Kids and the Laundry.

This little guy gets up between 5 and 5:30 every day.

He & Maria are SO different when it comes to sleep.  He's never really been that much into sleep.  In his whole 14 1/2 months of life he has slept thru the night 3 times.  Naps are always short... If he happens to sleep longer than an hour I'm SO excited.  When he's awake he's super happy and sweet which is nice, it would suck if he were cranky.

Maria on the other hand loves sleeping.  The going to sleep part isn't the funnest, but once she is asleep she will sleep for HOURS.  3 hour afternoon naps are not uncommon, and she sleeps thru the night like a pro.  Goes to bed 8ish and wakes up 8ish. Generally she wakes up cranky, and if she hasn't gotten enough sleep she's cranky..... kind of like her Momma.

So this past week when she started getting up 6ish she totally surprised me.  And for the most part she's been pretty happy.  She will get up, find her markers and a coloring book and sit at the table and color for at least 30 minutes.  It has certainly been making an interesting start to our days.

With all the rain we've been having lately getting the laundry dry has been a task.  Cristina washed it yesterday, and shortly after she was done it started to POUR. There was a short break between storms so I gathered up some clothes and hung them on our new indoor clothes lines.  There still wasn't enough space for everything so I left some clothes out to weather the storm overnight.  The sun dried them pretty good this morning and then I brought them in this afternoon before the rains started up again.  Sometimes I'd LOVE to have a dryer.

A few things about laundry here.....

-clothes go moldy.  if you spill something on your shirt and it's wet you'd better hang it to dry and not just throw it in the laundry hamper and wait three days for the laundry to get done because little black spots will form on your clothes and they'll be ruined.

-all the washing by hand and drying on the line is not exactly good for your clothes..... shapes are lost and stretched out. (another wonderful reason to have a dryer!)

-the clothes are washed outside-out, and then flipped inside-out to dry.  I couldn't figure out why so I asked Marco...... The sun bleaches the clothes so by turning them inside-out the outside does not get bleached.  (This doesn't work great on collared shirts.... the collar ends up getting sun-bleached)

Remember when Maria was wielding the frying pans like Rapunzel.... well today she watched Ratatouille and during the photo shoot she ran and got the frying pans and wanted me to take her picture over and over again.  This was the only shot where her eyes are open.

Before bedtime I took a couple pictures of Cooper.  When I showed him the picture on the back of the camera he was so cute, pointing at himself and then kissing the camera and then motioning for me to take more pictures so he could repeat the pointing and kissing.