"The one that's frustrated wants to eat."  This is what Madeleine said when I asked who wanted to eat lunch with me.  She had previously told me she was frustrated because I had tickled her when we played hide-and-seek.  (They were in the same hiding places, never moved, and just demanded that I find them over and over; it was getting dull; I tried to spice things up a bit.)  On the way downstairs she informed me that Big Brown Bear would make her "unfrustrated".  Thank goodness for Big Brown Bear.

Grant is saying a lot more too.  Today he said something... um... I forget the noun, but it was followed by the word "want".  Something like "pretzel want" (I think it was probably that; he was demanding pretzels).  And he's really good at finishing the last words of lines in books.  In one counting book he says "that left.... " then he flips the page, looks at the number, says it loudly in his cutest voice, and it's adorable.  I have been trying to video a lot mroe with the ipod touch, which is perhaps one reason why I don't write as much.  I find myself narrating into the camera instead of writing in a blog.  I really need to go video him reading that book.  Maybe Brian will help me do it tonight. 

Last night we ended up getting the kids to bed pretty late.  Madeleine was still up when the fireworks from the end of the baseball game started, so I called her to Grant's room, where we could look at them from the window.  She didn't say anything about them for a moment, and then I asked her what she thought.  She said they were "amazing!"  Then she was hopping up and down on the bed and said she did that because she was so excited.  Then, suddenly, I noticed she was covering her ears with her hands.  I asked if the fireworks were too loud and if we needed to close the window.  She said no, it was that she was "afraid of ten o'clock" -- and indeed, it was 10:00 on the digital clock.  (Sometimes she covers her ears if she's afraid, even if it's not a noise thing.)  Then she started crying and wailing and wanting to go to bed.  I kept trying to get her to watch the fireworks, because they had made her happy, but suddenly she didn't like them.  I said the grand finale was almost there, but she was just screaming.  (Brian came into the room just now and said, "That was quite the response from Madeleine last night.  I've never seen ecstasy turn into terror so quickly.")

So.  I insisted upon naps for everyone this afternoon.  Madeleine took a nap by herself in the crib.  Maybe she'll want to sleep there all the time now?  Have her own little cuddly bed instead of having to share with Daddy? 

And now it's time to go to Al's and Ellen's for dinner, and then off to see fireworks.  Thankfully there won't be any digital clocks announcing that it's ten o'clock outside on my grandma's deck. 

6-28-11

Madeleine is pretty funny.  She says a whole bunch of funny things these days.  She’s also really sweet, but that’s a different story, I guess.  Madeleine and I were just eating cake leftover from the Cousin’s Day party, and she said she really needed a wet wipe (because she was so sticky; a regular napkin wouldn’t be good enough).  I said she knew where they were.  She said she was too busy eating to get it.  I told her I was too busy eating to get it, too.  Then she asked me, “Who will get it?  Mr. Nobody?”  So I said I guess Mr. Nobody would get it, and then she ran and got it herself.  I didn’t know she knew about Mr. Nobody. 

Merrie Jo, Jameson, and Brogan have been in town for two weeks now, and we’ve had a fun and exhausting time with them.  My mom’s good friend’s daughter died, too, and so that created extra work for Mom and extra get-togethers for all of us.  So sad!  But I was going to tell about the Cousin’s Party.  After the day of the tornadoes when Madeleine said that when MJ and Jameson came she was going to “throw a party at them”, Merrie Jo came up with the idea of having a cousins party, and perhaps we’d give presents then, when we’re all together, instead of mailing them for birthdays.  So today we had a little party at lunchtime, with cake and ice cream and a few presents.  On the way home from Grandma’s house, Madeleine was asking me about when Merrie Jo would be coming back.  I said next summer, maybe, and Madeleine said that was a long time away.  Then she was telling me about something she was going to do when they came back.  It took awhile to get it out of her, but then she said she was going to have a party.  I asked if it was going to be like the cousin’s party we just had, and she said no, it was going to be a “real party”.  I asked her what made a party real.  She said you know, balloons… and a pretty cake…  I asked what made a cake pretty, and she said you know… sprinkles…  And I said Merrie Jo and Jameson had made us a cake for our party with sprinkles.  Madeleine said not like that one, and something about how that cake was too pretty.  I asked what made it too pretty, and she said it was the cereal balls on it (they decorated it with fruity colored cereal).  I asked her if she didn’t like those, but she said she did, but that she had just wanted to grab them and eat them.  So.  I guess next year we’ll have to get balloons, and make sure the cake has sprinkles, but isn’t too pretty. 

