Full Day

It was a fun, busy day today. It wouldn't be fall in Michigan without a trip to the apple orchard. Benjamin's preschool class took a field trip there today and I brought Isabella and Christian along. It was so fun to see how excited they were about the tractor ride and picking out their own apple. Also, Isabella was convinced she was one of the class. Even when they said that only the preschoolers were to do a certain thing and siblings were to stay with parents, she was bound and determined to participate. As I'm wont to do, I ignored the rules, and let her join in. She sat with them during the presentation and followed her brother everywhere he went. If she'd ever disrupted, I would have taken her out, but she was a perfect little preschooler - even raising her hand to answer questions! :) At one point I overheard a grandma ask, "Is that little girl in the sunglasses in the class? She's so small." No, she just thinks she is.

Afterwards we rushed to Benjamin's gymnastics class and they gave out a coloring sheet at the end which Bella wanted to paint. So we came home and painted. I decided since we'd been to the orchard, we should do a painting related to that. So we made our own orchards by painting the trees and then glueing red tissue paper onto them as apples and apple blossoms. (We did that by wrapping small squares of tissue paper around a pencil eraser and dipping them in the glue.) While we did that, Benjamin asked to go play at McDonalds, so I made them promise not to demand we buy anything there, and we walked over. There were a ton of kids there and they had a blast playing together while I got a chance to rest and feed Christian. Poor neglected third child. This is the place I've found he likes best:


He's not a big fan of his bouncer seat, but he actually fell asleep in his jumperoo shortly after I took this picture. I was commenting to a friend today that with Benjamin I was too inexperienced to recognize his cues early on. Tired, hungry, gassy??? Who knows? My schedule was his schedule and I could have met his needs at all times had I had a clue what they were. Now I'm on the third and I can read him really well. But now I don't have the time to do anything about it! He gets tired and overstimulated while we're at the orchard or while we're at library story time and there's nothing I can do, short of dragging everyone else home. Poor kid.

We got home from McD's just in time to make some dinner and read books before bed. It was a fun day, though. Also, it was the first day that I sported this new look:


I finally did what I've wanted to do for years and years. I got to the point where I so hated my hair that I had nothing to lose. Even if I ended up hating it short, I couldn't possibly hate it more than I already did. Turns out I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE having short hair. I don't really like the way I look with it and I still feel like a total stranger is looking back at me in the mirror, but I LOVE the feel of it and I love the ease of it. I may never have long hair again.