Esta mañana

To follow our crazy weekend/beginning of week, Joaquin and I had a relaxing morning. We woke up late, played, got a few chores done and then went hiking with Johanna. Joaquin responded to a less hectic pace by being exceedingly charming so I kept taking pictures the whole day. We started by playing a game that Joaquin invented awhile ago but still remembers occasionally and wants to play. You place a blanket over your and Joaquin's head and this is called a 'blanket house'. Once inside the blanket house Joaquin hisses like a snake and then the other person playing has to yelp "Help I'm trapped in a blanket house with a snake!" and throw the blanket off him/herself. Then Joaquin thrashes about wildly for a few seconds, takes the blanket off and snuggles with you to 'help you' stop being scared by the snake. Repeat. I swear to you I am not making this up, nor did I initiate this game. That was all Joaquin. So this picture is Joaquin inside a blanket house.

Once the snake game paled, I decided to get some laundry done. Taking the sheets off reminded Joaquin of the wrapping paper supplies I keep under my bed. He pulled them out to 'wrap his tractor'. Fortunately he didn't actually use any wrapping paper since all mine is safely encased in plastic. But he was very cute bundling up his tractor in tissue paper. I folded up a box for him and he kept putting the tractor, the trailer and tissue paper inside. Then when it was arranged to his satisfaction, Joaquin would open the present and exclaim "It's a tractor!" (The following videos are of this event.)

Then we pulled out the backpack in preparation for our hike. Joaquin was very interested in the backpack since he hasn't seen it in awhile and we filled up all the pockets with necessary items like fruit snacks and wallets and extra pull-ups. Johanna went with us and we strolled around the bosque for 45 minutes. Technically this was supposed to be an attempt at cardiovascular exercise, but once Joaquin got bored in the backpack and wanted to walk we were moving a pretty slow pace. Still I think I made up for it with the time I had to carry him. Joaquin is not a lightweight and now he's so tall that carrying him is difficult! But we had a great time. We actually went out onto a sandbank that jutted into the river and Joaquin kept running to the edge saying, "it's a beautiful day for the beach", which I think is a quote from Max & Ruby. Then we played with sticks and fallen logs which Joaquin kept telling us came from puppy wood, which is apparently what he heard when we told him they were fallen cottonwoods.

I'll end this post with a few funny Joaquin speeches. 1) He likes to twirl and get dizzy and then try to describe the effect. The other day at the mall he tells me, "Mama, I twirl and twirl and the mall falled down!". 2) He was telling me the other day about seeing a whale and shooting it, a game he got from his friend Gabriel. But I don't this he really understood what Gabriel meant, because he showed me how he shot with his thumb and then he told me that whales came shooting out, and then they grew bigger and were food. Hmmmm.... 3) Yesterday was our first day of Wow biblestudy for the fall and apparently they had a biblestory in the children's class. See if you can guess it from what Joaquin first told me, "We had a story and it was dark, your eyes shut, and then the light came (whooosh!)." I said, okay and then what happened, and he said something about light again and then ground. I finally clicked that it was the creation story and said, "oh, did God make light when it was dark?" So he tells me, all excited, "Yes! And he made ground and there were lots of animals" all this with much waving of hands. I'm so impressed with Chelsea's storytelling ability b/c he really remembered so much of it.