Questions can be tough. Questions can drive a person mad, in fact. The questions that seem to work the toughest on me seem to be those with no apparent answer. The why questions are especially dizzying, in my opinion. Why this? Why that? Why me? Why not me?

There are so many of them. See if you can think of 10 in 30 seconds. I can. Why 911? Why did some daddies start out late to work and survive? Why did some mommies run late in dropping off their babies for daycare and, in so doing, save them? Why did many daddies and mommies show up for work on time, leave their babies with in-building caregivers and.....? We can answer some larger questions with grand political explanations and anthropological theories, but when it comes down to it....why?

The why's follow us personally, too. Why was I born to parents who love me and each other? Why wasn't that person...or that one....or that one? Why was I born here in a country and state free of civil wars, where I could go to school, where I could go to bed at night never knowing real hunger? Why were so many others born places so vastly different? Certainly not because I deserved this and they deserved that. So, why?

I think that was more than ten. I've long since stopped trying to find the answers to these questions. They have been relegated to the "I don't know" file in my brain. I've often been annoyed by my husband's attempts to answer my "why doesn't God answer my questions" question. He usually encourages me to keep asking and conversing and see where it leads. Hmm...I usually end up thinking that I don't really want to converse with someone who would allow some of the things I see on the news....and then.....

Tonight's prayers:
Miss Mouse: "Gracious God, sank you for pretecting us from the tundertorm. We had fun today. How is Baby Hope doing?"
Miss Mouse: "What is God saying, Mommy?"
Me: "I don't know. He'll probably be answering you; it was your question. What is He saying to you about it?"
Miss Mouse: "Mmm...I sink he is saying "Sank you for offering the question"."

So, maybe, maybe Mr. T is right when he tells me that the asking of the questions is to continue the relationship, to continue to converse with the King of the Universe, the Almighty, who could answer them all if He chose. I don't know why He chooses not to. But I do know that He speaks to us, to Miss Mouse, and to me through her simple acceptance that the offering of the question is enough. Perhaps it is. Point taken.

Summer

You are my sunshines, my only sunshines.....

You make me happy when skies are gray.....

You'll never know dears how much I love you.....What a great park day we had yesterday.

Oh, give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above....don't fence me in. Can you see it on her face?!
We had a most marvelous time not being fenced in for nearly two weeks at the farm. Here, though, the adults are thankful for the backyard fence.

Baby Mouse

I was reading last night, in some rare moments of spare time, my old posts about Miss Mouse at the same age as Baby Mouse is now. I had to laugh at how similar they are, although in my mind Baby Mouse seems like such a wild one. Most of the differences come, I think, from Baby Mouse not having many shy bones in her body, and Miss Mouse having several. Other than that, they really are more similar than different which is cool, even though their differences are fun, too. Anyway, I realized that many of the things I don't remember Miss Mouse doing, at least I have written down on the blog....and that isn't so much the case for Baby Mouse yet. This post is an attempt to change that.

Baby Mouse has been tickling everyone and everything for the past two weeks. It comes out "tucka-tucka-tucka" which, by the way, is exactly what I did when I was a wee one. Crazy, eh?

Baby Mouse loves to hug and kiss. Especially Daddy gets numerous kisses. The minute he heads anywhere near the door in the morning, there are loud kissing sounds from Baby Mouse to remind him to kiss her, as if he'd dare forget that ritual!

Baby Mouse loves to clean. Wild child though she can be, she loves to vacuum, dust, pick things up, and just generally help out. She, like her sister, has a fascination with having herself vacuumed off by my little kitchen vac. She signs "more, more, more" after I repeatedly say "all clean!".

Baby Mouse loves to dance. Anytime she hears music, she starts either swaying from side to side or bopping her head around. It doesn't even matter what type of music. We've been listening to a lot of classical music lately, and she's been totally jammin' out to it. She, however, does not care to be held to dance. Miss Mouse loved being held to dance at that age, but Baby Mouse would prefer to dance her own jig in her own space.

Baby Mouse mimics like a professional little sister. She has a keyboard that she got for Christmas; it includes a microphone. Miss Mouse played with the microphone first, and for several months Baby Mouse never touched it except to use it as a chew toy. Now, though, she's the first to grab the microphone and "sing" into it....with the same tones and phrases as Miss Mouse (who tends to speak some type of foreign language into it).

Baby Mouse loves to hold hands with Miss Mouse and run around the house. Lovely evening entertainment, if you ask me.

Baby Mouse eats dirt. Almost everyday, though I do my best to prevent it.