I know I had more to write, but I was interrupted in the middle of the last paragraph and now it’s the 29^th – Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad! – and for some reason I’m really achy today and sitting is really uncomfortable and I’m done for now.  Toodles! 

Madeleine was laughing and holding her bear, and saying, "Grandma Shirley calls Big Brown Bear 'Candy Bear'!  That's so silly!"  I said, "Do you mean 'teddy bear'?" and she said, yeah, but that was still soooo silly.

Also we were cuddling upstairs after her bath and she was wrapped in towels and blankets, and she said she was warm as a bug.  Later she said she was comfortable as a bug.  She was thinking of "snug as a bug in a rug", but it came out in different ways. 

Also, Grant is really gross with his poop.  He always pulls his hard rock balls of poo out and brings them to me in his hand, saying "poop!"  At least that's better than throwing them, which is what he used to do.  Now he lets me take him to the bathroom and flush it down the toilet.  I guess it's a step forward......   ?? 

I just noticed Grant has his bottom two-year molars iu, but not the top ones.  I remember not noticing when Madeleine got hers... I'm doing a little better this time.

Within the space of about an hour, Grant managed to throw poop around the house (and get all yucky), break my new-at-christmas-time digital camera, pull out large amounts of his sister's hair, and get three fingers smashed in a door (two are bleeding, all are scraped and swollen), causing him to scream for about 45 minutes till he fell asleep for his nap.  Now he's having an extra-long nap so he'll probably be up till midnight, and I'm tired!

And Madeleine is whining for help coming down the stairs, and I don't even know what it's about.

But she did look at my shirt (which I haven't worn for her before) and she told me that it said the name of my "favorite mountain, Mt. Rainier". 

She has both legs in one of her pant legs and was sliding down the stairs like a mermaid.  And she's crying about it.  Seriously?  Can't a Mommy get a break?

P.S.  I just remembered how Grant ripped a page out of a library book sometime in that general time frame too.  Argh!

The kids are looking at a ladybug on the sliding glass door that goes to the deck.  Madeleine isn't happy that Grant is there.  First she tells him to not touch it, and then she says, "Just go outside Grant; he doesn't love you."  Ouch. 

Now she says, "I'm so happy we see a ladybug in our house."  That's nice, sweetie, but I bet the ladybug doesn't love you either. 

I was going to write down some of the 2-word phrases Grant has been using.  So, here goes:

Recently he has been saying things like:

"Get shoe" (obvious)

"Get Mommy" (which was really that Mommy got something for him)

"That one" (Today he cried about the shirt I put on him, and later came back to his closet crying.  I asked if he wanted a different shirt, and he said "yeah" and I asked which one, and he said "that one".  It was surprisingly a shirt he had never seemed to notice before.  He certainly has been more difficult to dress the past week.  He doesn't want any shirt, not even his favorites, so after lots of crying I just pick on and put him in it.  At least today he had a preference again, one that he would let me put on.)

"Here is" (On Friday the garbage truck comes.  We saw it twice at our house, and then when we went across the street to the neighbor's house it came by again, and Grant pointed at it and said, "Here is" -- as in, "here it is".  We also just had fun in general at the neighbor's house.  Their two boys (ages 2 and 4) were there, and the mom was planting flowers.  The three little boys went and caught roly polies and put them on a skateboard and then in a butterfly net.  Grant loved pushing them and making them roll into little balls.  Madeleine spent most of the time helping Charith (the mom) plant flower bulbs.  Madeleine sure loved that.  We had them over for a duplo/scooter playdate recently, and that was fun, too.  Madeleine likes to play with the 5-year old girl more than with the little boys, but she's in kindergarten now so she wasn't there on Friday.)

The kids are at their grandparents' house.  I took a long nap because Grant has been keeping me awake too much at night.  Then I cleaned a whole lot of the house:  I even vacuumed and did toilets.  Good grief.  I'm usually spoiled with a housekeeper, but she's out of the country for awhile.  Ay de mi.  And then I caught up on some internet tasks.  I guess I have a few more loose ends to wrap up.  I was going to make a kaleidoscope, but I guess I wasn't inspired and/or had too much other stuff to do. 

