A New Bedtime Diversion

Lindsey has been in a math "class" at her preschool for most of this school year. They actually have them adding and subtracting now, and give us little worksheets with activities to do at home with her to incorporate math into every day routines.

Last night Lindsey and I were reading "Heidi" for the third time. It starts by introducing Heidi as a 5-year-old girl, meeting a goatherd named Peter, age 11. So I asked Lindsey, "So how many years are there between Heidi and Peter?" and she and I counted starting at 5 up to 11 and got 6 additional numbers, so the answer was 6.

Once she realized that she can figure out how to do this, she got very excited. She said, "Let's do another!" So we did addition instead of finishing reading the book.

As I was leaving her room, she said, "Mommy, I want a book to read by myself." So we started picking out a book for her to read from the collection on the floor by her bed. Then she said, "Oh wait! No, I have my fingers, I'm going to count instead! Good night!"

So I left her room to the sound of her reciting as she opened up her fingers one at a time -- "One...two...three..."

Oops!

This evening we had two accidents in our household -- one when Marissa peed on the floor (to be expected, it was only her second time wearing underwear) and one time when Lindsey forgot to take her underwear down before sitting on the potty, and she peed THROUGH it to the potty.

I laughed pretty hard at the second one. And thankfully Lindsey did too.

Two Words with such meaning

Marissa's vocabulary has continued to expand and we are always entertained by when she tells us stories. She starts with lots of "uh uh uh's" but eventually gets to the point.

Tonight she and I were reading "Elmo Loses His Blanket," a book that has six flaps to open on each page to look for Elmo's blankie. Marissa's word for "open" is "ope." So here's what she sounds like as she searches for Elmos' blankie on each page:

This ope??

[opens flap with feigned surprise]

Oh! This ope!

[shuts flap, points to area with no flap]

This ope??

[scratches at part of page with no flap]

Oh! No ope!

[points to part with a flap]

This ope?

[opens flap with glee]

This ope!

It was a great example of how you can get a multitude of meanings from just a simple phrase, depending on how you say it.

I tried to get her to say "open," and she said it once, but once it got back to the book, "ope" was the word of choice.

She makes us laugh.

Blogger's Block??

Probably about once a day for the past week or so, something would happen and I would think to myself, "I gotta post that."

Then I get to my computer to write...and can't remember what the hell I was going to write about.

So I guess I'm writing about not being able to write. I'm still here, I'm apparently suffering from blogger's block!

Every Girl's Dream

It's clear to me how very young we are when those of us of the female persuasion begin to "dream" of our wedding day.

I'm sure some of this is brought about by the Disney Princess (TM) line, as well as various movies, influences, etc. And it doesn't help that my wedding dress and veil is at the back of Lindsey's closet.

Lindsey asked me if she could play with my wedding veil, and she donned her Christmas dress that I bought (for cheap) after Christmas this year. It does fit this year, though I suspect it will still fit her next year as well.

So she began to play "wedding." She found some Christmas decs of mine from downstairs, which became her bouquet, and would ask Wayne or I to walk her down the aisle, which started at the kitchen and ended at the storage bench in the living room. She asked me to sit where the minister would be, and then I needed to ask her name and the name of the groom, then I would say, "You are married happily ever after, you may kiss the bride!"

Eventually she got Wayne into the act, and he had to play the part of "Daddy," walking her down the aisle.

I think we'll have to pull these pictures out some time in the very far future, when she actually does get married.

Marissa played the part of maid of honor, obviously.

Adding insult to injury

Like it hasn't been cold enough of late, three things have happened that just rub it in how cold it is:

1. This weekend it got so cold that when I would open the side door to let the dog out, I had to ensure that my hands were not wet or damp (as they often are when cooking or doing dishes), as they were going to stick to the handle on the door.

2. It got so cold that our dishwasher stopped working. The waterline to it froze and wouldn't fill with water. Our air temp went below 0 at 4 pm Friday and didn't come back above zero until noon on Sunday...at which point it went back down under zero at 4 pm. Wayne left our cupboards open, hoping that the warmer air from the kitchen would get back to where the pipes were and de-freeze them. Something finally worked because finally Monday morning, our dishwasher finally worked. After three days of staying in the house, doing dishes after every meal, it finally works the last day of our three-day weekend.

3. The Packers lost, despite the advantage that the bitterly cold temps were giving them. Bummer, but the way they were playing they wouldn't have won against the Patriots anyway. Good luck to the Giants!

So long to the Patterson's!

