hands in it, picking up and moving it, squishing it, rolling in it, and just having a great time. His toes would get buried and I would say “where are your toes??” and he would laugh and dig for them. Then he started going back in the water. But it only took a few times of going too deep for him to realize what was going on, and he would turn back, return to the edge of the water, laugh and squeal, then do it again. He also figured out that if you move parallel to the shore, the water does not get deeper.

Ava proceeded to insert herself into a group of kids building a pile of sand and a big hole. It was a castle, and she was totally enamored with the entire production. She was recruited to help, which puffed her up with outrageous pride. When they were finished, she asked me to help her do the same, but since Carter was on the move, I had to decline. So what did she do? Went and asked an 8-year-old if she would help her build it. And this kid, bless her soul, did! They sat together building this thing, chatting away like best friends. The older child had a younger sister, who was lugging sand and water to them, and clearly unaware that she had been suckered into the grunt work. I was so proud of all of them, Ava for making friends, and these 2 sisters for being so nice.

At 4 PM, the battle of Mom vs. the Sand and Dirt began. It started with shaking out the (now empty, thanks to Carter) diaper bag, then shaking out everything that was to go in it, then rinsing the beach toys, then undressing Carter and taking him into the water and scrubbing him down then holding him naked on my hip until he dried and the sand would no longer coat him like a sugar cookie should he touch it, then getting him diapered and into the backpack, then shaking out the remaining towels, then getting Ava’s shoes on, loading up and heading to the car. At the car I got Ava naked, dusted her off since she was dry, put her clothes back on, and packed everything in the car. When I turned on the car, it was 5 PM.

When we got home, I stuffed them full of blueberries, and drew a bath. We all got in it, as I was no squeaky clean specimen myself, and when we got out, the water was brown. I mean REALLY BROWN. At least I did not blow off the bath by rationalizing that they had been in the water already. The problem is that there is actually a lot of charcoal in the sand because people have beach fires, and so there is this black dust incorporated into the sand, dust that is very tenacious.

On the other hand, I did have a realization on the beach as I was struggling with the fact that I had sand everywhere. I suddenly recognized the superb exfoliating opportunity at my feet for free! So, while Carter buried my toes, I rationalized that they might be filthy, but they would eventually be smooth.

And now, I am going to do some laundry and read Real Simple with total abandon, and try not to fret over the grammar of the title. Is it “Really Simple” or “Real. Simple.” It drives me nuts. But I love the magazine, for its ability to transform housekeeping into a chic endeavor. Never in a million years did I ever think that I would look at a photo spread on brooms with serious interest.