The walking around....
The graceful lowering to the ground...
The exit...
Natalie's newest location to play is under the kitchen table. Let's just say that I sweep under there more often than I used to...stray food from dinner isn't something she needs to be digesting. So, she's been pulling up for a few weeks now. Now she's pretty much mastered the skill, and has gotten extremely comfortable moving from one piece of furniture-within a short distance-to the next. That's where the table comes in. She crawls into the kitchen from the living room, and makes her way under the table. She then proceeds to pull up on a chair, and walk her way around from chair to chair. After a few minutes, she decides she's done with that, so she carefully makes her way down and tries to crawl out. Inevitably, she squawks on her way out because she is "stuck"..aka she's going out between two chairs and needs someone to move them apart so she can get out. She's also developed quite the sassy attitude..as seen in the foot propped up on the high chair tray in the picture below!
As far as the boys go, their reading is growing by leaps and bounds! I make them have about 20 minutes of quiet reading time everyday. They have to choose two books to read, an activity book (of which they do 5 pages), and can do a puzzle or word search book, too. Last night, Matthew was engrossed in his LEGO Star Wars Visual Encyclopedia-compliments of Grandma Patty-and I was able to tear it away from him so we could read together. He and Lucas both read a lot of what I think are huge words for second graders-dehumanization, concussion, etc.
In other news, Lucas is becoming quite the logical little thing. While driving by the dry cleaners the other day, here is our conversation:
Lucas: "Mommy, what is that place?"
Me: "The dry cleaners. Why?"
Lucas: "Because we haven't been there in a long time. Why do we go there?"
Me: "That's the place we take our fragile clothes that I can't put in the washer. We don't have a lot of fragile summer clothes."
Lucas: "Maybe we should take Daddy's work jeans there. They are very fragile."
NOTE: Derrick's work jeans have huge holes in the knees, rips in the back pockets, and paint and grass stains all over them.
As if that wasn't logical enough, while I was on the computer he was in the office with me and observing two clocks we have in here. One is a standard wall clock, with regular numbers. The other is a small decorative clock with Roman numerals.
Lucas: "Mommy, this clock must be really old." (the small one with the Roman numerals.)
Me: "Why do you say that?"
Lucas: "Because it has old fashioned numbers on it. The other one has real numbers on it."
Pretty logical, isn't it?
After we explored SPACE, we moved onto OCEANS, where the boys like to climb in the submarine. I remember the first time we went to COSI, it took much coaxing to get them down into the submarine, but now they clamor for the ladder and will sit in it for a little while. They love to "control" it, and then we moved on. 
After the lower level, we moved on to the Mezzanine. Here we hit the Progress exhibit, and the boys ran from decade to decade, checking out all the fun shops and restaurants. It was funny to see them in an old fashioned phone booth, and on the carriage..JPG)
We left COSI very hungry, and headed to Red Robin for lunch. It was another instance where I saw how much they are growing. They nicely told the waitress what they wanted, drinks and all. It was so cute. We then headed home for some quiet time, and to get ready for the first day of school!
