We are writing again

Well, we realized we sort of fell off of the blogging world when my brother told us our blog was about to slip into "blog purgatory." Oops! Yes, it has been 5 months since our last post. That is a sad sad thing!

So, in our last post Kira wrote about Pace finally busting out the verbage. Well, that is old news now. It's incredible how quickly that changes! Pace is now 2 1/2 and Satya is 9 mos. They are both quite the cuties, in my unbiased opinion. If Pace was a later talker, Satya seems to be a late mover. She seems quite content to sit on her bum, and when she wants to move she is more interested in walking than in crawling. Unfortunately, she is nowhere near strong enough to be walking, so we are hoping she will give in and try crawling soon. I have made it a habit to crawl around the floor in front of her, in hopes of encouraging her to mimic dad. So far, no luck! She has, however, graduated to all sorts of solid foods, and has quite the pincer skills with her thumb and index finger. Don't worry Satya, we love you even though you are immobile!

Grant (my brother) recently moved out to Utah to live with us - yay Grant!!! Among other things, he has come up with Pace's new favorite nickname for himself: "Pace-chinho" (after the Brazilian soccer player Robinho; in Portuguese, "nh" is the same as the "~n" sound in Spanish... I think anyway!). Grant, Pace, and I have headed out to the park a few times now to play on the swings and kick the soccer ball around, and Pace-chinho loves to steel the ball from his dad and run away! He gets many enthusiastic cheers.

Kira is still tackling Say it Green and I am still doing environmental consulting for businesses. This spring we added organic gardening to our activities list. We have started a perennial food forest in our back yard, which we thought would be a manageable project until we got too enthusiastic and made it unmanageable! We have learned quite a bit though about growing our food, which we both feel is important. The "permaculture" method we are trying to follow has been successfully used to start gardens in the middle of the salty desert land in Jordan, so it seems like it is pretty stinkin' useful no matter where we happen to find ourselves in the future.

Ok, that's the news for now. I have attached a fun picture from a photo shoot Pace and Satya were recently in - the photographer did a family pic for us as a little bonus, which was nice of her! The second picture is from a studio session we signed the kids up for - Satya's dress is from Cameroon courtesy of Ellen!