life is a bit challenging these days: ava is petrified of going outside, due to the remote chance that she might get "bumped" by lightning. PETRIFIED. it is a very difficult thing to deal with. primarily because i have another child that is dying to go outside. not to mention myself. we have talked and talked about it, she seems to understand the relative risk (lightning=not so much of a risk, logging truck on our road=major daily risk), that there will not be lightning when there are blue skies ("BLUE!"), and so on. to no avail. she needs a roof over her head. so today, that roof became the roof of the little bike trailer. i was practically insane and just announced that this was what we were doing. amazingly, she dealt with it. probably because she was sheltered. in a metal frame trailer, but hey, i let that one go.

and it is REALLY tough to haul about 80 pounds behind you on a bike on a dirt road. ava is 35 lbs, carter is 25 lbs, and the trailer is about 20 lbs, maybe more, so i did not go exactly fast.

top it off, she has a new defiance that is very tough to handle. i cannot even discuss it yet.

but. the wakeup basket is going well, with the one exception being the sheer volume of artwork that both kids are producing. it always was hard to stay on top of, but now i am swimming in paintings and drawings -- and i actually do want to keep track of it, so each night i am sitting down with them, relegating the redundancies or the not so exciting ones to the recycle bin and signing and dating the others.

carter was painting little blue marks all over his paper the other day, then he stopped, pointed to one and said "meow" -- apparently he was painting blue cats. i believe they were his first acknowledged representational art.

he is DEFINITELY about to be 2. he has his own tantrums, and wow. worst part is he loses all communicative skill, because when you are flailing around and crying, it is very hard to sign. so often i have absolutely NO IDEA what he is upset about.

it is amazing how challenging it is to guide 2 small children through a day. there are many other challenges in life, and some that are truly harder to learn and accomplish, but wowie, this one is hard in a unique way, and i think it might be because i am basically required to be the master brain for 3 people. my brain has to do all of the emotional regulating that their brains are not ready to do. not only that, but it also has to do all --well, almost all -- of the logical reasoning and much of the cognitive processing, guiding their heads through the steps of finding an answer, making a good decision, and so on. i have to be inside their heads AND mine at all times. and that is a lot of information that is very hard to keep track of.