October 7, 2011

  • October 7, 2011  --  My 33 and 5/6ths birthday.

    Joe and Karen are getting married tomorrow.  Tonight is the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner.  Madeleine is going to be the flower girl.  When she was the flower girl for Al and Ellen’s wedding, she was only 2.5 yrs old.  She practiced and practiced in the house.  We watched videos on youtube.  And then she did a pretty great job.  This time we haven’t practiced.  She did tell me once that she was only going to throw one flower petal at a time.  I said that maybe she would throw more, but we’d see what Auntie Karen wanted. 

    I’ve been meaning to come and write a few things  down about the kids, so let’s see if I remember them. 

    For the last three days, Madeleine’s gone to the bathroom all by herself without asking for help or wanting attention or anything.  It’s great.  She’ll just say she has to go somewhere, and she’ll go and come back.  Yay!   She could do it before, but was so needy and wanted attention.  The other night she asked for underwear for sleeping in the middle of the night, so she got it.  Last night she tried to go the whole night without a diaper, but she just woke up rather sad.  Her nightgown was damp, and she said that the bed was wet and then her nightgown got wet too.  She was pretty bummed about it, which manifested itself as her saying she was too tired to use the potty, and took some coaxing from me to go do it again. 

    Grant has been really amazing with his verbal growth the last month or so.  He started using the word “I” and saying decent sentences, such as, “That truck have corn in it.”  The last few days he’s started a funny new thing with the “-ing” construction.  He used to say things like, “Mommy doing now-ing?”   Now a sentence like that would be, “What’s Mommy doing now-ing-ging-ging-ging?”  I can’t even repeat half of his funny constructions, but I do know there’s lots of repetition of the “ging-ging-ging” part.  It’s all a lot more muddled than it was a week ago, and yet somehow I usually know what he is trying to say.  The words are being put together haphazardly; it’s obvious he’s trying to repeat the general sound of some common phrases, but they get put together in strange ways. 

    Another one of his favorite phrases is, “What clock is it now?”, which means “What time is it?”  He loves to look at the clock in his bedroom and ask about the time.  If I’m cuddling with him there, he will also ask about every single sound he hears, both inside and outside the house.  It’s rather endless.  Oh, and he’s been asking “why?” for a month or so now, too.  “Why?  Why?  Why?”  I don’t know if he understands the explanations, though.

    Madeleine is always asking questions, too.  She asks if it’s morning or afternoon, and then wants to know how many minutes until it’s afternoon (if it’s morning), or how many minutes it’s been since noon (in the PM).  She asks how many minutes till events we’ll be attending, how many days till future events (like Karen’s wedding, Halloween, Christmas).  She’ll notice that Daddy (a boy) is taller than Mommy (a girl), but she’s taller than Grant (a girl taller than a boy) and she’ll think it’s funny (in the strange sense of the word) and wonder why.  She noticed that every day of the week has the word “day” in the name, and wants to know what all the names mean.  She wants to know why Halloween is named what it is, and why Christmas is named what it is, and then on and on with all the other holidays.  Last night she wondered how I knew that red and blue made purple (she’s always asking, “How do you know????), and got out her paints and tried for herself.  Then she found it was true, and was so excited that she knew it and would be able to tell her teacher in kindergarten next year.  Then she wanted to tell the neighbor girl (who is in first grade this year) that she was in school, too, learning how to mix paints.  She mixed lots of other colors, finding among other things that purple and orange make brown.  We have a Styrofoam cube from the packing for our new book shelf, and she painted all over it, and then pulled out bits that make funny little pea-like crumbs.  She told me she was doing experiments with them, too, painting, and then dropping water into hollows she’d made in the Styrofoam cube, and dropping the tiny bits back in…  it was very involved. 

    Anyway, she wants me to come help her do a puzzle, so I guess I will.

    P.S.  I just remembered one more thing.  Grant goes around holding the palm of his hand out to people in the “stop” gesture, and says, “No, no swiping!”  He does it to Madeleine and to me.  It’s obviously from Dora where they say, “Swiper no swiping!”  But he does it in very strange contexts that don’t make a lot of sense.  Last night the kids were doing flips and slams with Brian before bedtime (he flips and slams them onto the bed, although last night they were flipping and slamming themselves).  I tried to walk into the room and Grant held up his hand right at me and said loudly, “No, no swiping Mommy!”  It was clearly a dismissal, like he was saying, “Go away!”  Which is maybe what he thinks it means, because on Dora when they stop Swiper from swiping, he always says “oh man” and goes away.  That would make a lot more sense, and why he would say it to Madeleine a lot. 

    Also, he goes around saying, “Goodbye bonk bonk.”  I’m really not sure what that is, but I think it somehow comes from the Urban Ninja iPod game.  I never hear that being said in that game, but Grant says it most often either during or right after playing it.  And then occasionally at other times, too.  I don’t get it, but it’s fun to go around and say, “Goodbye bonk bonk” or “Mommy doing now-ing-ging-ging-ging???”