--------------------------------------------------------

I remembered some more things I wanted to write down, so I'm adding onto this post:

Madeleine has been throwing some huge fits over really trivial things.  Here are some of them:

--I didn't want her to come to the shower with me
--I locked the door to the bathroom and she couldn't come in
--I undid her seatbelt for her and she wanted to do it
--I made her wash all of her hair and not just the back part

In general she is throwing screaming fits because she can't control what I do.  Isn't that part of the pain of the universe:  you can't always control what's going to happen to you?  I tell her I love her, but that she can't always have things the way she wants them.  And then if she keeps it up we move towards discipline (including spankings occasionally).  But a lot of the time she gets so out of control I have to hold her and help her stop crying.  I can imagine someone calling that bad parenting, but after awhile I figure she's suffered enough and needs some help.

5-15-11

The kids went to the neighbor’s house, so now I have free time and a whole lot of stuff to write down.  I feel quite unmotivated to do it, but hopefully if I get started it’ll start flowing a bit more.

Madeleine has really become a story-teller lately.  Now I won’t say she’s a *good* story-teller, but she loves telling stories to people.  For instance, on Thursday she went to the ladybug class at the Children’s Museum (it’s 45 minutes, and Grant gets to play in the museum while we wait).  At the end the kids in the class were eating cookies with red frosting that looked like ladybugs.  I took Grant with me to the bathroom while we waited for Madeleine to come out.  There he loves to play in the sink, because there is a stepstool so that he can reach the water, and also little cups to fill up.  He tends to get really wet.  To avoid this I suggested he go find Madeleine as soon as I was done.  He ran out and through the museum while I washed my hands.  I chased after him and found him in the classroom with all of the kids in the class, and the teacher was giving him bites of a cookie.  I felt a bit embarrassed that he had walked right in,  but the teacher didn’t seem to mind.  She tried to give him bites, and he just took a teeny tiny bite.  So then we said to take a bigger bite, and he took a really big bite and then had trouble with it and spit it out in a spray of red frosting.  I got my hand out to catch most of it, but it was pretty gross.  And Madeleine thought that whole story was hilarious, and loves to tell it to people.  She told it to my sister on the phone, but I think my poor sister couldn’t understand very well… understandably so, because Madeleine gets really excited and laughs and laughs and doesn’t really make much sense unless you already know the story.  Last Friday I went to the Catholic school yard sale with my mom and grandma, and Madeleine and Grandma Shirley and I were waiting in the minivan.  Madeleine started telling my grandma silly story after silly story.  I had to interpret a lot of them for her, and my grandma and I kept laughing and laughing.  After a long while Madeleine told us that she was just going to keep on talking until we told her to stop, and that cracked us up even more. 

I was telling the preschool teacher (at the Children’s Museum) this story too, because she had told me a few weeks ago that Madeleine was finally starting to talk.  She said the first three classes (which happen twice a month) she couldn’t get her to say anything.  Brian went to the spring celebration at the Children’s Museum, and talked to the teacher and she told him about that, but he came home to tell me that Madeleine was talking too much in class.  I didn’t think that was the case and verified it with the teacher.  But then we talked about kids who wouldn’t talk and wouldn’t talk, and then once you finally got them to talk they wouldn’t shut up.  These days that seems to be Madeleine.  J

She’s also saying a lot of funny things that I forget to write down, or perhaps that wouldn’t translate well to paper?  For example:  we went to the church with the daycare today, and there were lots of little kids there.  (We used to go to a later Mass with fewer kids, but the earlier one has lots.)  After we dropped the kids off Brian and I talked to each other about that being lot of kids (most ages 1-3) for one person to take care of.  Madeleine must have thought something similar, because on the way home she was all chatty and told us how she had asked the Teresa (who works there) “How are we going to handle all of these kids today??”  We thought that an astute and hilarious question, and wanted to know what Teresa had answered.  Madeleine said she answered, “I don’t know!”  An honest answer, to be sure.  At least if she had a problem she could call the parents, as they ask for the cell phone number (on vibrate). 

Grant is wild and crazy and prone to throwing poop around.  (Yuck-o!)  He still nurses, and likes to come at me and say in a monster voice, “Big bite!” and then say something that sounds a lot like “chomp!” and then clamp down.  It’s hilarious and a bit frightening at the same time.  J  Madeleine would say “big bite!” and mean that we had to cut up her food for her (because even a raspberry was too big for her delicate princess sensibilities).  Grant says the same thing with quite the opposite intent. 

