Why don't we cut his hair?

He may spend most of his days looking like a tiny absent-minded professor, but on rainy days, or freshly out of the bath, I just can't get enough of these curls!
By the way, Ezra's word list now includes:
Read! Duck. Bird. Car. Boot. Shoe. Back! (this means to hit, as well as go back.) Water. Hot. Spoon. Again. Oma. Opa. Sock. Pants. Shirt. Off. On. Bye. Hi. Truck. Man.
Bonk. Pig. Dog. Nonny.
Guy. Pocket. Scoocher. (his little bike.) Gibbie. (whom he usually still calls Ezra for reasons we like to speculate upon.)
Evra. (Ezra) Poop. Ball. Down.
Guitar. Cake.
Balm.
Certainly, these are not all legibly pronounced, and a stranger mightn't understand a single one of them.
He likes pointing out a picture on his shirt, practicing his newfound jumping skills, and putting things in his pocket.

The Sleepy Bumble Bee

Out at the cabin, picking and smelling daffodils, we found a little sleeper inside of a flower.
Gibbie had picked the flower, so we put it in a cup on the picnic table. It had been nice and warm, and then we had a few days of rain; I think it was too cold for him. He stayed resting there for several chilly days, until it warmed up, and he woke and flew away.
Now Gibbie checks all the tulips for bees.
We've only got about five that produced flowers in our garden this year, due to squirrels and enthusiastic neighborhood children, but with each new flower, Gibbie asks, "Mama, why is there not a bee in this flower?"

Barista Boy

Gibbie really knows his way around coffee shops. He has his favorites and list off most of the independents in St. Paul. He has his own regular drink (foam, aka a cappuccino minus the espresso). He does a better job of busing his own dishes than a lot of regulars I know. Sometimes he plays coffee shop at home and serves up pretend drinks. He can recognize a latte on sight.

Today he got some behind-the-bar with my best buddy and pro barista Pat. I was impressed that Pat could pour a good rosetta with Gibbie on his shoulders. I don't know if I could do that!

Perlieu in Spring

We recently got back from the most wonderful trip to the woods of Western Wisconsin. We love this place. It's the landscape I grew up in and Libby grew up visiting. Now our boys can enjoy it too. We may have more to say about specific adventures from this trip, but for now enjoy a slide show.
(Click here if you're Flash disabled.)

What Happened to The Full Cup?

Hello faithful friends and readers. I'm sorry that we have ignored you for so long. I didn't think this would ever become the kind of blog that included apologies for not blogging, but here it is.

We have some wonderful missionary friends in South America and North Africa who we would love to talk more easily with. For this reason I've been working on making our main computer ready to Skype (free Internet phone). If you've read our blog or know us, you probably know that we tend to do things the hard way. Sometimes it's for fun, sometimes it's ethical, sometimes it's economic, sometimes it's just stubbornness, etc. Thus I only use linux for an operating system (for all of the above reasons). Skype has versions for linux, but the version of Debian linux I was running on our main computer was too old. Having had great success with Ubuntu linux on my ibook, I decided to give it a try on our Dell.

The problem I always have with my desktop is getting the operating system to talk to the Motorola (Broadcom) wireless card I installed. The card uses proprietary windows drivers that any distribution of linux can't legally release with their OS. The first time around, I used a program called NDISwrapper to extract the necessary stuff from the windows driver (found on my wireless card installation CD). This time all of the distributions of Linux came with this program called bw43-fwcutter. It was supposed to do something like NDISwrapper, but it didn't work for me. In fact neither of these programs could I get to work with the newest versions of Debian or Ubuntu. In my despairation, I tried some different distributions and ended up getting NDISwrapper to work in openSUSE.

So after more than a month, The Full Cup is back! I also got a new camera for my birthday, which will add to the visual happiness of this blog

Heres' to a bright future of good frequent posting.