Happy 3rd Birthday, Peanut!

M (aka Peanut) had birthday number 3 today.  T brought cup cakes to preschool for her class to celebrate.  For dinner, M ordered hot dogs and french fries; then changed her order to chicken nuggets.  So, we had both.  C celebrated by eating 6 (!) granola bars before dinner thus was unsurprisingly not hungry for dinner.  M took birthday calls from Oma and Opa and Aunt Julie and Cousins A and H.  M enjoyed talking w/ Oma and Opa so much that she kept chattering away on the phone even after they told her they were hanging up to get dinner...  And any time Lil E sees someone on the phone, she wants to use it too.  She especially likes to talk to Mommy while Mommy is leaving work. 

When we got home from school, C found a princesses gift bag on the dining room table and ran out to the car to tell M.  He then helped M open the card and the gifts.  M was very excited to find a Rapunzel doll, Rapunzel shoes, Rapunzel (see a trend?) and Ariel plates, and Ariel fork and spoon.  The card contained Dora stickers which were immediately affixed to anything nearby--including at least 3 in Daddy's hair. 

C and I went camping with his Cub Scout pack during the last weekend of April.  The weather wasn't as warm as predicted but it only rained at night.  And the Walmart tent we borrowed from Scouter Tim was up to the task.  C got to train with a Revolutionary War infantry unit.  They got to march, do manuvers, hold pretend guns (sticks).  On one charge, boys from another pack kept charging...across the road, across the field..finally the tree line stopped them.  The boys especially liked when the soldiers shot the cannon.  In the afternoon, they got to shoot BBs, shoot bow and arrow, roll hoops, sign the Meck Dec, and use a compass.  In the evening, the boys went on a long hike to help get fire wood (and carried it all the way back to camp!) and then made smores in the fire.  His pack has their end-of-the-year picnic on Saturday where C will receive his Tiger Cub badge.

In final news for the blog entry, M is fixated and insists on watching the movie Hairspray (the one w/ Zaf Efron) every time she rides in the van. She likes to tell Ms Lucy and Ms Ashly (her preschool teachers) all about the escapades of Tracy, Seaweed, and the mean girl and mean mommy. Tonight, before bed, she asked to hear "You Can't Stop the Beat" and danced "like a big girl."

Birthday hijinks with big brother

Sitting in the chair, all by herself, getting her hair done!

Big smiles from Lil E!

Goodbye Briarthorne Drive

Closing was today; or our part of closing was today.  The buyers' loan hasn't come through yet so they should sign the documents sometime next week.  We moved Tues after some intense packing during the previous two weekends.  Wed night and Thurs were cleaning.  As I was at the kitchen sink rinsing the cleaning rags on Thurs afternoon, the hawk swooped in and landed on a tree branch in the backyard.  He only appears every 6 months or so and I was only at the sink for a few minutes, so the timing was quite a coincidence.  You know that birds don't come to say goodbye (except in Disney movies when they can literally say "goodbye"), but it sure seemed that way...If he shows up at the new house to welcome us, that will really be spooky.

Most of our stuff is in storage, so finding the key stuff to unbox at John and Wendy's townhome hasn't been hard.  Unpacking a little each day.  C and M are adjusting to sleeping in the same room--on the same futon.  "She has her legs on me."  "He won't move his pillow."  "I want Mommy to stay."  "I want Daddy to stay."  At least they agree that jumping on Mommy and Daddy's matress is a temptation that is too difficult to resist (over and over) and appearently well worth losing privileges to do.

Ellie has started communicating yes and no by shaking her head--usually emphatically.  She understands quite a bit as you can tell her to do something--she particularly likes to deliver objects to C or M--and she does it with a big smile.  She has talking jags a couple of times a day where she'll jabber enthusiastically and if you talk back, will do a call and response with you for a while.  She won't eat much of anything at pre-school.  She won't eat baby food for them at all but usually doesn't eat Gerber toddler food or much adult food either.  She likes milk and that's about it.  She'll usually eat some baby food for me once we get home.  Sleeping is still a problem as she often wakes up several times a night and will have trouble falling back asleep at least one of those times.

My favorite Briarthorne memories: 
*proposing to Tracy on the couch in the living room (no, it's not really about tax-free school supplies !)
*C's first days at his new home:  marching around the downstairs circle with Opa tapping boxes on the floor; hammering nails on the back porch; playing in the leaves and helping me rake
*C greeting us at the laundry room door when we returned home with M
*M on the swing set
*M riding tricycle, big wheels and bikes like a natural
*All the neighborhood kids (Jordon, Jayna, Kayla, & Jamal, Will, CJ) playing outside in the street in the evenings and weekend afternoons
*winter snow storms, complete with snowmen
*the huge oak tree in the backyard; its magnificent demise onto the swing set on Good Friday evening 2011 (Brittany saying, "Wanted to let you know that everything's okay" when we called to check on the kids.)
*T waving a little stick at me in the bathroom, "Two lines means positive...You know what this means, don't you?"  Well, actually, no... But I was quite surprised and pleased to find out!

I bought the place about 6 months after T and I started dating, so it's been home during our adventures in creating a family.  Now our adventures take us elsewhere.  Onward and upward...

Oh, the places you'll go...

Lil E is now walking a bit more--always when she decides to do so rather than at an adult's instigation.  Even better, we now have the video evidence:

A few small steps for Ellie, many upcoming leaps for parentkind

Ellie took several small steps on her own this afternoon.  First, she stood up on her own and walked a few steps to stand over by C.  The next time, I was able to count and she took 7 steps before sitting down.  Of course, once C and I tried to get her to walk from one to the other, she would have no part of it.

