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?).