Problem solved

Well, we solved the problem of the messy bathtub crayons. I just put Anna to work.

Jingle Bells

Kate and Anna were playing with Kate's princess dolls today.  Kate offered Anna a doll saying, "Here, Nonnie; you can be Belle."  Anna took Belle from Kate, and, making the doll dance, very happily sang, "Ningle bell all the way!"

Bathtub crayons

Bathtub crayons.  They look so fun.  So innocent. 

Do not give into their temptation.

As a mother who loves watching her kids play in the bath, one would think I would love bathtub crayons. 

I do not. 

Who thought of these things?  Who thought that, after finishing washing the kids, dressing them, combing their hair, and then wiping up all the water in the bathroom, it would then be fun to furiously scrub the entire tub?

Worse yet, the box encourages the kids to draw on their bodies.  It neglects to mention the crayon doesn't wash off even remotely easily. 

So, evidently the same people who love tub scrubbing also find it fun to fight with their kids in an attempt to remove the crayon marks and, despite the struggle, still get dirtier kids out of the tub than the ones they put in.

Barbie doll bodies

As most of you will probably remember, I didn't want the girls to have Barbie dolls, one of the reasons being I thought it would skew their body image. I was worried they would come to think of the Barbie dolls' bodies as being ideal, or worse, normal.

Today, we three sick girls were lying in my bed playing Barbie dolls.  At one point, Kate was trying to velcro a skirt onto her doll.  She was having a tough time, so she asked for help, "Mommy, can you get this skirt?  I can't get it on.  Her bottom is just too fat!"

Well, I guess I don't have to worry about the ideal body thing...

Running, running, running

Although I don't know how she would have been exposed to it (uh hmm), Anna now has Kate's persistantly runny nose. There's nothing like a constant run of thick snot to make your days seem very long.

Cheesy comments of the day:

What runs and runs and runs, but never goes anywhere?

Well, there's two possible answers:
1. Kate's nose or 2. Anna's nose.

And, although the noses may not be going anywhere, I am. I'm going crazy.

Frozen pizza

Since the kids love pizza and I wasn't feeling particularly ambitous today, I offered, "Kate, do you want to have frozen pizza for lunch today?"

There was a short pause and then, "But, it won't be frozen anymore after you put it in the oven..."

Thinking she was just being a little sassy, I just smiled and didn't respond.

She continued, "Because the oven will thaw it..."

I rolled my eyes.

She questioned, "So, it wouldn't be frozen pizza, anymore.  Right, mom?"

When I still didn't respond, she asked again, "Right, mom?"

Rolling my eyes once more, I replied, "Yes, that's right, Kate!"

"Oh!" she exclaimed, "Then, yes, I do want pizza for lunch!"

I guess she wasn't sure she'd want to eat "frozen pizza," but she'd certainly eat it if it was no longer frozen.

(First Annual) Boxing Day Bowl-a-thon

With the roads a mess and both girls quite sick with bad colds, we opted to stay in today.  As it turns out, it was the best choice we could have made.

One of Anna's Christmas presents inspired us to try family game of bowling.  We had so much fun!  It's definitely going to be a quirky, fun family tradition of ours!

And now for the scoring.  It's a little awkward with only six pins.

I believe the "a-thon" part of the word "bowl-a-thon" implies a long, marathon-like period of bowling.  As you see from the scoresheet, we only played ten frames.  But, before you question whether or not that was worthy of the "a-thon" suffix, let me remind you that we played this game with a just-turned-four-year-old and a not-yet-two-year-old.  Yes, there's where the "a-thon" comes in.

The Santa Threat

I've never agreed, for many reasons, with threatening kids with the "Santa's watching you" line.  It's one of my pet peeves, actually.  I won't get up on my podium right now and list all the reasons it's a bad idea, but I will tell you my major reason.  I think the biggest problem with that approach is that you're taking away a child's intrinsic motivation (or even a religious motivation) to do what's right, telling kids to be good so that they can get toys. 

