week ending apr 25, 2009:

The pictures are of the kids enjoying the warm weather at the end of the week, and making perler bead projects at the beginning of the week, and Chloe passing out the wrong way on the sofa next to her barf-bowl at the end of last week.

Week ending April 26, 2009: Last week we wanted to make sure Alex got extra attention, and we were successful in our campaign, but I’m not sure Alex would have chosen to have this week go the way it did, given a choice. Alex started throwing up Monday evening and is still not eating a full day’s worth of food, so he’s playing “pay attention to the sick kid” to the extreme. When Chloe was sick, she was too tired to put her jammies on, so we let her sleep in clothes, and she was too tired to brush her teeth, so we brushed her teeth for her. After Alex started throwing up, he made sure that he also got to sleep in his clothes and have me brush his teeth for him, etc, even though he never really got as run down as Chloe did. So I guess the good part about Alex getting sick is that we can be pretty sure that this time Chloe’s throwing up was because of a temporary virus rather than her chronic gastro conditions.

I registered the kids for Kindergarten this week. They are just growing up too fast. We keep noticing them using more and more big-kid phrases, and this week we caught a half dozen or so like “oh come on!” or “for crying out loud!”. One day Chloe said to her dad “I’m not gonna get cold cuz it’s like 70 Dude!” And when we were talking about our trip to the Magic Kingdom last year Alex said “last year I didn’t want to stay in the haunted mansion because I was a ‘fraid-ee cat. We asked him where that expression came from and he said Scooby Doo (same place where ‘Dude’ hails). And my least favorite of all the new expressions is one Chloe learned from yours truly. When Alex says something that she find unacceptable she says “EXCUSE me?!” as in “I think you would like to rephrase that!” I hate it all the more because I know I say it.

At school this week the kids celebrated their 100th day of school. The teacher sent home a note beforehand saying that any kid who could count to 100 would get a certificate, so we practiced and they both got their certificates! The weather has played a part in their growing proficiency with numbers. They can’t wait for shorts and tee-shirt weather, so we started having daily arguments about whether 37F was cold or not, so I made a chart with specific number for which weight clothes they could wear at which temperature. They practiced reading the digital thermometer to determine which days would be short sleeves and which would require coats. At first they had a hard time remembering whether 37 was pronounced thirty seven or seventy three, and they still have trouble with the seven segment display telling a 2 from a 5, but they did practice a lot of 2 digit numbers.

We leave for Florida (and no wifi) at the end of the week, and we are driving so I don't know how long it will take us to recover when we get back before I post again.