week ending mar 25, 2007

Week ending March 25, 2007: This week the kids were singing their own home-made musical, taking turns singing “this is my plate. This is my plate! This is MY plate.” And then Chloe sang “when you scream at Mommy, you don’t get what you want”. I think I like this musical! Alex has fallen in love with a TV show called “Little Einsteins”. It is a cartoon on the Disney Network which we don’t get because we don’t have cable (no, we don’t have satellite either, just regular old rabbit ears), but we rented a DVD with some episodes. Alex was so enthusiastic about the show that he told me all about the rocket and what happened to the rocket. Usually if I ask him what happened on a show and he says “I don’t know”, but with the “Little Einstiens”, I didn’t even have to ask. Even though Alex’s speech has improved leaps and bounds since his late start, he is still quite reserved, so I’m enthusiastic when he finds something he likes to talk about. On Monday Chloe asked what the “fun part” of the day was going to be. It was still pretty cold out and I was fresh out of ideas so I asked her what she wanted to do. She said she’d like to go to Chuck-E-Cheese. I haven’t taken the kids there since our first debacle in Jan ’06, so I’m not sure where she came up with the idea, but I figured that that a week day at 2pm was not likely to be crowded and I was right. We almost had the place to ourselves. Alex and Chloe did such a good job following my directions and taking turns at Chuck-E-Cheese that it got me thinking about how much better they’ve gotten at so many things, seemly without my help at all. We went to story hour at the library and both kids pasted things together without my help (a big challenge last year). We played taking turns tossing balled-up socks into a box and they did it perfectly. One thing that hasn’t gotten better is the verbal battles. When the kids used to fight by hitting each other, I could just physically separate them, but there doesn’t seem to a simple way to extinguish the never-ending bickering (short of just waiting until they are… what, 30 years old?). One subject of the most contention is who is going to sit on which side of the car. The sides of the car are exactly the same and it is so hard to tell the sides of the car apart that even the kids can’t remember which side they want to fight for. One day I asked Chloe which side she wanted and she said “the side that Alex wants”! The pictures are of Alex and Chloe trying on their “Florida clothes”, and of their Saturday morning ritual of BOTH sitting on Daddy’s lap to eat breakfast (for how much longer will they both fit?).

week ending mar 18, 2007

Week ending March 18, 2007: This week the crocus and daffodils bloomed, and then we had another ice storm. Fortunately we DIDN’T lose our power this time around! Also this week, I’ve been noticing how careful I have to be so that I don’t make Alex worry needlessly. He’s quite the worrier. He decided to wash all of his matchbox cars (over 50 of them now) and we set them on a towel to dry. He so enjoyed it that he wanted to wash them again the next day. I said that it took a long time for the cars to dry and we had to be careful not to get them wet too often or they would rust. He didn’t understand why rust is a problem so I explained that if the cars got too rusty they wouldn’t work any more, they’d be broken. Boy was that a mistake! I had a lot of explaining to do to talk Alex out of worrying about his cars. Chloe’s been picking up new words and phrases everywhere she goes, some good, some… not so good. The other day I thanked her for carrying her plate into the kitchen and she said “you’re quite welcome!”. Then today she told Alex to give her the toy back or she would “kill” him. At first I started to raise my voice at her, and then I realized she had no idea what she was saying, she was just trying on a new phrase to see what happened. When I explained to her why she shouldn’t ever say that, she said “but the boy at Chik-Fil-A said it!”. I was both relieved that we hadn’t taught it to her at home, but dismayed that she’s susceptible to bad influences over which I have so little control. Also this week Chloe said “Mom, I wish I was normal”. I was perplexed for a while until I some how figured out that she’d heard this phrase on The Incredibles cartoon. The character says it because he wishes he didn’t have super powers so he could be more like his friends at school. I explained that Alex and Chloe didn’t have super powers and were therefore normal. They said “what are super powers?”. I said “Well, Dash can run faster than a car and you can’t, so you don’t have super powers”. Alex said “I can run faster than a car, watch me!” And off he went!

visit with Maura, Meg, and Jeff

1) Natalie & Maura 2) Grammy Carole, Maura & Natalie 3) Meg, Jeff, Maura

4) Chloe, Maura, Alex 5) Meg, Chloe, Natalie

6) Chloe, Maura, Natalie, Alex


7) Maura, Natalie, Alex, Chloe

stripping wall paper end of mar 17

I tried several methods to remove the under layer of wall paper, and each time the surface of the drywall tore because the paper had been applied before any paint or primer. Looks like my project just got longer as I'll now have to apply a skim coat and sand it before I can prime and paint.

