Here.

Spring is here and we've been busy getting outside and walking, exercising, and watching these kids grow! Squawky is way beyond army crawling now; she's pulling up and walking alongside furniture. It's incredible the rate at which her gross motor skills have developed compared to the Little Goat who didn't walk until after a year. Every day it is more apparent just how different our girls are.

The LG is developing in her own areas. She can recognize a little over half of the alphabet when she sees the letters (even some upside down!), though we haven't made much progress on memorizing them. She's been enjoying our walks and reading books. Yesterday, when she was outside with LJ she told him she wanted to "dig the garden." Soon. We went out to feed Earl the Squirrel ('he' and 'Alice' live in our backyard) and instead of leaving one of the pieces of bread on the log by the fire pit, she just sat down and ate it. Luckily, Earl found the chunk of bread on top of the shed a little while later.

The trees in our backyard have almost all started to leaf out just in this past week, the tulips are about to bloom and some of the flowers we planted last summer actually made it through the winter and are about to bloom too. All of this is happening quite a bit earlier than usual this year. I can't think of an April in recent memory when I could wear just a tshirt outside and be roasting. Hopefully it's not an indication of how hot it will be this summer because me and heat - not the closest friends.

Speaking of heat. The guys that live in the tiny house beside us (really, everybody around here knows it as The Little House) are getting ready to move out sometime this summer. They rent and the owner has plans to build a house. In the meantime, they have been cutting and burning trees/wood on the property to help clear it off. We're pretty sure it has digressed almost entirely to the point of simply seeing how high they can make the flames go during their weekend bonfires. We've seen flames at least 15 feet high and the pile of stuff waiting to burn is crazy! At least 48 wood pallets, the cut logs from two trees that were at least three stories tall each. Oh, and a shed. Yes, they are slowly dismantling an entire shed. (We're wondering if they're going to take apart and burn the house piece by piece too.) It's really quite the sight behold.

In other news, the missions team from our church left last Wednesday for Indonesia for two weeks. For the month of April, there is a challenge at church to walk/run during the week to see if collectively we can walk the distance to Indonesia. I can't remember what the total number of kilometers walked so far is, but my personal total is 85km in the least three weeks and I'm pretty excited about that!

I have a post half-written about our Lenten experience this year and I really want to get it up on the blog. Finding time to write has been a challenge lately though but I'm shooting for sometime this week. Er, hopefully. Hope everybody's enjoying some nice spring weather wherever you are!