And finally, I've been contemplating a blog-world name change for Baby Mouse. More of a name expansion, I suppose. I was reading one of the "Series of Unfortunate Events" books while at the farm (ahhh....cool evening breezes, dry air, slow sunsets that take all night and merge into dawn, reading books and playing music on the deck....ahhh....), and the baby in the books, Sunny, reminded me of Baby Mouse. For example, at one point the older children explain to a kindly neighbor that "Sunny likes you because she is biting you gently. That's how she shows she likes you. People she doesn't like, she bites hard." Sunny seems to be also quite intelligent and have a fairly incredible vocabulary for a child who can only say a few words (there are 'translations' of her words included in the text). It got me thinking that perhaps Baby Mouse, who is more of a toddler mouse now, should be renamed, for purposes of the blog, to Sunny Baby Mouse. That way, when she is, say, twelve or so, she could drop the "Baby" part and still have some continuity to her name while not feeling quite so young. So, I might try it and see how Sunny Baby Mouse works out.

Bodily Parts & Functions

The first bodily function we will talk about is chewing....chomping....biting....eating. Baby Mouse does all these things, except eating, in abundance. On the 4th, Miss Mouse and I drove to see the fireworks display in town; we left Baby Mouse at home asleep with Daddy on BabyWatch. On the way back, Miss Mouse commented that "Baby Mouse could not come with to see the fireworks. She would have eaten them." Ugh! We need to get through this teething phase!

Talking is the next function on our agenda. Baby Mouse is talking a lot these days! In 24 hours last week she learned "meat" (a favorite of her sister's), "ham", "water", "foot", "cheese", "pizza", "Laura", "Grandpa Bob" - really anything we say these days and ask her to say, she will repeat!

The following tales are not for the queasy. If you are easily queasy, stop now; you will avoid queasiness, but also hilarity. Please consider that your fair warning. I will assume that continued reading is your confirmation of informed consent (I was a counselor in another life...).

Saturday returned us to the park in my hometown. One week after my sister and brother-in-law's beautiful wedding celebration there, our neighbor celebrated his 50th birthday. It was another perfect night! Perfect enough for Baby Mouse to happily run circles around our picnic table while we all ate without fear of her blowing away in a gale or being carried off by viking mosquitoes. At one point, Baby Mouse squatted low and put on her "thinking face". Uncle Jon asked if that position meant what he thought it did.....indeed.

Well, on such a perfect night, what mom would need to find an indoor area in which to change her toddler? No one up there would be offended by (or even notice!) a small girl getting a diaper change in the shade of the picnic table, right? The Change was proceeding as planned, same old, same old....until Miss Mouse glanced down and excitedly informed Grammy and the guest-of-honor's-wife Kathy that "Baby Mouse's poop is little balls! They are just in little, tiny balls! Just like this size (holding up her hands in a circle)." My sweet Miss Mouse. Maybe a lot of children might have said that to "gross out" the guests or to intentionally be inappropriate; not my Miss Mouse, nope not that one. She has always been intensely interested in her sister but also in bodily functions. We just returned a book on the digestive system to the library. In reading it (over and over and over and over) we learned how food progresses through the esophagus to the stomach where it is turned into a thick paste....should I continue? I'll spare the details, but I think that suffices to explain my Miss Mouse's interest in bodily functions. Now we just have to work on dinner-table-conversation-topics which we can hopefully do without inducing any shame about the non-dinner-table-conversation-topics such as little sister's dirty diaper shapes.

Fast forward two hours Saturday night, and we were attending the annual Threshing Bee talent show. I happen to love, love this talent show for two big reasons, but those need to be saved for another blog post. Anyway, the floor in the building where it is held is sand. Put together sand and tots and use your imagination. Yes, we had sand being piled on my blue jeans, sand being piled on our chairs, under our feet, on our shoes, sand being dumped in each other's hair....the line was drawn when Baby Mouse decided shoving sand in her eye might be a fun idea. Out we went to ride the little kiddie train. The sand sisters under control we headed back in to catch the end of the talent show; again the sand was piled, picked up, flattened, piled again - not a problem. Baby Mouse was quite enjoying herself what with being able to be in the presence of music and be dirty at the same time. Both girls were quietly playing in between the chair rows at our feet when, suddenly, Baby Mouse noticed the man in front of us who had leaned over with his elbows on his knees...and revealed a certain amount of skin.

Now, Miss Mouse would have observed this skin and been on her merry way.

