I heard a thump, and then Grant fell down crying.  I asked him, "What happened?  Did you whack yourself?" and he said, "I killed me-self!"  Really?  Then why are you still here crying?  ;-D Actually, I like his idea of what killing is... just getting a little bump.  If only it were that nice. 

We had 234 trick-or-treaters this year.  I think that's down slightly from last year, though I haven't double-checked.  It was a Monday night this year, which might deter a few people. 

I was playing Doodle Jump on the iPod touch with the kids watching me (Grant kept wanting me to play it, and now I play it sometimes even by myself).  Then Grant kept hugging me and saying, "My best friend!" (did he get that from the Cars movie?)  and then "hug!"  Then I noticed he did it when I lost, especially, almost as if trying to make me feel better.  He's so sweet.  He was watching Madeleine skip today, and was yelling to her, "Hi Madeleine!  Nice job!"  My mom says he's a keeper.  It's true. 

The kids did great trick-or-treating.  The neighbor girls ended up going with us, and it was pretty easy.  We got through the row homes, and then the kids got tired on the last street on the way back home.  But they got tons of candy and had a good time.  There was one house at the end that scared Grant a bit.  I had to carry him, and when they opened the door, he didn't say "Trick-or-treat!" but instead said "Hiiiiiii!" in a voice that was strong but tremulous and scared.  It's hard to describe it.  It's like he wanted to start wailing, but was holding it together and saying "hiiiiiii" instead of losing it.  But he couldn't think of what you're supposed to say; he was too scared, I think.

Anyway, it's time to go read books to him. 

And then tomorrow is Brian's birthday!  He's a saint. 

Good night!

P.S.  I checked.  Last year we had 280 trick-or-treaters; the year before that we had 262.  So we were definitely down a bit this year. 

10-31-11

Grant’s so funny these days.  He talks all the time, and some of the things are pretty silly.  I know I’m going to do a poor job of remembering it all, but at least I’ll try. 

For example:  The other night he didn’t want to go to bed.  He’d been playing with the black iPod touch (the “blackpod”) and was displeased when I took it away so he’d go to sleep.  He started throwing a little tantrum yelling, “I’m mad!  I’m mad!  I’m mad!  I’m not tired!  I’m not tired Mommy!” on and on.  This was funny because it was just like what Madeleine would say.  But the fit didn’t last long, and then he was on to one of his favorite pastimes:  looking at the clock.  “What clock is it now, Mommy?”  Then I would tell him the time, and he would say, “I’m glad!!”  and then, “What comes next?” Then I would say what came next, and next, and next, till the clock changed, and we’d start all over, “What clock is it now Mommy?”  This (Saturday night) was the first time I remember him using the line, “I’m not tired.”  Then yesterday (Sunday) morning, he started saying, “I’m not tired!” anytime he was displeased with something.  Ironically, he often meant that he actually was tired, such as at church when he didn’t want to walk anymore and exclaimed “I’m not tired!”  Then he demanded to be carried. 

Just now Madeleine has asked about making cookies for Halloween, but I told her that we were going to make cupcakes with grandma instead.  She moaned about it a bit, and then very poutily said, “I wanted to do them the last Monday in October...”  (Imagine her lower lip sticking out in a huge pout; I’m not sure it actually was, since I was not looking at her, but it sure sounded like it would be.)  It cracks me up when she says things like that.  The other day I had pulled down a random cup to drink from, and she looked at it and said, “I sure like that cup for football season.”  I looked at the cup, and it was the one from the WSU football game that you get with hot cider in it, and it has football pictures on it.  It amused me that she knew the term “football season”, knew that it was football season, and figured that that cup went very well with football season. 

Yesterday in the car Madeleine was having me ask her math questions (7+2 and that kind of thing).  When she was done, Grant wanted questions too.  He doesn’t know math too much (just 1+1, mostly, or if you show fingers he can count), so I started asking about what letter made which sound.  I know that he knows a lot of letter sounds, but he knew almost every single one I asked.  He had trouble with short e, w, and y, but every other one he knew.  Oh, and I think he said “key” instead of K.  But I was really impressed, because I haven’t worked with him on that.  I suppose it’s from playing Starfall?  Starfall really works on letter sounds.  He also is obsessed with their math games (we bought the “more starfall” access, and it has all sorts of games that he loves).  Oh, yeah, he learned how to use the computer mouse in the last month, popping bubbles on Starfall.  There are a hundred bubbles to pop, and it counts down from 100 to 0.  He started popping bubbles randomly, and now he’s precise and does it in rows, starting from the bottom. 

Grant wasn’t as verbally advanced as Madeleine, and I think Brian thought that maybe he wasn’t as smart.  And then I’d say that boys often don’t develop verbally as quickly as girls, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not as smart.  But lately Brian has been quite impressed with him.  He’s really learning lots. 

