Dr. Jesse

Jesse has two big passions these days: outer space and the human body (and in particular the digestive aspect of the human body).  He can often be found either drawing pictures of the solar system or the human body or pretending that he is traveling to space or on a journey through the human body (again, mostly through the digestive system...ha).

Last spring he got bored with all the play equipment at our downstairs park and so he began moving all the small toys and creating "human bodies" out of them; recently he has wanted to do the same thing in the tot lot.  I don't typically let him rearrange the toys in the tot lot for this purpose, but he got away with it the other day when I had to take a really important phone call and could not intervene (I had to give him some credit for his creativity, though, so I let him crawl through the entire system he had made...I think he was pretending to be food traveling through the digestive system).

Anyway, I thought some of his clever artwork was worth sharing. I have to say that these ideas are 100% his and not ours, especially those related to bodily functions.  I guess he truly is all boy.

Below is his first body to construct.  He asked me for paper, scissors, pipe cleaners and marker one day and this is what he came up with.  Then he asked for tape and taped it all together.  From top to bottom is the mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine and large intestine. The pipe cleaners are the blood vessels.

The next time he made a body he wanted to step it up a notch so that he could actually make the "food" (aka crumpled up pieces of paper) go through it.  He needed a bit more help executing this idea, but again, it was all his; I just helped him tape it together so it wouldn't completely fall apart.

In case you were wondering, this toy bin was the toilet (let me reiterate that these ideas were 100% his).  I might not ever understand boys...

Yesterday he wanted to make more human bodies.  Actually, I think he said he wanted to make something like 40 of them, but I forced him to stop at 4 because it takes up a considerable amount of paper to make these, and we have scraps of paper EVERYWHERE in our apartment right now.

I apologize for all the potty humor that is present on here today, but here Jesse is proudly holding up the bottom.  Simply take a whole sheet of paper and make a small rip in it and voila, you have a bottom (again, his idea).

Here are the body parts cut out and lying around in piles on our kitchen table.  Our kitchen table appears this way a lot these days; it does feel a bit strange to me, but I guess it's just in time for Halloween?

Here is the finished product, from top to bottom: teeth/gums/mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine and bottom.

4th Annual Apple Picking

After a long and somewhat unintended blogging hiatus, I am going to try to get things back up and running around here. Time sure seems limited these days and I'm not sure I'll ever quite figure out how to juggle all the things I'm supposed to be doing and all the things I want to be doing...things like finding time to exercise, read good books (for myself), volunteer my time at church, having quality family time, and so on.  It's just a busy season of life.  But, I do enjoy having this blog as a record of our family life, to look back on someday, and I know that our far-away family also enjoys seeing a bit of what's going on in our world.  I have quite a few posts that I wrote months ago (some as much as 7 months ago) and just never published. I will probably post them, but they will likely be without pictures.  So, stay tuned for those in the near future.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of our latest family outing to the County Line Orchard a couple weeks ago.  This was our 4th year to go.  It is definitely a family tradition now and something we look forward to doing together each fall.  Jesse and I have been learning a lot about apples over the past few weeks and so this was a fun "field trip".

Here is Jesse watching them make caramel apples. We didn't try any, but we did try some of their famous pumpkin and apple donuts.

My boys on the tractor and ready to go apple picking.

Jesse really got into the picking of the apples this year.

We ended up picking/purchasing over 9 pounds of apples (Gala, McIntosh and Jonathan).  When we got home we made a large batch of cinnamon applesauce, which turned out delicious!  We also made an apple coffee cake for our community group and the rest we enjoyed just by themselves.