cup of joe: let's go fly a kite..

Saturday, the whole family got to go roller skating to help celebrate Kayla and Fiona's birthdays. Lily had been asking about going roller skating, and what better time than with friends where I didn't have to plan anything?? I didn't actually roller skate, but Kaylee and I had fun watching and talking to friends anyway, and Jesse didn't wind up in the hospital, so we all had a great time. On our way there, in an effort to console Jesse for peeling him out of the house on his day off (not really), I offered that if he would rather sit with Kaylee, I would be willing to skate with the girls since they were bound to be terrible and he gave me a shocked, "if there is going to be roller skating, I will be skating!" and so that's how that was decided. And the look of, "I'm going to fall and break something" when he stood up on his skates was fantastic.

Emma is at the wonderful and fearless age: she wants to try everything and doesn't know that she could be hurt by it, so she can go with innocent abandon.

Lily, on the other hand, is learning things like: falling hurts. she was much more cautious and nervous about being on skates, though she was at the innocent abandon age the last time we went.

We had a ridiculously warm day yesterday, considering it's only February. And by ridiculously warm, I mean it was in the 60s, so let's not get too carried away there, but it was so nice. The girls loved getting a chance to play outside without bundling up so much they couldn't move- although they enjoy that also- and Kaylee got her first real taste of what's coming this spring and getting to spend countless hours running around outside with her sisters. She was just crawling when the weather started to get cold last year, and while we were outside plenty, she spent a lot of it on a blanket with a pile of toys in the shade.

Anyway, Emma was incredibly tired, and Kaylee has been fighting a cold or some such nasty still, so Jesse and I got them both down for naps early afternoon. It was much too nice of a day to insist that Lily stay in for Quiet Room Time, so I grabbed the plastic Superman kite I'd bought last year on clearance ($1, bam) and we headed down to our field. Lily loves kites. Really, she loves everything having to do with outside, but my dad showed her all about kites last spring and she regularly asks if it's windy enough to fly a kite, any time there is a breeze. It's kind of hard to get enough wind where our house is situated down a hollow, but yesterday was windy. Especially for a cheap, light kite. Well, and a 4 year old with low expectations. She and I ended up just running down the hill into the field and letting the kite fly up behind us, only getting it caught in a tree a few times, and had a wonderful time. We went back in for a drink of water right as Emma was waking up. After checking in on sleeping Kaylee, Emma and Jesse joined Lily and me down the field for some more kite flying. I think next time we go, I'll just have to run down the hill with the girls and let Jesse fly his own kite so he can just stand in the middle of the field and get his kite really high in the air. Somehow, the 2 and 4 year old kite fliers weren't as interested in that...