We will be greatly missing our friends the Pattersons, who safely drove in to Buffalo, NY yesterday, after leaving Minnesota on Wednesday. Above is a photo of their daughter Jamie and Lindsey, playing dress up for the gazillionth time.

Yes, I also thought that Marissa was going to bite Molly, only to have her give her a very tender kiss. After they both looked and each other and wondered what that was all about.

Brrrr!

You know it's cold when...

• You wake up in the morning, see that the thermometer says 10 degrees outside and say, "Gee! That's not bad!" (because at least it's above zero, and it is above single digits.)
• Your nose hairs freeze together whenever you breathe through your nose.
• You actually stock up your house so you don't have to leave over the weekend to get groceries. Required supplies include brownie mix, chocolate chip cookie ingredients, chili and wild rice soup makings.
• It takes the dog all of 30 seconds to go outside and do his business, some of which sprays against the house because it is too cold to go all the way out to a snowbank.
• It's too cold to drink beer -- your drink of choice becomes Irish coffee.
• The radiators in the house run 24 hours a day to keep the house warm and become too hot to touch.

This isn't some list that gets passed around through the internet that I'm posting here, this is the honest to God truth of what we've been doing the past few days.

The kicker came last night when I was attempting to wash dishes. I ran out of hot water right away and couldn't figure out why because we have a water storage tank, not a hot water heater, which is connected to our boiler since our entire house is heated with hot water. I finally figured out that between trying to keep the house warm and Marissa just having bath water run, it was enough to drain that entire huge tank of hot water.

Brrrr!

Local Facebook Controversy

I read in the metro section of our local newspaper today about one of the suburban high schools that cracked down on underage drinking by perusing photos students had posted themselves on their own Facebook pages of them at parties, drinking with other underage friends.

The school had penalized the students by various means, i.e. suspensions, kicking them off basketball/volleyball teams, etc.

Some of the students actually had the gall to protest against the school, claiming that they had "invaded their privacy." They staged a walk out on Friday and did not attend classes. Rather ironic, considering many of them weren't supposed to attend anyway since they had been suspended.

Let me get this straight...your privacy was INVADED? By viewing photos that anyone can view which were posted on the internet? The saddest thing was how many of these students parents backed them up, opting to send nasty letters to the school or threaten to pull their child from the school district. (As if their child was a gift to that school in the first place.)

Hey, how about instead having a chat with your son/daughter about the dangers of underage drinking? How about taking away rights to the family car as punishment? You're going to stand by your child who was drinking because you don't like the means by which the school found out? Where were YOU, the parent?

Good for you, Eden Prairie High!

A New 'Do

Okay, so perhaps the short hair on my last avatar gave it away. I had decided some time ago to donate my hair to Locks of Love, or some other such charity that can use human hair to weave wigs for cancer or alopecia patients who can use it.

Well, Locks of Love required a minimum of 10 inches of hair, even for the shortest layer of hair. My shortest layer was 8 inches, and I just didn't have the patience to grow it out anymore. So I did a little searching and thanks to the publicity from Hillary Swank, came across the Pantene Beautiful Lengths program, in which the minimum length required is 8 inches.

The majority of the hair that was cut was 10 inches, with the shortest lengths being 8. It all came off in one thick ponytail, which I then packaged up and shipped off to the charity.

It felt sooo good to get it all chopped off! I was grinning like a fool while my stylist was cutting away, and I am very pleased with the outcome. I can't believe how weighed down my hair had been -- hardly any of my natural curl was showing through anymore and after she styled it, wow! What curls!

So next time you see me you may see me start to do the "hair flip," but then stop and grin ridiculously. Or you may see me put my purse on my shoulder then go to move my hair out from under the purse strap, only to smile that it isn't stuck under there anyway!

I'm especially happy to be able to see my children again when I bend down to kiss them hello, without having to put my hair in a ponytail to do so.

Nighttime Noises

Some time ago I wrote about being freaked out in the middle of the night when one of Lindsey's toys' batteries started to wind down, causing the toy to make unprovoked noises in the middle of the night. It was creepy and enough to cause my heart to jump into my throat before becoming entirely awake and gaining all of my faculties.

Last night I had a similarly creepy event.

I awoke in the middle of the night to hear Lindsey laughing. Clear as day, as if someone had just told her a joke.

It wasn't a sleepy, grunty laugh, one you would expect from someone still sleeping. It was the clear, crisp sound of her normal laugh.

Sure enough, she was dead out sleeping. She must've been having some good dreams, though, to laugh like that in her sleep.

Creepy.