Ooh, and Brian said if I really wanted a third child, he wouldn’t deny me.  How sweet is that?    But probably when I was 35, so you’re all going to have to wait.  And by then I might not want one.  I was just talking with my grandma about how I want people to come visit me when I’m 80.  How’s that for a good reason to have another child?  Try to ensure lots of grandkids to come and visit me when I’m old?  Obviously that’s a great reason.  ;-p  But as my kids are starting to get easier, it seems like maybe… maybe it wouldn’t kill us to have another.  My kids are getting easier.  They play together.  They’re more capable.  It’s nice.  So obviously we should throw all that peace away and have a new baby.  ;-P

I have a “bad parenting” story that I want to write down (it’s not really that bad, don’t go call CPS on me), but I’m starting to think of when my kids are older and if they really want all this stuff on the internet.  Hmmm.  I might have to start making everything protected, so I can still keep a faithful account of my children’s shenanigans without forever embarrassing them before they’re old enough to open their own Facebook account. 

Anyway, I can’t think of much else now, and I really need to go wake up a sleeping kid so he’ll still be tired enough to take a nap today.  We have trick-or-treating to get ready for!  Yay!

Happy Halloween! 

P.S.  More links for Mom:

http://legoleaks.blog28.fc2.com/blog-entry-2481.html  (translate that one; it says "tile art" which I found exciting)

http://oxane.tumblr.com/post/11877844343/underneath-a-flower-by-eilonwy77  (that one has a bunch of "reblogged from" notes, which means it was posted in all those places).

Some links for my mom... I hope they haven't been repeated (too much, at least):

http://modelbuildingsecrets.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/easy-as-tic-tac-toe/

http://legoexpress.tumblr.com/post/11784111177/6-pt-7-pt-stars-flowers-by-eilonwy77-on-flickr

http://huamachuco.tumblr.com/post/10195140661/lego-kaleidoscopes

http://huamachuco.tumblr.com/post/10195106999/lego-crystals

http://kawalego.seesaa.net/article/227186169.html

http://www.mattsbrickgallery.com/post/11530714090/favorite-thing-you-built-by-eilonwy77-flickr#notes

http://legozz.tumblr.com/post/11134372813/pony-palace-by-eilonwy77

http://legoexpress.tumblr.com/post/10694814114/golden-lucky-which-way-is-up-by-eilonwy77-on

http://www.mattsbrickgallery.com/post/10000971703/sick-floor

http://zenseeker.net/Kid/Duplo.htm

http://legoleaks.blog28.fc2.com/blog-entry-1383.html

Madeleine and I were just using foam stamps and ink pads to make pictures.  She wanted her stamp of a present (for StarSong's birthday tomorrow, you know) to have several colors on it.  Then I said she should be careful, because she was getting the colors dirty, with blue on the yellow ink, and stuff.  I just didn't want her to ruin the new ink pads, and Madeleine said to me, "Thank you for warning me."  Really?  I had to run to the computer and write that down as quickly as I could.  Who says that?  I love it! 

Now Madeleine says, "Silly me!  StarSong's birthday is really on Saturday."  StarSong is a My Little Pony.  I think Madeleine is decorating something for her birthday.

Also....  Grant is obsessed with the time.  He's always saying, "What clock is it, Mommy???" over and over and over.  Especially when he should be sleeping.  Often in the middle of the night.  It's 1:31.  1:32.  Still 1:32.  1:33.....  It gets a bit..... annoying, to put it mildly. 

Back to stamps with Madeleine!

Today we were buying stuff at Wal-Mart, and we checked out in the garden center where you don't have to wait (usually).  We have talked to the cashier there a lot over the years, so Madeleine is used to telling her stories.  Today she was telling a very out-of-context story about Karen's wedding and dancing with a boy there (I say out-of-context because she'll start saying things that don't make sense to someone who wasn't there and doesn't know the general idea of what she's talking about).  Madeleine said several comments about it, but then the cashier had to talk to the other cashier about something.  Madeleine said another sentence or so about the wedding and then went on, as if she were still telling her story, but said, "and I'm just talking to myself."  It cracked me up, that she realized that the cashier wasn't listening to her and that she was essentially talking to herself. 

I've been reading a lot of longer books to Madeleine recently, because her attention span and comprehension is getting better.  We send Grant to play math games on Starfall on the computer (he recently learned how to use the mouse, and he loves to "pop bubbles", which counts backwards from 100, and he can click on a hundred bubbles quite quickly.  He loves all the counting and adding games, too).  I've noticed Madeleine using some "book language" when she talks, now, such as coming out of the house and looking at the night sky and saying it is "velvety black".  And then today we saw strange farm machines in a field with what looked like rolls of long cable or hoses, and Madeleine told me they were "spools".  I asked her how she knew that, and she told me some book or other... Clifford's Kitten, maybe?... that had that word in it.  ("Velvety black" is from the Little Ballerina, she informed me.) 

She's doing a little bit better at reading books, too.  She'll still miss easy words at times, but then she'll surprise me and know a word like "recital" and "slippers" (although I'm sure context clues are helping). 