On this subject, as with most matters relating to Santa, Dave and I have agreed to disagree.  So this season, Dave used the "Santa threat" to, as I term it, manipulate Kate's behavior, and I held my tongue.  (For those of you who know me well, you'll realize how incredibly hard that was for me!)

Our family opened gifts, including "Santa's gifts," on Christmas Eve this year.  Shortly afterwards, while I was taking a shower, Dave saw Kate and Anna begin to fight over a toy.  Kate let go, intentionally causing Anna to fly backwards.  Dave caught Anna, and reprimanded Kate, "What would have happened if I wasn't here?  Anna would have gotten hurt.  Kate, that is really disappointing..." 

Kate replied, "Well, Santa isn't watching me anymore."

I'm very proud to report that I didn't say "I told you so."  Can I still be proud of that if I write, "I told him so" on this blog?

Photographer's kids

You know what they say about Pastor's kids...*

Well, I took the family photographs at our get-together on Christmas Eve. That made my kids, at least for the day, the "photographer's kids." They sure lived up to the equivalent stereotype.

Here's a couple attempts at a photograph of the "great-grandchildren." (Ignore the backdrop; it wasn't my idea.)  Anyway, do you see how all the other kids are standing there nicely and smiling.  Well, notice my two monkeys...

Here's a close-up of that last one...

* Two notes about the pastor's kids comment: 

1.  In case you've never heard of the stereotype to which I am referring, many people say that it's the pastor's kids who are the meanest, who grow up to be the most messed up, the one's who get pregnant, etc.

2.  A little disclaimer: I have to say, for my readers who go to my church, that the stereotype is completely untrue for Will, Joe, and Helen, three of my very favorite kids!

Sid the Science Kid

Background Note:  One of the shows that Kate and Anna really like to watch is called Sid of the Science Kid.  In fact, anytime anyone mentions it, Anna will yell out, as the character in the show does, "Scientist in the house!"

Yesterday Kate got a synthesizer for Christmas at her Grandma's house.  She loves it. 

Today she was dialing the phone to call my mom.  She said, "I want to tell Oma about my new musical instrument.  What is it called?"

"It's called a synthesizer," I told her. 

Kate kind of laughed. "Really?" she asked.

I assured her that really was its name as she finished dialing.  A moment later, as she was talking to my mom, I realized why she thought it was funny.  I heard her explain, "And, Santa came to my Grandma's house, too, and he brought me a Sid the Sciencer."

Stupid dog

We made our neighbors bags of baked goods for Christmas and planned to deliver them this evening. When we were about to leave the house, Mason pushed by us and ran out the front door.
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When he got outside, he ran into the electric fence. The shock stopped him, but didn't convince him to go back into the yard, so he just stood there, getting repeatedly shocked, until, after about fifteen seconds, he barrelled back through the yard and over another part of the fence line out into the road.

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What followed is a whole series of frustrating events, some of which are thankfully ridiculous enough to be at least mildly humorous.

At one point, as the girls stood waiting on the driveway while I tried to slow down passing cars so Mason wouldn't get hit, a man walked by with his dog. Mason, of course, ran up to them, so I went over to try to grab him. The man kept yelling at "Lucy," so at first I thought he was trying to keep his dog from going by Mason. I apologized as I chased Mason, explaining that Mason had broken through his electric fence.

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I continued to, unsuccessfully, try to grab Mason, and the man continued to yell at Lucy. After the man yelled, "Lucy, why are you out of your yard?" I realized the man thought Mason was the dog who lives on the block behind us and was trying to help me get "her" back.

Although I explained that the dog did look like Lucy, but was actually my dog Mason, the man kept yelling for Lucy to come to him. There were several other unsuccessful attempts at communication before the man told me he had on headphones under his hood. The man continued to holler for "Lucy," but, quite honestly, I figured it didn't matter because Mason was possibly more likely to respond to "Lucy" than "Mason" anyway.

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After a few more minutes, I decided the kids couldn't just continue to stand on the driveway, so I mimed to the man that I was going to drive to get Mason/Lucy.

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When I walked back to the girls, I gave one more attempt to yell for Mason to come. "Mason!"

