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.