more good pictures

Lassen Volcanic Park

We went to Lassen with Josh's friend Cynthia Marshall, her husband, and her two kids. We stayed in a house from airbnb in the town of Mineral. The house had lots of kids' books and toys, and a cool fort in the backyard. It was a crazy, otherworldly kind of park. Mud pots and steam rising from the earth, and rocks of every color. We had a good time.

Also, we got swallowed up by a tree:

Peanut butter poop

I will come later to the explanation of the title of this post. In the meantime, Aviva is doing a lot of new things and is getting bigger and bigger every day. She's a little girl and not a baby. And sometimes she's mean to Noah, and I'm glad it's not a one-way thing.

We had a good time with Abuelita and Greg.

Aviva has a few words. Hi - she likes to pretend to talk on the phone and say "hi." Sometimes it's my watch that she's talking to, and sometimes a little plastic buffalo, and sometimes a monkey. Anything that is the right approximate size - it's good to use as a phone. 

Also she says "daddy" or "doggy" for any animal. Well, most people are either "daddy" or "mama." Everyone is one of those two. 

She kind of grunts or whines "eh! eh!" when she wants something, and points to what she wants. She also pats the seat next to her or pats the couch if she wants to sit there or have you sit there. 

Okay. I'm going to write about our trip to Lassen, and I'm going to hope you forgot about the peanut butter poop, so I won't have to explain it.

Mama, I'm your best friend

Abuelita and Greg came to visit and we had a really good time. Noah loved being Greg's sack of potatoes. And they played trains a lot. Greg also taught Noah how to throw paper airplanes. We went to the Little Farm and Steam Trains at Tilden, went to Fisherman's Wharf and the Ferry Building Farmers Market in SF, the north Berkeley farmer's market, and just a lot of hanging out.

Noah has been telling me that he is my best friend. Sometimes, he says I'm his best friend, but mostly he's telling me that he is mine. I ask him if this is his way of telling me he loves me, and he says yes.

He often gives me packages. They are invisible packages, and he wants me to open them. Last time it was a banjo, that I should play with my fingers. He gave one to Aviva also.

There is a lot of talking, generally. And he really wants to know things. He asks a lot of WHY questions, really wanting to know. But there is often no answer. Why do I like the juice? Why is it not tomorrow yet? When will it be tomorrow? Why?

I have a tic-tac-toe set that a former student gave me, and we've been playing that. It's not until someone wins, but until we run out of pieces and all the spaces are filled. Then we look for three in a row. He likes that game.

Yesterday he made me some pretend carrot chocolate soup, and asked me if I very much like it. And I did very much like it.

We have some fruit flies in the kitchen and I was mentioning them to Josh. We started talking about what they are, and how they are so teeny tiny. Noah said that they are SO teeny tiny you can't even see their paws.

When Noah likes something a lot, he wants to do it all day long. Or he wants to play it all day long, or look at it all day long, or eat it all day long. Yesterday when he was starting to wake up in the morning, he wanted a bunch more sleep. A bunch of sleep all day long.