First Day back at KinderCare

Today we were talking to Lindsey and Marissa about how their day was today, their first day back at KinderCare in a week and a half.

Lindsey told me she had a bad day. She said, "There were lots of kids there and they made a lot of noise and I didn't like it."

Marissa had the following to say.

Wayne asked, "Marissa, were you naughty or nice at KinderCare today?"

Marissa: "Naughty."

Wayne: "What do your teachers say to you when you're naughty?"

Marissa: "They say, 'No No, Me!'"

We thought that was pretty funny.

Lindsey's Photos

One of the gifts we gave Lindsey this year was a digital camera. A what? you say, how can you possibly give a 4-year-old a digital camera??

Well, it's made by Fisher Price, it's in a solid plastic casing that is intended to survive multiple drops, and there are only four buttons on it. It's made for ages 3 and older. And, in typical fashion with technology continually blowing my mind, it actually wasn't that expensive. She loves my camera, always wants to take pictures with it and look at them through the viewfinder, so it seemed natural to get her her own.

The one drawback is that the photo quality is pretty weak. We can change the setting on it to make them nicer, but then it only holds 20 photos instead of 60, and for her it's all about hearing the click and knowing she took a photo. I did, however, have to share some of the lovely photos she took on Christmas Day. She had that camera filled to 60 within an hour. I promptly downloaded them for her and I'm pretty sure it's full again and needs to be dumped once more.

So, here's Christmas Day from Lindsey's perspective.






This lovely trio of photographs was taken of a rather large gift toward the back of the tree that Lindsey kept trying to get at to open, but Wayne kept telling her not to because she was going to knock all the ornaments off the tree. We could not even get to this gift until the presents in the FRONT of the tree had been opened. So she kept getting closer and closer and taking a photo of the greatly desired present. In case you're wondering, it was a play bowling set from Aunt Michelle, which was promptly the item of delight until the next gift was opened.


This particular photo brought Lindsey a great deal of mirth, as she laughed and laughed at Marissa's oversized butt, which is clearly in need of a diaper change by the way it hangs halfway to her knees.

Here is the only record we have of the joy the aforementioned iPod brought Wayne, aka Daddy, as you see him smiling as he finally realizes that I did not buy him a sports radio, it's an iPod! Note the strewn presents in the background -- we haven't seen our floor in days.

Last note, while it took Wayne 10 minutes to figure out how to open the battery compartment and put the batteries in the camera, it took Lindsey all of 2 seconds to figure out what the buttons do.

"How do I turn it on? Oh! here it is. How do I take a picture? Oh! Here it is! Mommy, I want to see the pictures...oh never mind, I found it."

Damn I feel stupid.

Worldly Thoughts

I was awoken this morning at 6:30 am by our youngest, crying in her room. I go in and she asks for hot milk, which I give her and she promptly goes back to sleep. Which is a good thing because for the 10 minutes she was up she didn't stop crying; she clearly had awoken too early. (I'd like to do that too when I wake up too early, but I don't think my co-workers would appreciate it.)

But now I was up, and, unlike going back to bed as I usually do, I got up, put a pot of coffee on, and folded some clothes while watching The Today Show, a guilty pleasure of mine. (Those who know me know that our TV is rarely on.)

So while this sounds like doing household chores, I see it as quiet time, me time, time when I don't have to getting after someone to stop bugging the dog, give something back to your sister, don't unfold the folded clothes, frick and frack, and so on.

Suddenly there was a "Special Report" on the Today Show. In some cases this means something ridiculous; I bet if I had been watching TV the day it was announced that Britney Spears' 16-year-old sister was pregnant they'd have broken in with a "special report." I remember they broke into regular programming when the O.J. Simpson verdict was announced.

But this was special news -- Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan, had been assassinated in Pakistan. The air literally went out of me -- she was one who I had been watching closely in the news, hoping that she would find a way to work with Pakistani President Musharraf and bring stability and, more importantly in my mind, some level of humanity to many of the people in Pakistan who live in abject poverty. She had been the poor people's champion, even though her government was previously accused of corruption. (Her reaction had been, "How else can you get anything done in this country?")

I had thought some months ago when she returned to Pakistan after being in exile in London that she was putting herself in harm's way -- she had been killed while standing up through a moonroof in a vehicle, clearly making a target of herself. I wonder if she thought in her mind that while she may do some good while alive, she could also do some good as a martyr for a better Pakistan. But either option was preferable to living a comfortable life in London while her homeland went to hell in a handbasket. God bless her for choosing to act and not sit back and observe from afar.

I was very saddened by the news, and saddened to know that 20 people were killed along with her. I'll be praying for people in that part of the world.

