Father's Day

My kids are blessed with a great dad who adores them, plays crazy games with them even after getting home from a long day of work, takes over and exhibits patience in situations when I'm just done, and is all around fantastic.  He is greeted like a rock star whenever he comes home.  And I'm so grateful that I'm married to him.

I'm glad my bloggy friend Jennifer told me what she was doing for her husband for Father's Day because it reminded me that I did this last year with the intention of doing it every year and almost forgot all about it!   So I bribed the kids with chocolate chips, gave up the battle of getting D to take his socks off and got about 100 pictures of them together in the hopes of having 3 turn out. Then made a little photo with the pictures spelling DAD and a quote that we say to each other around the house.

Then I saw another post for a personalized Motivational Poster which I couldn't resist making.  I thought Medman was in need of a little motivation to finish his last year of residency.  But I found four good quotes instead of just one, so made four posters.  Gotta love photoshop for making little projects like this so easy!

One that is too true:

If you can't read the little print it says:

CONVERSATION

Anyone who thinks the art of conversation is dead ought to tell a child to go to bed. 

 Robert Gallagher.

One that makes me laugh:

LAUGHTER

I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.  

Woody Allen

One that is sweet:

AFFECTION

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable

happiness there is in our lives. - CS Lewis

And my very favorite:

MEDICINE

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.

-Jack Handey, "Deep Thoughts" Saturday Night Live

Highs and Lows of the week- June 14th

Highs:

1. Took another road trip this week.   Medman had a conference in Madison, Wisconsin and since there are some tempting job opportunities in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Northern Iowa, we all climbed into the car and went along.  Children were angelic again.  It was almost creepy.  We let them room together again and they were complete chuckle-heads all night long, but all day while we drove (and we drove a LOT) they did things like sing Old MacDonald Had a Farm together.  I'm not kidding.  It was weird.  Like maybe there's a small carbon monoxide leak into the car or something.  Of course, if there is it's obviously not fatal and it just seems to be making everyone really happy, so I'm not going to worry about it.  
2. Went to the Madison zoo.  It was FREE and since we have young kids and only had a couple hours to kill, its tiny, sort of pathetic zoo-ness was perfect.  We saw lions, tigers, giraffes, flamingos, grizzly bears and bison.  Oh, and a weird little prairie dog colony that I'm fairly sure wasn't supposed to be an exhibit, but since they had moved into the zoo the zoo keepers just stuck up an educational sign by their dirt and pretended they wanted them there.
3. It was a cool, cloudy day when we went to the zoo and I've never seen animals so active. The lion cub wrestled with his mom.  The big bad male lion roared loudly and impressively (ok, once he sounded like he was trying to cough up a fur ball, but besides that it was impressive), the tiger roared back and all the commotion made the giraffes run around kicking up their feet in skittishness. 
4. Feeling remarkably knowledgeable as a parent.   Not because I'm doing any better job at it than normal, but my sister and her husband have just been licensed to be foster parents and got their first kiddos.  THREE kids ages ONE, TWO and THREE!  Medman snorted an evil sort of snort when he heard that and said, "They're so screwed!"  So in comparison to people who have never had children but just got 3 toddlers dropped into their house, I realize that I have, in fact, learned quite a bit about children over the past 5 years.  Not that I display any of that competency on a daily basis as I mother them, but the knowledge is tucked away in my brain somewhere.   And actually the three foster kids are really sweet and well-behaved.  My kids had fun playing with them yesterday.  Besides convincing the one year old that sleeping is better than screaming at bed time (yes, all you parents can wince in sympathy at that situation) things seem to be going well.
5. Only 9 weeks of pregnancy left! 

 
  Lows:

1. Still have NINE WEEKS of pregnancy left.  NINE!  58 days, to be exact.  Ugg.  C'mon baby.  Let's finish up this stage so I can at least have different things to complain to my husband about.
2. It took Belle 2 years and 3 weeks to do what we've known she would always do: climb out of her crib.  She seems determined to be taller than she is, so climbs absolutely everything. The other night we heard distraught crying and Medman went in first.  When I got there I was surprised to see him holding a little girl with blood streaming down her chin!  Eww!  Really, with climbing out of a crib and falling twice your height to the floor, just biting your tongue so badly that there are 4 clear holes matching your teeth isn't the worst injury she could have suffered.  And apparently a very painful tongue was a good learning tool.  A couple nights later she looked at me and said very seriously, "Mommy?  When I climbed out of my crib....it was NOT good."   True fact, honey

And a couple pictures of D:

Already WAY better at xbox than I am.

Our little maestro at his violin recital last month.  (Yes that's a one TENTH size violin. It's adorable.)

