The delight of my new table

Yesterday was a day of home improvements and the start of Ella's 17+ years of formal education (kind of.)

Wednesday night I was sitting out on our porch at about 9:30pm during a thunder storm, enjoying the fresh air rolling in, my nervous dogs (Bridger HATES thunder!), the smell of freshly mowed grass (smelled just like hay!), watching two frogs hopping through the yard and the neighbor passing back and forth in his pajamas, making phone calls. The thought occurred to me, "We need a table and chairs out here so that I could be sipping coffee." This thought escalated into visions of my when my Mom comes this summer and the two of us sitting out on the porch sipping coffee and playing Cribbage and RummyKub together, in the beautiful, fresh air. Now, our house is fairly small and the weather here in fairly perfect pretty much 100% of the time so it makes sense to spend a lot of time outside on your porch, which we do. Our porch is basically just an extension of our house.

I got off of work early yesterday (thanks to computer problems - yikes!) and was on a mission- finding the perfect plastic table and chairs for my front porch. If you've ever been to Entebbe you'll know that John's Shop is the place to go for pretty much everything. Imagine my delight when they had exactly what I wanted in a table! No trips to Kampala for me!

After collecting and setting up my new table and chairs, I got a call from a guy who had just come from Montana who my Mom had sent some little work books for Ella, with. So before the kiddo's were even up from their nap I charged over to his hotel to get them, while Sarah stayed with the kids. This worked out perfectly as now Ella actually has a place to do school!

Not only does the table provide a nice place to sit and do your work, but I think it will provide some added protection from thunder storms! The thunder can't get you if you hide, right?

We ate dinner AND breakfast on it and I was able to sit and sip a cup of coffee this morning, as intended :). Ahh.... life is good when you have a new table on your porch!

Boy was she thrilled with her new books!! Now she can do "school" like her best friend, Janet. She is however, not the most academically minded child. She likes the coloring, cutting and gluing of things but when it comes to writing letters, not so much.

While he might come across as a rather dim bulb (fat and happy and compared to his sister, quiet), I'm thinking that Frankie just may end surprising me and being my academic genius. I'm afraid I've woefully underestimated his brain cell abilities! He'll point to a letter on something and tell me what it is, totally out of the blue, and yesterday he picked up a bug and told me it was green - and it was!!! The thing is, I don't work with him on colors OR letters! At all. But I work with Ella and he just watches, absorbing it all.

I LOVE his look of concentration. He'd catch me smiling at him and start to wiggle his shoulders and "dance!" Yup, strange kid :)

He's smiling for the camera again :)

Ella, sitting in the "shade" of our baby lemon tree (the stick with leaves on the top, sticking up to her right.) The cool thing about this tree is that it's right in front of our house and no one planted it! We throw our dish water into this circle of flowers and evidently there was a lemon seed in it once and up grew a lemon tree!

Our darling 19 month old neighbor, in an outfit that Ella's Granny made

A sight every mother of preschoolers likes to see... :)