We went to a thing at the park yesterday where they had lots of large trucks, tractors, race cars, etc., on display for kids to get in and look at.  It was lots of fun, though Madeleine was a bit scared by the whole thing.  She was especially irritated when over-eager kids would honk all the horns of the vehicles they were in.  She is not a fan of noise.  Then we went to the Playground of Dream with some friends we met there, until the large storm came up.  For the record, we got the first lightning storm of the year on Friday night – well, it was after midnight, so Saturday early morning.  It woke me up around 12:30 a.m.  About time!  It’s been (at least by some measures) the coldest spring on record in the Northwest, and I think the delay in thunderstorms goes along with that.  At least I think it was a delay; don’t we normally get some in April?  But then another big one came up while we were at the park, and it got really dark; but it was time to go home for dinner anyway.  Madeleine and I went upstairs while Brian cooked, and looked for lightning.  It was hard to get Madeleine to see it, because she tended to look only for a few seconds and then look away while she was talking about something.  But I held her head for her (she told me I could) to keep her focused, and then she saw some.  But she’ll only say that she saw it “a little bit”.  But at least “a little bit” is better than none.  When we heard thunder she wanted to shut the windows, but it wasn’t very loud and she didn’t seem to get scared.  She had told me earlier in the day (when I had said there was a possibility of thunderstorms that day) that she didn’t like thunder, but that now that she was four she liked lightning.  She’s always saying things about how her age affects things, even if it really doesn’t, because, in this case, even when she was three she said she liked lightning but not thunder.  She has a whole lot of explanations for things that make no sense, but at least you can see that she’s trying to explain the world around her. 

Brian always asks her (and now Grant), “How did you get so cute?” and he taught them to answer “Mommy.”  Sometimes we change it up a bit, such as with, “How did you get to be so smart?” or How did you get to be such a pain in the neck?”  (I asked her that last one yesterday while Matt and Andy were over, and she just got all silly and said “No thing” and shook her head and wouldn’t say any more.  She wouldn’t be baited; smart girl.)  If we ask her how she got so big, she’ll say, “Birthdays!”  I thought it a rather good answer. 

I cleaned up all my lego pieces and they are all perfectly ordered right where they are supposed to be.  Everything has been dismantled and stacked into columns, laid into the appropriate containers, and placed neatly into the book shelf in the upstairs hall.  Perfect.  Beautiful.  Now I suppose I should go get some and start messing them up again and make something new.  Or at least I should tomorrow – I get more free time tomorrow, yay!

MJ says that Jimmy said that he wants more kids because they like chaos.  MJ pointed out that Brian and I like more structure.  So perhaps Jimmy’s newly-expressed desire for 4 kids is a better idea for them than it would be for us.  When I first heard it, I sort of thought, “If my sister gets four kids, I want four kids too!”  But it would be nice to just get the ones that we have grown up a bit more, and go do more grown-up things with them…  vacations and the like.  We’ll see.

I’m hungry and ready to do something else now…. So adieu…!

A few quick things:

Haley came over, and Madeleine told her that her shirt said, "New York" on it.  Isn't she old enough for kindergarten yet?  Another year still?  Really?

Grant likes to pop out at you and say, "Hi Grant!"  Maybe he is suggesting what we should be saying to him?  He also says, "Yay Grant!" very enthusiastically (for example, when he puts a ball in the ball chute).  Haley was teasing him about not being very humble. 

I was asked to be a guest judge for a lego competition, and I did it, but I was so full of crap.  It sounded sort of like I knew what I was talking about:  I wrote lots about each entry, discussing things like colors and shapes and lines and details.  But I'm still secretly thinking (well, not-so-secretly thinking now) that it's all crap and I'll be laughed out of lego-dom.   

Brian is playing letter games with the kids, and Grant just found the letter Q faster than Madeleine did.  Grant is really learning a lot of letters and numbers now.  When Madeleine was little I'd quiz her and see which ones she knew and write them down in my blog.  Now I just think, "oh good, he's not a complete dummy" and go off and try to play a game or make something or clean a bit...  Poor second child.  So neglected. 

Toodles!