Linking up to:

Highs and Lows of the week - May 24th

CLOTHES:

High: Belle got a shirt that says, "My Dad is totally awesome!". She asked me to read it to her about 25 times before she started repeating it with her own spin. She spent the rest of the day chanting in a little sing-songy voice, "My DAD is SUPer AWEsome!"

Low: I asked her, "Is your mom super awesome?"  She snorted disdainfully and said, "No!"

High: Soon thereafter I dressed her in her "If you think I'm cute you should see my mom" shirt. Hoping she'd decide to memorize that one.  She asked me to read it to her about 25 times before she started chanting in a little sing-songy voice, "My MOM  is SUPer AWEsome!"  Yay

.

BUGS:

High:  Out back one gorgeous afternoon we found a fuzzy caterpillar crawling across the patio. This sparked about 15 minutes of my kids squatting next to it and crooning, "Its so cute!".


Low:  Went back inside and Medman said, "Crap!  There's a tick in Belle's ear!"  Took her up to the bathroom to remove the horrible creature and found a total of SEVEN on her!  SEVEN!  If you were to set seven of those little buggy vampires end to end, they would probably be as long as my precious little fair-skinned beauty.  Eww!  Seven!  And D had one.  Guess it's true that girls are sweeter.

OMAHA:

High:  Medman had a class in Omaha last Friday so we tossed the kids in the car and went with him.  Was a pretty great trip.  My kids are nearly angelic in the car.  I really should remember that the next time they are being buttheads around the house.  Toss them in the car with little baggies of Cheerios and they're happy for HOURS.

We visited the Omaha zoo, which is pretty cool.  The best part was probably the Swamp at Night exhibit.  Swampy and DARK and creepy.  You walk along this wooden boardwalk through a huge barely lit swamp with alligators (crocodiles?  Should a mother who homeschools know the difference?) swimming silently and malevolently about 3 feet below you.  Solidified in my mind what I had always guessed:  I will NEVER go into a real swamp at night.  NEVER EVER.  EVER.

We also got a great deal on a hotel which had bedrooms separated from the main living area AND a full kitchen.  So great.  Usually Belle gets tossed into the room away from everyone so we can stay up later than her.  But this time we decided she's such a big girl that we'll let her and D sleep out in the main area together and Medman and I could get the bedroom to ourselves.  Because other people's children share rooms and actually sleep?  Right?  So maybe the first night they'll stay up and play a little, but surely by the THIRD night (the night after walking 45 miles at the zoo) they'll be so tired they'll zonk off to sleep immediately.  Nope.  Those two turkeys, who's bedtimes are 7:30 and 8:00 normally, stayed up laughing their heads off until 10:00 EVERY NIGHT. But if you had heard the gales of laughter that went continuously for 2 hours, you would have been glad it was going on.  The way the two have fun together may have been the best part of the trip.  Well, that and getting to go to Starbucks. 

Random other highs:

The baby cardinals in the nest about a foot from our front window hatched.  Such pathetic little things at first, but after only a couple days they are fluffy and fat and peeking around planning their first flight path out of the bush.

I saw the first firefly of the year!  I love fireflies!  They're so magical!

And finally some more random pictures:

Hope everyone else had a good week!

Linking up to Jen's Highs and Lows at Life, Crafts and Whatever.

Baby Ga Ga

So I mentioned last post that Belle has become quite talkative lately. I admit that I find my children much more interesting once they can talk.  I mean the baby books tell you that "Soon after your baby is born you will begin be able to interpret their different cries." 

Well, that's a bald faced lie.  Yes, the cry of pain is more high pitched and desperate than the others, but when you are putting the baby in its car seat and it starts screaming, "AAAAHHHHHHH", it's not crazy that you roll your eyes and try to convince it that you only have TWO MINUTES in the car to get to Walmart and the car seat isn't really that bad before you realize that in fact it is a cry of pain and it is because you pinched them in the seat belt.  Oops.  But isn't it better when they can scream, "OWWWW! MY LEG!!!!!!!!!!!"?  (Yes, I just qualified which time I pinched my child's leg in the seat belt as the better time.)

So, this brings us to Belle's 2-year-old checkup.  Now the average child reaches 20 lbs around their first birthday, give or take a couple months.  Mine, not so much.  We were really hoping that Belle would finally reach 20 lbs by two years.   If you've never had tiny children, you may not be able to relate to the low level of worry that persists as you see your child outgrown by everyone around them.  As you see the little dot added well below the 5th percentile on the growth charts at every doctors visit.  As, if taken by themselves, their height and weight development plop them in the 'failure to thrive' category.  (Especially, I would add, if your husband is a medical resident who occasionally has to assess children who are similarly sized and diagnose terrible illnesses.)