Christmas Photos

This Christmas was a wonderful one, especially because Marissa finally understands the concept of presents, though she still doesn't get the hype and the fact that Santa is coming. But she did have lots of fun opening her gifts.

The entire time leading up to Christmas Lindsey never had many ideas of what she wanted from Santa for Christmas. Whenever we'd ask her she'd say "a dress" or "bones for my doggie." So Wayne and I thought about what she and Marissa might enjoy, and for the most part I think we hit the jackpot. They both truly enjoyed their toys, and spent the rest of the day playing with them all.

I have a couple of observations about the photos I took throughout the day on Christmas:

1. Multiple costume changes. They both started in their same-old pajamas, which were quickly replaced when they received the new pajamas from Grandpa Tom and Meme. This was changed once again when the matching purple dresses were unwrapped.

2. Incredible flexibility. Both Marissa and Lindsey spent many hours this day in deep knee squats, checking out toys, opening gifts, playing, and had no compliants whatsoever. I, on the other hand, needed a Tylenol and a heating pad after bending over for so long.

3. Challenging photo op. I have multiple photos of the back of Marissa's head. I have long expanses of orangish-looking wood floors. I have photos of ripped wrapping paper, jumbled boxes and scattered toys throughout my home. In other words, I have successfully captured the chaos that reigns nearly every day, but certainly at Christmas.

Now I can tell this story

I shared this one with a few people before Christmas, but now I can tell everyone else. I'll give away the ending now: Wayne had no idea I had really gotten him an iPod.

I got Wayne an iPod for Christmas. Lindsey was with me when I bought it (can't be helped sometimes) so I told her that it was a secret that Daddy was getting it and not to tell him. She got preoccupied with other things before we got home so she promptly forgot about it and never said a word.

Two weekends ago she was pretending that she was going to go to the mall. She put on her hat and mittens and her purse over her shoulder, and came up to Wayne and said, "Daddy. I am going to the mall to see Santa. What would you like for Christmas?"

Wayne said, "I would like an iPod."

Lindsey replied, "Oh! Mommy already bought one for you!"

Of course, I couldn't rush in to the room and stop this exchange or Wayne would know that truly I HAD bought him an iPod and this wasn't just Lindsey making things up. But later she came in to the kitchen and I motioned her over.

"Lindsey!" I whispered. "Why did you tell Daddy that I bought him an iPod? Remember, it's supposed to be a surprise!"

She said, "But Mommy, he wants to ask Santa for one, and I don't want him to get two!"

Some Good Christmas Moments

All in all, it was a wonderful Christmas. Some good thoughts of today:

• Lindsey jumping up and down upon coming downstairs and seeing even more presents under the tree! (She was worried Santa wouldn't leave any when he saw all the ones that were already under the tree from relatives.)
• Both girls jumping up and down upon receiving the largest package of plastic play food I've ever seen.
• Two girls in matching pajamas they received as a gift as they open the rest of their gifts.
• Marissa completely enamoured with the stuffed puppy dog, kennel and veterinarian supplies that came with it. (All play stuff, of course).
• Lindsey methodically putting her toys into a pile so Marissa can't play with them.
• The picture perfect snowfall that after in the afternoon as we were getting Marissa down for her nap.
• Sledding with the girls on snow covered sidewalks around 4 pm, both girls giggling and squealing along the way.
• Coming back in from sledding and sharing some homemade hot chocolate we had gotten as a gift.
• Wayne singing off-key on his newly loaded iPod, figuring out all the features it has.
• Loading up all the CDs we have onto our PC so Wayne can put them on his new iPod.
• Playing grocery with Lindsey with her new cash register.
• Having a dinner of divine steak with garlic bread, corn, baked potatoes and wine. And...not having the dinner ruined by a timeout or a whine-fest. Aaahhh!

Pictures to follow...

Christmas Confusion

Tonight we attended Christmas Eve service and then went to our friends' house down the street for a Christmas Eve get together with friends. We finally called it a night a little after 8:00, with Lindsey and Marissa both yawning and getting cranky.

As Wayne was putting Marissa's coat on, he asks her, "Marissa, do you know who's coming to our house tonight?"

Marissa says with no hesitation "Fosty the No-man."

Lindsey chimes in, "And Rudolph!"

Excellent. We've taught our children well.

Okay, so maybe sometimes she IS Italian...

Last night I asked Marissa to wash her hands before dinner. As she got up on the stool she said

"I washa-hands."

Buon Appetito!

This is me as we try to leave the house in the morning