Last year, the kids and I made a framed handprint collage-like present for Julie and Mothers Day (right). This year I followed it up with a folksy photo of each of the kids holding up hand-drawn letters spelling out “LOVE.” This was inspired by this 2009 post on a blog called The Inadvertent Farmer.

The first step was getting pictures of each kid with a letter. It wasn’t too bad as I just had to take enough to get each one looking cute.

A trickier task was finding a frame to display four pictures. It took the third store before I lucked out. Because of the timing, I had actually printed the pictures before I had the frame and so had fingers crossed that the size would work.

Once made, the absolute hardest was getting a group shot of the kids with Julie holding it!

Here’s the example: a lot of my photo stream is endless pictures of cute kids. Facebook friends who have friended me for other topics have to wade through that collection. Some actually like them–our friendships aren’t single issue and they appreciate glimpses of the rest of my life. But with G+ it’s my job to figure out which issue friends might want to be kid picture friends. I don’t want to put them on a list they don’t like and essentially spam them. Is there any G+ features I might use?

Google+: View post on Google+

We learned about the lead painted Thomas’s on the same day that our family doctor told us that it was officially time to become concerned with Francis’s slow speech development. When Theo was just a little older than Francis is now we put together a dictionary of his vocabulary. Francis makes cute sounds and seems bright and curious but he’s not even gotten out a consistent mama or papa and we haven’t been able to figure out a meaning for his most common word (Aye–YEASH). He’s got an appointment six months from now with specialists at Wilmington’s Nemours (that’s how backed up they are!).

We’re not blaming the trains—the lead ones we had were relatively unpopular and have few signs of wear. And we’re not panicking. My mother brushes off all concern with the assured declaration that kids learn to talk at lots of different ages. She could certainly be right of course: our doctor sent us to Nemours for Theo with the worry that he had a big head. If Francis does turn out to be a little “slow,” well then we’ll just take that as another lesson plan God has for us.