So it is a kindness from God that our kids tend to develop sooner than the average in other ways.  For D it was lots of other ways.  But Belle it's just been verbally.  She's one of those kids that goes from 5 words to 500 in a couple months.  And she's a complete chatterbox.  She can talk for so long that your ears hurt.  Things like, "I tell D it is time for lunch." and "When D watched the movie a tweet-tweet bonked the window!" 

And that chattiness is comforting to us as validation that some part of her tiny person is developing. So even though the nurse at her appointment is going to crinkle her brow a bit when she charts that little growth dot, she will also be bombarded by such a verbal barrage that she won't wonder if I'm some sort of negligent mother who starves and never educates her daughter. 

In the waiting room Belle is doing her normal, "I'd like to talk to every stranger in the room" thing entertaining all the sneezing and hacking elderly people waiting with us.  We get called back for our appointment, and the nurse looks at Belle and says, "Wow you are getting so big!" (clearly just a generic line she uses with all children...)

And Belle looks at her with the most vacant expression ever seen on a human with an IQ above 26 and says, "Ga ga!"

What the????? 

Me: Can you tell the nurse how old you are?

Belle: Ga ga!

Seriously?  In the one place where the SOLE PURPOSE of our visit is to gauge your development?  And "ga ga"?  Even real babies never actually say "ga ga." 

Nurse: Did you just have a birthday?

Belle (still looking blissfully vapid): Ga ga! 

And in that moment I saw the nurse get an overly sweet smile as she clearly filed my daughter under the category of "cute, but slow."

And that was it.  For the next 20 minutes my daughter refused to say anything to either nurse or doctor other than "ga ga."  When the nurse left to get the doctor, Belle glanced at the "Go Dog, Go!" book that we had with us and said, "The doggies are going up the BIG ladder!!! Up, up, up!  The ladder is H'MONGOUS!!!!"

But when the doc shows up, she pasted that idiotic expression back onto her face and cheerfully said, "Ga ga!"

So I lamely kept muttering things about how usually she's quite talkative and she's not really as completely underdeveloped as she is appearing.

And we left the appointment with her NEVER breaking character.

In the hallway outside the doctors office she looks at me, pulls the lollipop out of her mouth and says happily, "Look mommy!  I got a purple lollipop!"

Me (through clenched teeth): Oh REALLY?!?!?!??!

Belle (cheerfully): Yup!  It's yummy!  I LOVE it!!!!

And at the same moment that an elderly woman in the hallway turned to smile sweetly at this happy child I snapped off a, "YOU ARE SUCH A TURD!!!"

And yes, the woman's expression changed to one of disgust as she filed Belle under "Cute, happy child with a mean old hag of a mother."

Happy Birthday, Belle!

My baby girl turned 2 last week.  2!

I've done the math several times to make sure it really has been that long since she was born. 


So here's a list of just a few of the things I love about her:

1. She's hilariously funny.  I know I'm her mom and supposed to say that, but she is really funny.  Granted she's funny in an odd sort of way (like doing spaced out arm-waving, nonsense singing episodes where she closely resembles Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean), but she often has us in tears of laughter at the dinner table.  In honor of her funniness, here is D's all time favorite picture of her. 

2. She's the most beautiful two year old in the history of the world.  A fact I had suspected for some time, but I did some extensive research (3 minutes Googling 'most beautiful toddler') and it is a fact.  She is more beautiful than any of them.  And has been for most of her life.  Here she is at 5 months old. 

3. She has an infectious laugh.

4. She sweetly says 'Thank you' anytime anyone gives her anything.

5. She says 'I sorry' easily.  Even when the other person is the one who's supposed to be apologizing.

6.  I love how (even though I mocked her 6 months ago for not being able to speak) she has an enormous vocabulary which she uses non-stop.  She just this moment traipsed into the kitchen and said, "Mommy, you done yet? I have my boots on.  I want to go outside." 

7  She loves her big brother.  Whether they are dressed up fancy....

 ...or hanging out in pj's on Saturday morning in her crib.   (Yup, hers are on backwards.)

8.  She's snuggly with her mommy. 

9.  She sings Be Thou My Vision with me every night at bed time. 

10.  She has impeccable fashion sense.  Here she is on a nice spring day decked out like a garden gnome with her winter hat and her brother's over-sized Thomas shoes. 

11.  She is very affirming.  The other morning I woke her up and she was examining her backwards pajamas, clearing looking for a way to get them off.  She tugged slightly on the cut I had put in the back of the neckband so she could breath while the pj's were on backwards.  Then she smiled at me and said kindly, "You did a great job cuttin' my jammies, Mommy!" 

Happy Birthday, Belle.  I love you!