If I had a pony..

We took Harper and Hudson to the rodeo Saturday. We parked, walked a really long way, rode ponies, looked at some animals, looked at some tractors, walked a really long way back to the car, and came home. It was enough to satisfy everyone. Maybe next year we'll ride the bumper cars or something. It is impossible to take decent pictures of a pony ride. They all looked like this:
I have tentatively re-entered society this week with my many small children. Helena would prefer to stay home and take a 3 hour morning nap but she has done pretty well. We are having spring here in Houston. It generally lasts around a week, at which point the temperatures rocket and it's summer for around 9 months.

I watched a really affecting movie on HBO called "Taking Chance." It stars Kevin Bacon as a Marine colonel who, feeling far removed from the war in Iraq, volunteers to escort the body of a fallen soldier home. I pretty much cried through the whole thing. Not because it is overtly sentimental or manipulative, but because it is so quiet and spare and stunning in its presentation of the process. I was particularly touched by the scenes showing the soldiers whose job it is to prepare the bodies when they get stateside. They were so reverent in their solemn duty and each dead soldier is put in the coffin impeccably dressed in his uniform even if he will never be viewed by anyone else. I'm not one for ceremony in general, and my highly unusual opinions on funerals deserve a post of their own, but I absolutely love it when a movie can make me ponder the deep things the way this one did.

On a lighter note, we have been enjoying ourselves some of the jazzy vocal and guitar stylings of Jason Mraz. I think he would probably enjoy the fact that every time we listen to him in the car Harper asks, "Mommy is this a lady?" I enjoy the fact that Mr. A to Z looks an awful lot like my very own husband, who has also been known to entertain us with his own jazzy vocal and guitar stylings.

It's funny how with your first child you spend lots of time deliberately teaching them stuff. Like, for example, teaching them to count to 10 in four different languages by their first birthday (not that WE did that. Ok, yes we did. You should've heard how cute Harper sounded counting in Hungarian). But with the subsequent kids there is all of this accidental learning. I heard Hudson count to 20 today when he was sorting his cars and I had NO idea he knew how to count that high. I'm sad to report that "Sesame Street" probably gets the credit.

Helena has slept an EIGHT hour stretch at night three times this week. This is an awesome feat not achieved by the other two until they were many, many months old. I am thankful. Here are she and Hudson having another, slightly more conventional, conversation:
And here they are today enjoying watching little animals sway to and fro to the tune of "Old McDonald". Right after I took this picture, Hudson got up and started swaying and doing a little karate dance. Helena was duly impressed.