Criss Cross Applesauce

Portrait: Mish & Sebash

Misha and I decided to make applesauce in honor of fall. I would like to take him to an orchard, but this time we just bought some apples from the store! Here is the photo story of the applesauce:

I quartered and peeled them ...

while Misha diligently cut them into small pieces ...

to boil on the stove.

Then we used our nifty immersion blender (from Grandma Kate, present in this photo via the telephone) to create real applesauce consistency, ...

added cinnamon and plenty of sugar, ...

and ate it up!



Bath time fun: I usually bathe the boys together as it seems to save time. I can wash both kids' hair one after the other, then finish washing Sebastian and pull him out and dress him while Misha plays. Works great, and they like it too.


Here is Misha in his tent, along with Sebastian. He likes it when the baby can go inside, too. I think my days of crouching in that little tent may be coming to an end! (However, yesterday he informed me "Mom! We have a meeting downstairs in my tent! You're going to be late!") Sebastian likes the tent as well - sometimes if he's fussy, I'll put him inside and he will forget his problems while gazing at the way the sun lights up the red fabric ceiling.




A big smile for Grandma!

Both Misha and Sebastian are growing and changing so quickly. Sebastian is so alert and interactive now that he's just over three months old. He is less content to lay on the floor, preferring to be held upright in a lap or, better yet, held in a standing position. He loves to brace his legs and experiment with his own strength. He is so much more aware of other people now that it's great fun to play with him and make him laugh. He also tries so hard to communicate, from loud, complaining yowls (usually from being left out) to the cutest appreciative, throaty gurgles. In Josh's words, "Yep! We made another cute one!"





Misha is loving preschool and he comes home with cute stories about what they do there. Apparently they sit on colored "polyspots" for grouptime and they all have special jobs to do every week. This week Misha got to put away dishes. Last week, he got to turn off the lights. I love it when he tells me how they pay attention: "Head Start style! Criss cross applesauce, hands in your lap, eyes on the teacher!" He sings me the songs they learned and tells me what he ate for lunch and snack. He's very excited about an upcoming field trip to the pumpkin patch.


He has also reached a turning point in being ready to listen to chapter books! This is great for me, who is getting a bit sick of reading books like "The Berenstain Bears and the Truth" every single night of the week. We read Charlotte's Web throughout a week and Misha hung onto every second. Every day he wanted to know what would happen to Wilbur. When, towards the end of the book, I read a sentence in the middle of a long non-dialogue, narrative paragraph about the coming of fall and Charlotte "not having much time left," I didn't expect Misha to pick up on it. But sure enough, as soon as I paused to begin a new paragraph, Misha piped up with concern: "But why doesn't Charlotte have much time left??" We were both sad at the end, but I tried to emphasize the fact that Charlotte's children were still there, as much for myself as for Misha!

We have also been reading the Junie B. Jones series and the Magic Tree House books, which are great. Junie B. is a classic, exasperating kindergartner and the kids in the Magic Tree House books travel on journeys to other countries, cultures, and times. (They visit the African savana and the the Amazon, to name a few.) These books take about an hour to read start to finish, and we finish one every time we sit down to read one. He even tells me he wants to read five of those books in one night before bed. He also tries writing words on his papers, sounding out his friends' names. He has one friend named Mercy, and he methodically wrote her name MRSE all by himself by sounding it out. I was very impressed.


Sebastian watches his big brother play at the park.


Misha, Sebby, and friends from our apartment complex.

So big!

Looking around.


Misha providing a "menu" of bib options for Sebastian. :)

We have recently acquired an iPod Touch, which is so extremely cool that it can only be described in the words of my sister as "the pinnacle of civilization." Like a true child of the second millennium, Misha has already mastered it and I constantly find him watching little videos, playing the race-car game, learning Mandarin from text and interactive graphics, or playing with Google Earth. Josh has been teaching him all of the countries, and now Misha can locate more nations than the average adult - without the benefit of being able to read anything written on the globe. So when he found Google Earth, he was hooked, especially after he figured out how to zoom in. Today he brought the iPod to Josh, asking, "Daddy, is this Russia? Is this Russia??" Josh glanced at the map, which was zoomed in to such an extent that it could have been anywhere. He zoomed out, and out, and out, until - you guessed it - Russia filled the screen.