After I saw Mason run the opposite direction, I turned to walk to the car, and Anna grabbed my leg. I looked down at her and she shook her head and corrected me, "Loothy!"

Family picture

Kate drew a picture of the family. She even included some of her favorite letters, and her beloved punctuation point, the period, on the top.

To Dave's dismay, the picture shows (in order from left to right) Kate, Mason, Mommy, and Anna. He couldn't believe she'd include everyone's belly buttons, but not her own father!

Belly pride

Maybe it's because I'm always telling her how much I love her "big baby belly," but Anna is extremely proud of her abdomen! And, she's also obscessed with her belly button.

Because Anna usually has on onesies and therefore doesn't get a lot of time with her belly exposed, it makes it even more fun to watch her show off at bathtime.

Making ice cream

Sure you can go to the store and buy ice cream that tastes just as good, probably better, but then would you have to wipe loads of water off your counters and sweep endless amounts of salt off your floor?Seriously, though, making the ice cream really was a lot of fun, it tasted great, and it wasn't

as much of a mess as I made it out to be.

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If you're interested, here's the recipe:

Fill a large Ziploc bag halfway with ice and add about 8 tablespoons rock salt.

In small Ziploc bag, mix together the following:

1 cup of whole milk

2 tablespoons of sugar

1/4 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract

(For chocolate ice cream, add 1 tablespoon of cocoa.)

Seal the small bag and put it inside the large bag. Seal that, and roll the bag around for about ten minutes until ice cream is creamy.

All in the verbiage

Anna has a really cute way of converting many types of word into verbs. When she wants one of us in particular to put her to bed, she'll request, "Daddy ni-ni me." When she was describing what happened to her finger after Dave helped remove her fingernail, she explained, "Daddy ow me." When she wants someone to get her a cup of milk ("tea," as she calls it), she'll ask, "Mama, tea me."

My favorite of her recent sentences came about when she wanted me to help her get her shirt off. She came up to me and, pulling on her shirt, asked, "Mama, off me." It happened to be the end of a long, tough day, and letting pretend she was talking in mafia lingo of "offing" her was, if not tempting, at least funny enough to get me through the rest of the evening!

Target aisles

Today the kids and I had some errands to run. On the way to Target, Anna was complaining that she wanted her "tea" [milk]. She'd just had a lot to drink, so I told her we'd get her some more later. As we were walking into Target, Anna continued to complain about wanting her"tea" while Kate and I discussed which aisles we were going to. I'd explained to Kate, while trying to ignore Anna, that we were going to go to the baby aisle to get diapers and wipes, and then we'd go over to look for a dress she wanted. Kate said, "So, we'll go to the baby aisle and then the dress aisle?" Anna suddenly stopped whining. She must have thought she'd found the perfect solution. She looked up at me very intently and asked, "Baby tea aisle?"

Not it...

Thankfully, there are always two set of genes that go into making a child. I'm not going to claim their dancing genes, although, as anyone who knew me in college knows, I probably should.

No, Anna!

Kate and Anna were having one of their many little disputes in the bath yesterday.

Anna was taking her Little People dolls and having them "walk" up Kate's arms. Kate was complaining that the dolls were hurting her arms where they were sore from her four-year-old shots. I said, "Anna, walk on Kate's legs instead," and Kate agreed, "Anna, walk on my legs instead."

Anna complied. She put her dolls down, stood up, and carefully stepped one foot onto one of Kate's legs and was attempted to step her other foot up when she plopped down in the tub.

Egg nog

I love egg nog. I shared some with Kate the other day, and I'm pretty sure she liked it too. When she described it to Anna, she told her it was "like melted icecream with crumbled up cookies!"

Voice of reason

I had signed up to bring the snack to Kate's Awana Cubbies' class last night. Since it was the last week of Awana before Christmas, I'd planned to make candy cane cookies with Kate that afternoon and send the cookies with a little candy cane poem for each kid to take home.

Early in the afternoon yesterday, I got a horrible migraine. I lay in bed for two hours while Anna napped and Kate played and watched T.V.

