week ending march 30, 2008

Week ending March 30, 2008: The pictures are of the kids throwing foam chairs at each other and beating each other with said chairs. They were laughing their heads off!

This week we got Alex’s rocket back from the school. We just went to the front office and the person at the front desk radioed someone on the roof and they brought it right down to us. Alex says he might not want to launch it again soon. Also this week we went to the Open House at the MD Department of Agriculture in Annapolis. They had pony rides, face painting, and all the stuff that any good festival has, and it was PACKED. The temperatures were in the 40’s, so I can’t imagine how crowded it would have been on a nice day! Here are the pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/constance.phelps/DeptOfAgricultureOpenHouse2008
Well before we’d even mentioned going to the Ag Fair, Chloe was sitting at the dinner table with nary a horse in sight when she said “Mom, how do horses get sick?” So I said “germs and bacteria, just like us”. So she said “but horses don’t have hands”. We are always telling the kids to wash their hands because they touch germs and then touch their food, so she figured out that horses can’t use their hands to pick up their food and therefore can’t germs the way we do. I pointed out that another horse could sneeze on their food or sneeze where they were breathing, but thinking about it, I spent a lot of time around horses when I was growing up and they don’t get sick very often.

Also this week I was reading a Disney’s Aladdin book to the kids and there was a character who was an evil genie who kidnapped Aladdin’s monkey and said “I’m going to take you as my slave!” I asked the kids if they knew what a slave is. They said “no”, and I immediately regretted asking since I’m pretty bad at coming up with kid-friendly ways to explain what words mean. Anyway, I said “a slave is a person who is owned by another person and the slave has to do whatever the owner says”. Chloe didn’t miss a beat before she said “Mommy, am I your slave?” It was so telling of the way things have been going around here. Chloe really doesn’t like rules as much as the rest of us in this household do, and she spends a good deal of time bucking the system and griping about being told what to do. She frequently tells me how she can’t wait to grow up and tell other people what to do. Alex seems to find comfort in knowing what to expect, so he likes knowing what the rules are and following them to please us and keep the peace. Chloe acts as though we are treating her like a slave, as though we are depriving her of rights when we expect her to follow basic rules.

easter 5 min video

The picture on this blog is a video of our first 5 minutes on Easter Sunday 2008. Click the triangle on the lower left to start the video playing.

week ending mar 23, 2008:

Week ending March 23, 2008: This was a week of Easter frenzy! We were supposed to do an Easter Egg hunt with Big Daddy last weekend, but it got rained out. Then I took the kids to see the Easter Bunny at the mall on Friday. Chloe was excited to go, and Alex was pretty happy too, but neither of them wanted to sit on the bunny’s lap, so we settled for them sitting next to the bunny for the picture. On Saturday we went to the Easter Egg Hunt at their school (and the associated church). It was huge! I think there might have been a hundred kids, but they divided them up by age groups, so it was managed quite nicely. Alex and Chloe were in the 4-5 year old group, so I worried that, as the younger members in the group, they wouldn’t be able to keep up, but they did great! Each found exactly 15 eggs (if you are doing the math, and there were actually 100 kids and each kid found that many eggs, that would mean that church members filled and hid 1500 eggs!) and each egg was filled with more than one piece of candy, so it was quite a haul.



