This weekend's milestone: Ian had his first sleepover with House (Grandma, if you missed that story) last night! It's 9:36AM as I write this sentence and the phone hasn't rung yet, so all must have gone well. :-)
Ian has a new chore/favorite thing to do: he feeds the cats in the morning. I started thinking quite a long time ago about what would be good chores to have him do once he was old enough, and feeding the cats seemed like it would be right up his alley. So for months now, I've made it a point to try to have him around when I feed the cats so that he could see the procedure, and this week he decided (of his own volition, even!) that he was ready to take over: one morning as I was opening up the catfood container he came barrelling into the kitchen. "NOOOOO! Eee-eh do it!" And that was that...it's now HIS job. :-) And I find it funny, how quickly the cats have acclimated to this slight change in routine: Gandalf now meows incessantly at Ian every time he walks into the kitchen, and this morning the cats woke me up at exactly the same time Ian normally wakes up, rather than starting in around 5am with the "feeeeed us! we are poor starving babies!" routine.
Strange side effect of motherhood: I'm on much more of an internal schedule than I used to be. I only need to set an alarm in the morning when I need to be up MUCH earlier than usual, and I apparently cannot sleep in anymore: even with Ian gone, I was up before 8 this morning. In days gone by, I would have gotten up, fed the cats, and gone back to sleep. Not now, though. WHO AM I? I should have spent the morning being productive, but no. Relaxation is good, I know, but I lost a day on Friday to being sick and I have a busy month ahead of me, so I need to Get Things Done.
This picture is cheating: it's from mid-April 2010, just before Ian's birth. With this spring's unusual weather, I was looking around for pictures from previous springs to see when things were blossoming. We had a week of 80-degree temperatures, and so around here most of the flowering trees have already blossomed, and our forsythia is already well past the degree of bloom in this picture. I feel like April is going to seem kind of colorless with so many of the usual April/early May blooms already passed -- or will our return to colder weather make the flowering season last longer? And then there's the question of my lilac: the October snowstorm decimated the poor thing, and I've been waiting anxiously to see whether it survived enough to regenerate somewhat.
I took advantage of the weather two weekends ago to do some work outdoors -- I got my perennial beds cleaned up and pulled last year's plants out of the garden. I'm really sort of flying by the seat of my pants with this whole gardening thing -- I really don't know what I'm doing, so I just do what feels right. ;-) I need to augment the perennial beds this year with something that blooms later in the summer, and we need to decide what's going in the vegetable garden this year. It was nice to have that bout of nice weather to get a headstart on the spring cleanup, so once planting time arrives we can dive right in!