Springtime and Some Cute Animal Pictures

It's been a busy couple of weeks! Mira is continuing with her Terrible Twos and sometimes it seems like the only thing that can keep both of us sane is going outside. Luckily it's been gorgeous weather and Mira is finally at the age where she can play on playgrounds by herself and she's actually pretty adventurous.

Beautiful spring days

Investigating the garden hose.

Eating strawberries - between the two of us we could eat a couple pounds at a time.

This next picture needs some explaining. Mira loves to draw with sidewalk chalk, except it always turns into her directing me what to draw. So because she's learning different parts of the face I drew a face. Her embellishment (which she had no idea she was doing) was to grab the green chalk and draw a large booger coming out of the nose. I personally found this absolutely hilarious, especially since she had no idea that boogers are green and come from your nose. (Hey, what can I say, I'm a nurse and no bodily fluid is off-limits!)

 Here are some pictures of various other animals of ours enjoying the weather.

You may have to zoom in to see there's a white kitty sitting in the storage box on the back of the ATV.

The new chicks are at the awkward gawky "teenager" stage.

They like to sit on your lap any time you give them a chance.

I took Mira out for a walk and our neighbor's sprinklers were on. Mira ran back and forth through them on the sidewalk a few times and then leaned over to investigate one that wasn't spraying the water correctly. Suddenly the whole sprinkler head popped off and a huge geyser of water shot up out of the ground right at Mira. She was more startled than anything but I sure got a laugh out of it.

Of course what goes along with the few quiet moments is she likes to dig in her heels and refuse to come inside/leave the park/etc. which turns into another tantrum. Some days I feel like I'm just going tantrum to tantrum and I'm desperately trying to figure out ways to prevent another one from happening. In fact, a few days ago I dropped Mira off at the daycare at the gym for an hour and when I came back to get her I was informed that she had spent the entire hour going up to kids and hitting and punching them. Even after a few time-outs she would go right back to beating up the other kids so eventually they made her stand by herself away from everyone else. I was absolutely mortified at the time and told Mira as we were driving home that hitting is not okay, and feeling in general like a pretty crappy mom. But the more I talked about it the funnier it seemed. Now I laugh when I tell the story. At least I don't have to worry about her not being able to fend for herself!

I have to give her credit for being smart - or rather a smartie-pants. At dinner I told her if she wanted a brownie she had to empty her plate. So, she did what I told her. She took all the food off her plate.

I have to put in some pictures of Wally just because I find him in the most ridiculous places and it makes me giggle.

 And finally:

This girl might be busy and nonstop and make me want to pull my hair out most days but it's the super cute moments like these that make it all worth it.

Some family recently came into town and that's a whole blog post by itself - which will be up in a couple of days. I was going to add them into this post but that would be a rreeeaaaalllllyyyy long post so I'll be nice and break it up.