Baby Mouse pointed and stated quite clearly, "Butt!", followed by "Butt! Butt! Butt!". I couldn't hardly breathe for laughing so hard. Thankfully, Grammy had the presence of mind to capture the verbal Mouse after the second series of 'body labeling' because we were both quite fearful that she was actually going to poke said body part. Miss Mouse at this point got quite worried. Mommy and Grammy both had tears streaming down our faces, and Miss Mouse didn't really see anything funny about the fact that Baby Mouse had pointed out a body part. It was kind Miss Mouse who taught Baby Mouse the word in the first place, and it was used as a label for what her diaper covers. My girls are far from perfect (ask our poor friends who stayed at the farm after the big wedding - two screaming Mice ran up and down the hallways until midnight), but for whatever reason, they just don't understand the concept of using these bodily functions or body parts as a way to be funny or rude yet. Miss Mouse in the previous example was truly just informing Grammy, and Baby Mouse was delighted to be able to label a body part.

Hitched!

Auntie Laura and the now-official-Uncle Jon are now officially "hitched"! Welcome to the family, Uncle Jon! The decidedly Western-style wedding was beautiful, as traditional as my sister could possibly finagle it to be, and was the beginning of a wonderful, adventurous marriage. Congratulations, Auntie Laura & Uncle Jon!

The happy couple pre-wedding ceremony.


Laura and Jon with the hardanger banner my mother-in-law made for our wedding eight years ago. Since then it has been used at all of Mr. T's cousin's weddings (except his cousin who was married before we were, of course!). Grandma Kathy puts a special backing on it to match the wedding colors of each couple, and in recent years, she's even added the ribbon. I had so much fun helping pick out ribbon and backing colors earlier this spring, and the banner turned out even more beautiful than I could have pictured. How special to have it used at Little Sister's wedding, too!



In these parts, princes and princesses wear boots!


Up until the moment I walked down the aisle with the best man, we weren't sure whether Miss Mouse was walking with the rest of the flower girls or with Grandpa Bob. It had been arranged with Grandpa Bob to take her down the aisle to meet Mommy and Daddy up at the altar, but at the last minute, after having some fun taking pictures with the other girls, Miss Mouse got really brave and walked proudly down the aisle herself. It was pretty funny that she used only the fake flower petals that we had practiced with on Friday night, picking carefully around the real flowers that had been added on Saturday morning.

The bridal party plus flower girls left the church and traveled to the reception in the park (down the street) via covered wagon. Very cool. Baby Mouse wasn't really sure about the whole deal, being held by the best man, bouncing up and down, rattling around in a wagon, but she seemed to approve!

I'll try to post some close up pictures of the Mice in the coming days, but I thought there might be some interest in seeing the bride and groom who I have the most pictures of at the current moment!

Pork Chop Philosophy

Our Independence Day dinner consisted of pork chops grilled over wood smoke, hot German potato salad, homemade baked beans, and steamed broccoli. Baby Mouse had had quite enough supper, in her opinion, so she headed off to be bathed by Daddy before Miss Mouse and I were done with our food. Hence the following dinner conversation:

MM: "Pork chops are my favorite."
Me: "Pork chops were my favorite, too, when I was your age. They still are."
MM: "Mmm...I love pork chops. They come from pigs. Do pigs give us pork chops?"
Me: "Um, yes."
MM: "Ooohhh. Isn't that nice of them?! Do they see us and think 'I want to give them a pork chop'?"
Me: "Sort of."
MM: "Do they come from pigs like the ones we saw at the college (our field trip with the children's museum one week was to a kiddie day hosted by the ag program at the college)?"
Me: "Yes. Those pigs are probably being raised for their meat."
MM: "Oh. Isn't that just so nice of them?! They see us hungry and give us pork chops! Do they carry the pork chops for us in bags?"
Me: "Yes, it is nice that we have meat to eat. We carry the pork chops in bags from the store."
MM: "Oh. The pigs do not carry them for us. We carry them to coolers in the car. Otherwise they would melt."
Me: "No, pork doesn't melt, but if it gets too hot, it would get bad to eat."
MM: "Hmm...I hope the college pigs don't get too hot and get feeling bad. Do you think Piglet (her dear imaginary friend) would like to give us pork chops?"
Me: "No, I don't think he probably would. He isn't that sort of pig. And I think the college pigs are fine and not too hot."
MM: "Oh, I'm glad."
---Though I do savor my quiet moments with Miss Mouse, I was quite glad for Baby Mouse's timely, though naked, arrival in the kitchen as a distraction from this fairly odd pork conversation!

As a sidenote, I was also struck tonight watching the news showing, as they do every year, new citizens being sworn in, hearing people say how happy and excited they are to become Americans; it always amazes me at how very much United States citizenship means to those who were not born with it and how very little those of us who were born with it ever even contemplate it. Happy Independence Day!