Working way too much these days....

I've been working on powerpoints and travelling way too much these days. I'm taking a little bit of time off today - but according to the hours I worked last week - I realistically could've taken this whole week off!!! More and more often - when I drop Mercer off at daycare before a trip - I get a little emotional. It's getting harder to leave. He has no idea, but I think his teachers can tell. We went to an art festival before I left town for one of my recent trips. And - we checked out the play areas, of course! (as seen in the photos) We probably saw more of the playgrounds than art exhibits. Oh well. It was still fun for all of us. The main point - to spend time together & get outside.

Mercer has a couple of really funny expressions. One of them is a facial expression where he draws his mouth up and makes his eyes real big. The other is something he does with his arms - it almost looks like the chicken dance pose. He'll pulls his arms up high by his side when he seems pleased by something. He's also counting better. One two One two. And - he's recognizing most of the basic colors now. For awhile, everything was red or blue. Now he knows orange. He says yellow and purple too... sometimes when we're even pointing to those colors!

This week, however, I got to do a couple of cool things at work:

One was attend a lecture at our office that the Executive Director of Georgia Organics did. I ended up looking through the Farm-To-School literature she had and decided that I'd love to work towards getting a little garden at Mercer's school. I've been in touch with the fund-raising team to try to get more "meaningful" fund-raisers. I think this is a goal that parents would be willing to work towards.

Yesterday, I met and gave a tour of our office to a "famous" architect in Switzerland. I've never heard of him, but I looked up his work online. He is doing some nice work & has been practicing sustainability there since 1995. It makes me think again about how I need to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. It was inspiring to check out his work / talk to him - he was a really nice guy/ and to think about GOOD design again. hmmm....

If interested: http://www.ramseier-assoc.com/

We also went hiking recently. Well, we were trying to hike. For the most part, Mercer wanted to sit on the trail and play with the pine straw. (Which really blows my mind because he sees a pile of pollen or dirt and he yells EWWW YUCK!) He would get up and walk a bit. Oh wait - there are sticks. Let's pick them up. Oh - here are more sticks. See them? I'll wave them over my head for a bit. It was almost comical at how slow the hike went.

We ended up carrying him a lot of the way and - ultimately - cutting our hike short. It was worth a shot. And - we decided to keep trying, as we bought a state parks pass for the year. Maybe he'll get the hang of it?

This was our first time this season with Mercer out in the woods. What a difference 4 - 5 months makes. What a difference NOT using a carrier makes!!