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Then at 3:00, I made my way out of bed and determined it was time to make those cookies. No, it's not that I didn't have something else I could send as a snack. It's just that I, for some ridiculous reason, felt it was the good-mother-at-Christmastime thing to do.

So, we set about making the cookies. Every time I bent over to get anything, my head would hurt so bad, I would have to take a moment to breathe through the pain and suppress the nausea. We finished making the batter, but when I bent down to grab the food coloring (which I just used less than two weeks ago for Kate's birthday cake) I couldn't find it. I searched, with much pain, through each drawer and it was nowhere to be found. I revised the plan and we used sprinkles instead. And, although it wasn't my perfect plan, I still felt I'd done that afore mentioned good-mother-at-Christmastime thing, which gave me some satisfaction.

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I felt that satisfaction only temporarily, though, because just as Kate and I were putting the finishing touches on the first batch of cookies, Kate asked, "Wouldn't it just have been easier to buy some cookies at the store?"

Mom's early Christmas present

My little Anna has been becoming so much better behaved lately. She still has her moments of difficulty: pushing Kate, pulling everything off shelves at the store when I set her let her out of the cart so she doesn't crack her head open climbing out, emptying a gallon of water on the kitchen floor from the water dispenser on the fridge if we forget to lock it, drawing on... but I digress. My point is, she's really getting to be a much better listener and quite a sweet and funny little person.

One of the things I've been working on with her, as with any nearly two-year-old, is her manners. I've been trying to get her to say please when she asks for something, and thank you after she gets it. She's got the most adorable way of saying, "Ank you, Mama!" along with the sign for thank you, that just makes me melt.

Tonight I was putting her to bed after we'd gotten home from Awana. It had been a long day. I'd had a migraine, it was really late, and Kate was whining in the doorway. I had Anna on the changing table, and was putting diaper cream on her bottom when she said, completely out of nowhere, "Ank you, Mama, for helfing[helping] Nonnie [her name for herself] ." I got tears in my eyes and I kissed her, telling her "You're so welcome." And she elaborated, "Thank you, Mama, for helfing Nonnie with babies [her word for poopies/bottom]."

This from the girl who, up until about two weeks ago, screamed and kicked and tried to squirm away through every single diaper change!

Changing a diaper, something I've done at least five times a day for the last four years, has never been so rewarding. That short, beautiful ten second moment more than made up for every difficult moment in the last 22 months, from those colicky days of six hours of crying to every time I had to leave the grocery store without half of what I needed with Anna wriggling and screaming under one arm.

Ank you, Nonnie, for helfing Mama.

No, Daddy...

The other night when Dave was putting Anna to bed, in attempt to avoid her new virus, he gave her a kiss on the forehead, rather than her lips. Afterwards, he looked down at her, she looked a little distressed, or, in retrospect, annoyed. He went to give her one more kiss to cheer her up, and she sort of pushed him away and said, "No, Daddy..." Then she pointed to her lips to help her confused Daddy.

Poor, pretentious Kate

My poor Kate. Sometimes I worry I'm inadvertently turning her into such a pretentious little thing.

She has been working on a book for the last couple days. A little while ago, she decided she wanted to write "Written and illustrated by Kate" on the cover. I wrote the words out on a piece of paper and cleaned the kitchen as she copied them onto her book cover. When she was finishing, she said, "...t...e...period! All done. I even put a period."

Of course, I didn't explain that what she'd written wasn't actually a sentence requiring a period, and, instead, said, "Great job. I'm so proud of you for always remembering periods."

She asked, "Why?"

And I said, "Well... some kids don't even know what a period is in first grade!"

She didn't say anything for a while, and I continued to clean up. Then, I heard her from the other room, declare, "I'm going to tell all the kids in my first grade what a period is!"

Abby's idea

The last couple months Kate, Anna, and their friends have been attending a lot of birthday parties at Pump It Up, a popular place to have birthday parties with big inflatable slides and bounce houses.

One of Kate's friends, Abby, had her own third birthday party there a couple months ago.