Madeleine has been loving to paint and to stamp with rubber/foam stamps, to put stickers on things and decorate things... she keeps asking to do art projects and pretty much makes them up on her own.  She'll get out art supplies and say she wants to do something with them and then do it.  It's kind of nice for me, to know she can get stuff and do it on her own.

Anyway, I should go....  toodles!

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???”

9-26-11

Grant is talking up a storm these days.  Now let’s see if I can remember what he has said…

We say a school bus the other day, and he saw that there were no kids in it, and said, “No kids in ‘em!”  And then in a book he say a picture of a school bus with “kids” in it (they were really owls), and he said something like, “yes kids in it!”  And he copies a lot of what Madeleine says.  Madeleine has gone around saying things like, “I’m really mad!”  So now Grant goes around saying “I’m re-ee mad!” a lot.  (That “re-ee” is “really” without the “l” sound.)  He’s even said it in the middle of the night when he seems to be asleep. 

Last night before Grant went to bed, we were upstairs reading books in his room.  He heard noise from downstairs (Brian was watching TV) and he said several times “What is it?” and “Calling me??”  He was very clearly saying that someone was calling him and who was it and what did they want?  I thought it very cute.   

I know there’s more that he says that I should write down, but I’m forgetting.  I’m so busy thinking about BrickCon and LEGO and how to build what I’m going to take that I forget to write things down in time. 

I do know that we were playing a letter sounds game on the computer yesterday, and Madeleine started acting like she didn’t know and she was too tired to do it (a common thing; she tends to not read to the level  she’s capable of because she’s “too tired”), so I asked Grant what made the sssss sound, and he knew it was the letter S.  He also knew which letter makes the sounds for the letters T, P, and A right then (those are the only ones that came up; I’m sure he knows even more).  When I gave him the hard C sound, he told me “kee” was the name of the letter, which is a good guess.  After Madeleine saw that Grant got it and she hadn’t said it, she got a little more energetic about answering the questions, but then got pouty and went away.  That girl is so smart, but so often doesn’t want to show us what she knows.  I don’t think she likes the potential of being wrong, perhaps.   Just like me, of course, if that is the case.  She’s read words like “creek”, “dull”, “points”, and “highway”.  She read the name “New York” off the neighbor girl’s shirt several months ago.   And yet she’ll so often say she can’t read even the most simple words that I know she can read.  So instead of trying to make her read to me, I just keep reading to her and exposing her to words and sentences and language patterns, knowing she’ll soak it up even if she doesn’t want to spit it back to me. 

Madeleine says all sorts of funny and wonderful things, too.  One thing I remember was that she said Saturn’s cousin was coming to visit Saturn, and that Saturn’s cousin lived at the tip of New York right next to Pennsylvania.  Okay, that’s crazy that my 4-yr old knows that New York borders on Pennsylvania.  We don’t live there; we don’t really know anyone who lives there;  and yet she still knows.  She’s always asking about words I use; we had a very long discussion about the word “instantaneous” the other day.  Turning the light switch on = instantaneous.  Dropping a piece of paper = not instantaneous.  Today I had to spend several minutes discussing the word “shield”.  She was using a cup to shield her hands from the water in the shower, and I said so, and then she wanted to know what that meant, and I went on and on with examples of shielding.   The other day there was some word we were talking about with the prefix of “in-“ and I explained that that meant “not” and she wondered why and I went on and on about words I could think of with the prefix “in-“ meaning “not”.  Wow, how’s that for a nerd raising a nerd…? 

Anyway, I should get back to the building…..  5 days to go….

Madeleine calls a moon that is about 75% illuminated an "egg moon", because it looks like an egg.  Grant calls it that, now, too.  This morning I pointed out the moon, and she told me it was an egg moon, and then went on to clarify that an egg moon was a full moon that had a crescent taken out of it that we couldn't see.  I thought that was rather clever of her to realize.

What's not so clever is her awful tantrums that she has been having when I want her to do something she doesn't want to (like shampoo her hair) or when I won't help her with something I know she can do.  I make her do whatever it is, let her scream a bit, then hold her for awhile to calm her down, because otherwise she'd scream for hours. 

Now Grant wants me... so toodles....

Some of Grant's favorite phrases:

"Look me!"  (Look at me); for instance, right now he's on his back by the rocking chair, kicking it so it rocks.  "Look me!  Look me!"  Then he tries to say "help!" which is code for "come and grab my legs and let's do the wheelbarrow across the room" (Madeleine developed that, and Grant learned it well). 

"Why?"  I don't know if he really wants to know why, or if he just likes to say the word.  But suddenly I find myself explaining why to him over and over again.  This has developed over the last week or so.

"I want that one!"  or "I want X" or "I want the X"  -- sometimes he gets the word "the" in there, too...  He's done this for awhile, but now he says it all the time, all day long; he's so thrilled to be able to tell us what he wants.

He has all sorts of other language phrases, and sometimes puts together sentences, even if backwards a bit.  Today there was something like "going there" and then "that big truck" or something like that, to say the big truck was going there....

Anyway, he wants me, so I guess I'll go.