On Sunday Alex managed to sleep until 7:15 before he came bounding into our bed. Because we suspected that the Easter Bunny had hidden eggs downstairs, we told Alex he could go wake Chloe up so they could start hunting. They were so cute looking for the eggs and helping each other. If Alex found a pink egg, he’d give it to Chloe, if Chloe found a blue egg, she’d give it to Alex. In addition to more candy, the Easter Bunny gave Chloe a kite and Alex a model rocket (or a “bwast-off rocket” as he calls it). We had my family over for lunch which was a nice distraction since the kids were worn out and over-sugared already. After lunch weather.com said the wind was 3mph sound we decided to try the rocket instead of the kite. Grammy and Granddad went to the local high school with us for our first ever launch. Although we’d prepared pretty well for the launch, it still took longer than Alex’s patience lasted for us to set up, so Alex paced in circles, holding the launch button and asking “is it ready yet?” and “how much longer?” Of course our location was carefully chosen to provide the least possible opportunity for the rocket to land on the roof of a building, so guess where the rocket landed? You guessed it, right on the High School! We hoped that the rocket had come down just behind the school and spent a while searching, but finally had to break it to Alex. He cried. And cried. “Mom, I miss my rocket!” I explained that we could get it back when the school opens on Tuesday or he could have a new one, but that didn’t ebb the mourning. At that point we were on our way to dinner with Grammy Barb & Casey’s whole maternal side of the family, so once we got there Alex was finally distracted from his malaise. Grammy Barb had set up a 3rd Easter egg hunt for the kids, and they always love seeing their cousins Blade and Skye, so the Easter fun resumed.

week ending March 16, 2008

Week ending March 15, 2008: This week I realized how complicated 4 year old kids can be in their emotional relationships. Alex and Chloe spent time with their cousin Natalie and although they always look forward to seeing Natalie, they fought and cried and pouted a not-insignificant amount of the time. Children are emotionally volatile and their reactions very primitive in that they go from on-top-of-the-world, to crying, and back to on-top-of-the-world in the time that it takes most of us to tie our shoes, so the crying and fighting is nothing remarkable, but I started to wonder why the kids display so much negative emotion around Natalie. Later in the week the kids spent time with their friend Angie and they all played nicely for a very long time which further led me to wonder why they can play nicely with Angie while they sometimes won’t with Natalie. The more I watched, the more I learned. Angie, Chloe and Natalie are head-strong and opinionated, but when playing with Angie, Chloe will acquiesce, and when playing with Natalie, Chloe puts her foot down and demands that Natalie play the game the way Chloe wants it played, and then Chloe cries when Natalie (rightly so) refuses to be bossed around. While it originally looked like Chloe played better with Angie, it later seemed that Chloe was being truer to her own desires when she plays with Natalie. Chloe spends more time with Natalie than she does with Angie and may be more comfortable asserting herself, even though her assertions are not always socially appropriate. I’m amazed that people so young make such fine distinctions (between friends they see every couple of months and relatives they see weekly) and have such complexity in their reactions. Or maybe I’m projecting my feelings onto her and my whole theory is a bunch of garbage and I’ve just bored the heck out of my readers by over-analyzing kids playing. But hey, I don’t have much to think about while I’m folding laundry and doing the myriad other mindless tasks of an at home mom, so I try to explain the inexplicable.

Alex’s story of the week starts as Alex walks up to me and says “Mom, I need a phillips”. “Why?” I say. “So I can take my space shuttle apart”, he says. I ask to see the shuttle and he shows me the two Phillips head screws holding it together, so I told him where the screw driver was. I turns out that he couldn’t actually get the tiny jeweler’s screw driver to turn the tiny screws, so I helped, but I’d like to state, for the record, that Alex’s first attempt to take apart a toy that wasn’t meant to be taken apart, was at 4 years old.

Early Easter this year made for some chilly egg-dying outside!

week ending mar 9, 2008:

Week ending March 9, 2008: I finally took Chloe to physical therapy this week to have her checked out for the toe walking that I reported to the pediatrician in November. They did a very thorough exam and found no physical reason for the toe walking although they checked out her feet, ankles, legs, and trunk to make sure that the toe walking wasn’t compensating for weakness or imbalance elsewhere. That said, the therapist still wants to see Chloe twice a week for at least a month to help Chloe “relearn” how to walk. Chloe was nervous at first about meeting the therapist, but when I explained it would be just exercise and no shots, she felt better. Now that she knows there are lollipops for afterwards, she’s looking forward to going.

I was really impressed by the airplane that Alex built out of blocks this week. Up until now everything that we’ve built out of blocks has looked likes buildings or tunnels, so vehicles are new territory, and that the vehicle had symmetry was particularly impressive (I thought). I did not help Alex at all to make the airplane, he just left the room for a while and then came back and said “look at the airplane I built!” I made sure to stop what I was doing and talk with him a while about the airplane and to take his picture with the airplane. With a mom like me, the kids know that they’ve done something memorable when I bring the camera out!

