First Kiss (or, what happens when you feed a giraffe by mouth).

Naturalist got her first kiss today, and let me just say he was a real animal.

“Hey Babe! Come gimme some sugar!”
It all started innocently enough while we were visiting the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs. They have an amazing African Rift exhibit where you get up close and personal with the giraffes. [...]

Miss Independent.

Sassy has been working on her independence for a while now. Like, since birth. Her height (or lack of) has always worked against her…there’s only so much you can do when your little hands won’t reach higher than the edge of the countertops.
Our last trip to Moab she learned some mountain [...]

Tornado-shy.

Alright. So, I haven’t been around a lot of tornados, and I haven’t lived in a lot of places where tornados happen. In fact, as Jen inadvertently pointed out, I am terribly ignorant about tornados. While her son was at school huddling under a desk in lockdown, my kids were running around [...]

Tornados–what the hail?

I’m sitting here under a tornado watch. Seriously. This afternoon a storm cell blew through here depositing big marble to golf ball sized hail, which set off car alarms and carpeted the ground in ice.
The kids put on their bike helmets and ran out to investigate. While outside, Golfer pointed [...]

Nightmare.

I had a horrible dream the other night. I dreamt that I was stuck in my car because of all this crap that had piled up in it. And this crap just kept getting higher and higher until I could barely breathe. In my dream, we had taken a roadtrip and it [...]

The Color of Place.

My lovely friend over at A View From Here wrote a great blog talking about terroir, which is a ‘taste of place’. Since I had no idea what this was until she wrote about it, I’ll let her explain it in her own words:
This is the subtle taste that comes from a [...]

Homeschool Anniversary.

This weekend, while ‘cleaning the house’, I thought It’d be a great use of my time to go through my old posts here at Child’s Play. Can you say, “easily distracted”?
Anyway, it dawned on me that I’ve passed the three year mark for how long I’ve been homeschooling! Yessiree, three years [...]

I’m a Pro!

At least, that’s what Flickr calls me. Just having someone tell me I’m a ‘Pro’ over and over is totally worth the $24 a year.
I’ve been wanting to upgrade my account for a while, but kept using that $24 for other more immediate and pressing things. Like, Starbucks hot chocolate. [...]

When 9 months is longer than 4 years.

I swear, 9 months of this:

felt like 4 years.
But then, all of a sudden, that became you:

(see…even back then you were our princess…)
And then, in a flash, you became this:

I blinked, and then you became this:

which oh-so-quickly became this:

(which is precisely when ‘The Toddler’ became ‘The Sassy Princess’.)
And GOOD GRIEF, child! Can I get [...]

‘Dare to Do It’–Irene Sendler

I haven’t done a ‘Dare to Do It’ blog in forever–I’d kinda forgotten that I’d even started it until this weekend. I read about so many inspirational/brave/pioneering/interesting people and I wanted a place to highlight some of the stories I come across.
Remembering it this weekend was perfect timing, because I just read an [...]