This is what awaited us...

  at "the Dish" this morning!!!!!!  Ah!!!!!  Instead of running, we watched this tarantula walk with us on our path for a good 10-15 minutes.  (The Dish is a popular place to walk in Palo Alto.  We drive down there and meet up with friends about once a week.  It is an open space preserve, which means, "walk at your own risk"  they have signs warning you of coyotes and mountain lions, and thankfully we have never seen any of those, but this is coming a little too close for comfort. )  Madeline was both scared and intrigued at the same time, but she ended up showing the spider her teddy bear, so I guess the coin landed on the "this is a good spider" side. Go figure.  I was fine to walk beside it, it was actually really interesting; the way two legs were synchronized at a time.  And we just finished reading Charlotte's Web!  So it was perfect!  And that's one of the things I love the most about being a stay at home mom is that we can sit as long as we want and watch spiders, or construction trucks, or whatever we want.  I always seem to digress to why I love being a stay at home mom.  Start talking about spiders, of course I end up talking about being a stay at home mom!  Duh!  Anyway, our list of wild animals we've seen at the dish includes: deer, ground squirrels, a blue heron,  Adam has seen a rattlesnake, lizards, and now a tarantula.  We talked about bringing it home to play a trick on daddy, but we decided not to when neither one of us wanted to pick it up!

Preschool!

   And she's off!!!  This IS the beginning of the end...once she's in school, she will never not be in school again! AGAIN!  Am I being a bit dramatic?  Well, need I remind you of the swimming lessons where I cried? ... mmm hmmm... and of the time I heard Butterfly Kisses on the radio and bawled my eyes out, on my way to the OB--BEFORE--Madeline was even BORN!  Now you know who you're dealing with, I am totally sentimental.  But I was very proud of myself, I did not even bat an eye today.  Well, Madeline did help a little.  She was sitting and playing with Moon Sand before I even said goodbye.  I had to call her over to give me a hug!  What was she thinking?!  I guess she is not much like me, and to second that, Adam said he was the exact same way when he went to school, didn't look back.  Unlike my horror story about Mrs. Tyzinski (my first grade teacher who was really a witch) told me on my first day of school "Only BABIES cry!!" Which of course made me cry harder and made me feel like a LOSER...on to the pictures??

Funny that my first picture of a post about Madeline is of Joseph.  Oh well, here he is happy as a lark in his PJ's ready to go where-ever the wind takes him!  I couldn't ask for a better baby!

Here is Madeline who was not happy as a lark, in fact we had to threaten her with NOT going to school that day she was acting so badly... yes, I know, don't give your kids empty threats, we'll work on that one later when she's behaving!

Walking to school with Daddy.  Such a Daddy's girl.

Smile!

Cute picture, huh?  Even if she's not looking at me or the camera.

Moon sand!!!!  Where have you been all my life?

  So just one more funny story.  This one is actually about Madeline.  When I picked her up, I got the same cold reaction as when she left.  She just hopped in the double stroller like she had gone to Pre-school a million times.  "How was your day?"  I asked "what did you do?"  All she said was "Mom, I just played with a black baby."  hahaha!  What the heck? That's what I'm paying the big bucks for, inter-racial skills at this preschool! I knew there was a reason it was so pricey! What she really meant was she played  with baby dolls and one of them had darker skin.  It wasn't even black, I saw it, it was latino or something. Hopefully she can squeeze it and it'll teach her some spanish!