This week I had one of those “this was not in the job description” kind of moments. Alex was using the toilet and he called me over and said he was lonely in there and would I keep him company? I said it was stinky in there and he should hurry up and finish so he could join us. He asked if I’d bring him a 2-way radio so he could talk to us from the toilet. I admired his ingenuity, to I obliged. What I didn’t realize was that with a radio in his hand, Alex felt obligated to talk, and he didn’t really have anything to talk about except for what he was doing, so I got a play-by-play in the nature of “I think I’m done Mom. No… wait… here comes another one… I think it is two more. I’m pushin’em out, Mom.” Gee, thanks for sharing. I guess it is my job to teach the kids what it is and is not appropriate to talk about, but at this age I figure any language practice is good language practice.

We went to the aquarium this weekend with Daddy. Bid Daddy and Bubbe got us a membership for Christmas and we’ve been anxious to use it. At first Alex didn’t want to go, but once we convinced him that the sharks were safely behind glass, we all had a nice time. Here are our pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/constance.phelps/AquariumMar2008

week ending march 2, 2008

Week ending March 2, 2008: The pictures are Chloe and her friend Alan eating cake, and Alan giving Chloe and Alex a group hug. This week I’ve got lots of little notes on the dry-erase board about cute stuff the kids did this week. It is so great to be back to healthy! My notes are as follows:

1) “not an option” – Casey and Chloe were discussing what they were going to do next and Casey said “I’m going to tickle Chloe!” and Chloe said “that’s not an option, Daddy”. It just cracks me up when the kids use phrases normally reserved for adults. Chloe is so quick to pick up on what all these adult phrases mean and to put them to good use.
2) “socks w/o asking” – We were getting ready to go to the car when I noticed Alex had his socks on and I realized he had put his socks on without my having to ask him. Now this may seem like a little thing, but when you have to ask someone a dozen times to put their socks every single time you head out the door (Alex is very easily distracted and can’t focus long enough to walk up the stairs, go to his room, get the socks, come down stairs, and put the socks on), it is cause for great rejoicing when that someone does the deed without even being asked.
3) “Chloe baby” – Chloe wants to be a baby again. All week long she’s asked questions about what she did when she was a baby, looked at photo albums from when she was a baby, and watched the video from her first year. She says it is not fair that she can’t be a baby again because she misses having people do everything for her. In the mean time I’m having fun going through all the mementos from their babyhood.
4) “Alex library” – We went to story hour at the library and we haven’t been in quite a while. For our first few years going to story hour, Alex would sit in my lap and hang around my neck while Chloe sat right in front of the teacher. This time Alex ran right up to the front with Chloe and when the teacher asked him to pass out popsicle sticks to everyone for the craft, Alex walked up to each group of people and held out popsicle sticks until they stopped taking them! I thought that was very brave.
5) “Captian’s Daughter” – On our long drives to Longwood and the ski resort, I brought some of the kids’ favorite CD’s which include Bob Marley, a classical orchestral compilation, some pre-school songs, and some Irish drinking tunes. Chloe picked up a lot of phrases from the Irish CD and (when she’s not pretending to be a baby) has been pretending to be the “Captain’s Daughter” (What shall we do with the drunken sailor? Put him in bed with the Captain’s daughter… early in the morning). I can’t wait to hear what they teach their friends at preschool…

6) “Blind” – The kids started asking questions about being blind. It all started when we were driving home with balloons in the car and I couldn’t get them to keep the balloons in the back seat so I explained that if a balloon got in front of my eyes I wouldn’t be able to see where we were going and we might crash. Several minutes later Chloe asked how blind people drive. I said they aren’t allowed to get driver’s licenses and can’t drive. She was shocked and practically shouted “how do they get places?” Driving does seem like such a right and a necessity that I was glad for the chance to think about those who have to do without.