March 11, 2011

• 3-10-11

  Ah, the poor Cougs.  They did their typical thing and looked good till the end.  Does this count as couging it?  I’m not sure, but it’s sad.  I’m glad Brian didn’t stay up late watching it.  I was really hoping his team could make him happy (for once), but I guess my team will be it for now.  It’s probably because my mom wrote “Go Huskies” on Madeleine’s finger nails with a new purple nail polish.  It was “just a joke to tease Daddy”.  Poor guy.

  Madeleine wanted to paint Auntie Karen’s birthday card (happy birthday, Auntie Karen!).  She painted on Jupiter, a yellow color with a great red spot.  Then I think she did Pluto, which is always purple (it must have been in a book that way).  Then she did Saturn….  I forget the color but it had rings, of course.  Then she mixed blue and green to make Neptune (Neptune is bluish green, you know), and gave it some yellow rings.  Then Pluto needed some friends, so she made Ceres and Eris (other dwarf planets) to be with Pluto.  The dwarf planets were noticeably smaller than the other planets.  I thought the whole thing turned out great.  Then Madeleine wanted to add a butterfly to it (she had told me this before she ever started), but fussed that she couldn’t draw it.  So we got out some butterfly stickers, and that was the card.  I labeled the planets and wrote “Happy Birthday Karen” on it, along with a “Love, Madeleine”.  Madeleine can write all that out, but it’s slow and she’d already spent a lot of time on it, and it was time to be done.

  Grant painted a card, too.  He’s actually not too bad at getting some water color on his brush and smearing it around the paper.  He didn’t even try to eat the paint his time, though he still managed to get paint on his face.

  Madeleine and I have been on a major Plants vs. Zombies kick.  She loves the Zen garden and I play the games to get money and new plants for her garden.  I’ve done it so much the last few days (we got it for the PC, so there is lots of extra stuff to explore) that when I am half-asleep I get such weird thinking and all my life is somehow converted into video game  scenarios.  I can’t explain it really well.  It’s strange.  But I’m half asleep.  I think it’s about Grant and then I wake up and realize it was just plants vs. zombies.

  I’m actually getting a bit tired of it, which will be good.  I got enough money for Madeleine to buy a mushroom garden in the morning, and now I’m typing a bit.  I really need to type a bunch more, but I’ve just been firing peas at those zombies instead.  Madeleine loves to watch, though she’s funny and tends to run away and hide because she gets scared. 

  Both of the kids are really maturing.  I’ve really noticed it recently in both of them.  Madeleine is reading books quite well, now.  She can read them like a kindergartner or first grader,  getting through a lot of pages using the words she knows and surmising the rest.  Now if I could just get her to remember the word “them”, it would make the book she got from the preschool Children’s Museum class go so much better….

  Grant talks a lot more now.  His current favorite phrase is “help me”, and he says it way too much.  He’ll say it as an expression of dismay, even if he doesn’t need help.  Sometimes I think he says it just for the fun of it.  I’m sure he’s figured out he gets lots of instant attention if he calls out “help me”.  Brian and I were discussing how we didn’t remember Madeleine saying “help me” that much, and then I remembered that she always said “help you”.  I would ask her if she wanted me to “help you”, and she would repeat what I had said, without changing the pronoun.  Then the phrase took on a life of its own, just being “help you” instead of “help me”. 

  This reminds me that Grant has started saying ‘reach!’ the way Madeleine did, when he wants to get something but is too lazy to get it.  Well, often he can’t get it, but sometimes he just doesn’t want to make the effort.  We still love to make fun of how Madeleine used to put her arm out and say “reach!”without even trying to get to the object.

  I suppose I need to go to bed.  I had a nap, and then some caffeine (we went out for Karen’s birthday:  just to Eatza Pizza because that’s where the kids like to go, but still I guess it was better than being alone on one’s birthday), so I wasn’t feeling too sleepy.  I was also pumped up on basketball and zombie killing.  But now I think it’s time, and 7 a.m. will be here sooner than I think.  Or…. A crying kid will be here sooner than I could wish.

  Good night!

  • 3:08 am
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