Maybe this is why Abby, when told that Christmas is Jesus' birthday, is certain He's going to have it at Pump It Up.

Problem solved...

Yesterday in the car, Kate asked me if I would play with her when we got home. Then Anna protested, "Play with me, Mommy!" Kate said, "No! Play with me first, Mommy!" So, Anna, imitating Kate, said, "No! Play with me first, Mommy!" Despite my suggestion that we could all play together, this went back and forth for several minutes, while I attempted to ignore them.

Finally, Kate thought she'd found the solution. She said, "You go second, Anna, because you were the second baby." Then she tried to confirm her plan with me, acting like it was nothing more than a logical solution, "Mommy, can we just go in the order of who how we were born?"

That's fine, but...

One of my philosophies about dealing with kids is, whenever possible, don't let them see they're getting to you.

Although I hadn't thought about the exact way I do this, I realized last night that often when Kate is being difficult, I've responded with, "That's fine, but..."

If she wouldn't wear her coat, I'd say, "That's fine, but you might be too cold to play for long." If she wouldn't clean up her things, I'd say, "That's fine, but you might be sad if you don't get to play with those toys for a week." Or if she didn't want to put on her pajamas, I'd say, "That's fine, but that won't leave us much time for reading."

What finally made me think about my wording last night? Well, once again, I was haunted by a little voice that sounded a lot like mine coming from Kate's mouth.

Last night, Kate came home from her Grandma's house over tired and quite disagreeable. I was trying to cheer her up by telling her we would get to play with our neighbor Connor today. She responded, "Okay. I'll come if I can bring my Strawberry Shortcake dolls."

I really didn't care if she brought her dolls, but I didn't want her thinking she could manipulate Dave and me, so I said, "Kate, I don't make deals like that." And, before I could explain further what I meant, she put a nonchalant look on her face and replied, "That's fine, but then I'm not going."

Christmas Vacation

(If you've ever seen Chevy Chase's 1980's classic, you'll know why I've titled this post accordingly.)

Just after noon today, we began the holiday tradition of setting up our Christmas tree. Dave wanted to assemble the tree and put up the lights ahead of time, so that our family time could be spent hanging ornaments together, discussing the memories that related to each, making new memories all the while. If you add in some festive holiday music, each of us sipping eggnog, and snow falling softly outside the window, you'll truly understand the emphasis I was placing on this holiday tradition.

Shortly after Dave began to unravel the lights, he discovered only one string was working at all, and that string had a good percentage of its bulbs burned out. Undeterred, Dave set out to quickly pick up a few strings of lights. To save time, he went to the closest store, Walgreens. He called me from Walgreens to let me know they were out of stock of white bulbs and told me he was going to run to Home Depot. About 45 minutes later, he called me from Walmart. He told me that Home Depot had been out and that Walmart was, too. I suggested he make the drive up to Steins. A half hour later, he was able to overpay for some lights.

When he came home, nearly two hours after he'd left, we happily started our festivities. Dave strung the lights around our tree, and it looked beautiful. Dave handed the girls ornaments, the girls hung them, and I snapped pictures. Aside from lack of eggnog and snow, it was just as I'd pictured. About halfway through the ornaments, I was hanging up Kate's second Christmas ornament, when we heard a strange crack. I knew neither kid had done anything, and nothing happened after the noise, so we shrugged it off.

As Anna was helping me hang one of the last ornaments, Dave asked me to guess how much he'd paid for those lights. The actual price was over twice my guess, but we just sighed, commenting that it was well worth it. Just then, there was a series of loud cracks. I froze for a moment until the entire 7 foot tree, complete with dozens of ornaments, many of them glass, began to fall on top of Kate. I grabbed for the tree with one hand, pushed Anna out of the way with the other, and as I tried to get a better grip on the tree that kept slipping through my hands, shouted, "Kate, move, move!"

Dave helped me grab the tree and Kate safely escaped. Dave and I took turns holding the tree and trying to figure out what was wrong. When we determined it was unfixable, Dave laughed and said, "The only trees I saw for sale today were all pre-lit."