poweder room project by lunch time

Hey, I"m pointing and clicking while I'm chewing! I took most of the H/W down, but didn't tackle the sink & toilet.

powder room project start

I started trying to remove the wall paper in our powder room by working in the evenings after the kids went to bed. This is how far I got before I sent the kids to Grammy Barb's so I could make some real progress.

week ending mar 11, 2007

Week ending March 11, 2007: We decided that in order to wear the kids out enough that they’d go to bed early tonight and start transitioning to Daylight Saving Time, we’d take them to the Science Center. We all had a good time. This week I had a hard time not laughing when I heard Chloe say “Mommy’s not watching us” while she was standing about 5 feet away from me. She and Alex were twisting the bottom of their chapsticks so that the waxy part was sticking out about an inch long and just asking to be broken off. Chloe obviously knew that I wouldn’t be happy if I knew what they were doing but she didn’t have enough impulse control to stop herself from announcing that she’d noticed I wasn’t watching. I finally got Alex to do some coloring this week. For months he has absolutely refused to do any coloring. When Chloe colors, Alex wants me to color on his paper, and if I try to get him to take turns coloring with me he get immediately frustrated and screams “I can’t do it very well!”. Casey’s Mom said that Casey flunked coloring in Kindergarten because he refused to do it. So I figured, oh well, he can still graduate from college even if he never learns to color with crayons. But this week I found the right incentive to get Alex to color-- the stapler. Alex really loves to see me stapling things and we discovered a web page http://disney.go.com/magicartist/play/index.html that allows me to print out Disney characters for the kids to color in and then we cut them out with a flap on the bottom that I staple into a loop that acts as a stand so the characters stand up by themselves. I told Alex he had to color the character before we’d cut and staple it. When we did the first one Alex did his usual complaining, but he still wanted to do more and after the 2nd or 3rd he was obviously getting more comfortable with coloring. I also found a page that has mazes that I can print out and the kids do quite well finding their way through simple mazes. Boy they are growing up fast. This week we also started doing their Tumble Tots class again. When Chloe learned that we were going to the class this week she literally jumped up and down and shouted “Hooray! Hooray!”. I find her enthusiasm really beautiful and I hope she doesn’t outgrow it anytime soon.

Chloe's biopsies

Chloe’s biopsies: The doctor called and said Chloe’s biopsies are fine. All the irritation appears to be because of stomach acid and the increased Prevacid is the right course of action for her. The biopsies show no evidence of food allergies. The doctor said Chloe’s hernia is “significant” and she will need to be monitored every 3-4 years.

week ending mar 4, 2007

Week ending March 4, 2007: This week I’ve noticed the kids wanting to help with everything even more than usual. I was cleaning out the humidifier in the bathtub and Chloe asked if she could help and said she wanted to try it too. Alex has similarly volunteered to try routine and boring chores. The kids have learned the word “boring”. They say “what are we going to do today Mom?” and I say “play with our toys” and they say “no, that BORING!”. When we have to run an errand and they say they don’t want to go, I remind them that I helped them get to the fun places, and now they have to help me get the work done by going to places like the grocery store or the K-Mart. Chloe has decided that this means that each day a “Mommy part” and a “fun part”. She’ll ask “what are we going to do today, Mom?” and I’ll say “go to the grocery store” and she’ll say “No! What are we going to do for the FUN part?” She definitely believes that she deserves time every day to enjoy the things that she likes, but she does concede that the whole day doesn’t have to be about her. Most pre-schoolers believe that world revolves around them, so I guess this is some progress. We’re making very little progress with Alex’s potty training. He wets himself roughly once a day. He had a few days when he would actually decide that he needed to use the potty and he’d get there on time, so I started asking him if he had to use the potty rather than telling him he had to sit on the potty. I got myself in trouble again with my language around the kids. After the 100th time that I had to remind them that we didn’t have time to play around because we had to get to a party on time, I lost my temper and raised my voice at Chloe and said “we don’t have time for farting around, we have to GO!” and she said, “OK, OK, Mommy. I will stop farting around. When we get to the party will we have time fart around?”. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the pictures this week, Alex and Chloe are eating popsicles in the bathtub because they are too messy to eat clothed and it is too cold to be naked at any time other than the bath.