In other news, C has finished his God and Me award for Cub Scouts.  They'll award it sometime after Easter at the University City United Methodist Church.  He also had a starring role as "the young preacher"in "Miss Fannie's Hat" in last Sunday's youth service.  He dressed in a suit to look like a preacher and spoke out so everyone could hear his lines.  This Wed, he has to do an oral report in class on Frederick Douglass.  The words are big for that (Tuchahoe, Maryland; President Abraham Lincoln), so we've been practicing...

 

Pinewood derby and more

Today was the Pinewood Derby and the Blue and Gold luncheon.  C and I "finished" his car last night by attaching the wheels.  Fortunately, the pack had two workshops to work on the cars... with other people supplying the saws, paint, and other key equip..or we would have never gotten that far.  We weighed in when we arrived and the car was only half the required weight.  Again, the pack bailed us out by having extra weights.  I apparently used the wrong glue, as it took forever to dry--and wasn't much better than tacky when we finally were the last ones to check in our cars.  C ended up 7th out of 11 in his den.  Not too bad given our car construction skills.  He seemed happy with the car though which is all that matters.  I felt a bit guilty knowing how much my dad always helped me with my car and how C was getting royally ripped off by my minimal abilities.  At least the wheels stayed on until after the race!  And next year, we'll know about the need for weights...  C also helped clean up afterwards and did quite a lot without being asked or being bribed with incentives.  When the other boys who were "helping" started to fight over brooms, mops, etc., C stuck to his job and stayed out of the bellyaching.  I was very proud of him.

C and I also finished the Dinosaur Lego set we got him for Xmas.  He did almost all the work himself, I mostly just identified the pieces that were needed next and handed them to him.  And by the end, he was finding the right pieces too. 

Our excitement this evening is T and M going to the hospital.  M has something shiny up her right nostril.  T couldn't get it out.  The dr's office advised us that only a pediatric emergency room would have the right equip to get it out and we needed to do it asap before it got lodged in further or got sucked back into a lung.  She stuck a bead up her nose in preschool a few weeks ago.  Fortunately, they saw her do it and were able to get it out with a tweezer.  It's unclear how long this object has been up there.  I thought I saw something earlier in the week but forgot to mention it to T...

Lil E is walking holding onto fingers.  Sometimes she'll do it holding onto one hand only.  And she'll stand for a few seconds on her on.  But if you try to get her to move between Mommy and Daddy, she'll just sit down.  She's still keeping us up quite a bit at night which is a partial rationale for our lack of energy to update the blog frequently (ie, never getting around to posting Xmas pictures).  Argh.  Otherwise, she's doing well.  She adjusted to preschool well; within a week and a half had stopped crying when we dropped her off and now seems fine with being handed over to her teachers.

Lil E's getting tired of sitting on my lap as I type so I'll try to put her to bed. 

10:50 update.  T called to say she and M are on their way home.  It was another bead, fortunately, rather than the screw we had feared.  M got through it just fine and kept the nurses entertained with her questions.

A Unique Birthday

Having four b-days parties--one with our family (per C's insistance), one with Oma and Opa, one with the Fay clan, and one with the Allen clan--is unique (or perhaps, quadrique).  That apparently is the benefit of having a b-day near Thanksgiving and traveling to visit all available relatives (and having your mom demand each one of them make --or buy-- a cake for you...). 

Also unique is having your sister eat part of the candle.  In all fairness, it had icing on the bottom and it was the same color as the candle.  And once you start to eat something sweet and yummy, you just want to keep going...even though we paid enough for the icing and cake to have a different density and taste from the candle. 

As part of southern tradition, E had a cake of her own at the Allen b-day celebration (a "smash cake").  It was decorated with a lady bug--her costume for Halloween.  The red and black icing also make for extra festive messiness when the child smears icing all over herself.  Initially, E disappointed mommy and Aunt Kiki by not smashing and smearing her cake with sufficient gusto.  So mommy took E's hands and showed her how to mash her cake.  She then got into the swing of eating it off her hands, wiping it in her hair, balancing a chunk on her ear, nearly dumping the cake onto Dad, and all of fun things that babies do with cakes that justifies the ironclad southern tradition of giving babies their own cake so as to amuse their guests at the party and provide their parents opportunity to make videos with which to embarrass them in their teenage years.

E is celebrating her one year anniversary with teeth--two bottom teeth and now one on the top.  She's been a bit fussier lately because of it and is less interested in eating solid foods, even fruits.  She's also starting to walk holding onto our fingers.  She seems to get a kick out of it.  Walking shouldn't be too far away.  She still wakes up once or twice a night for feeding and often takes a while to go back to sleep.  Or maybe she just likes rocking or pacing the hall with daddy.

Aside from eating candles, M is phasing out of naps.  That is, after about two weeks of using her nap time to dump bottles of hair goop on the carpet (or into her shoes), and/or dump all her toys, clothes, hair bows, etc., on the floor (but doing it like a stealth ninja), Dad decided it was better to find alternative uses of our afternoons.  She's very talkative, likes to dance (in her phraseology, "shake my booty"), and likes to take off her clothes and diaper and dance.  Tracy has asked a friend who is a retired ballerina when dance lessons start.  The lessons start at three but require pants or poofy dresses.

M likes to ask about cousins A and H and ask where Oma and Opa are.  She likes to inform us earnestly that A and H got time outs for riding scooters in the house and not listening (which happened while we were on the phone with them a few weeks ago).  She also tells us that A and H call her "Mena-Beana" but that "Julie, Oma, Opa" don't.  In the car, she likes to ask what the driver is doing.  After hearing the answer, "I'm driving" 749 times, she will now update the question to "Are you driving?"  When asked what she is doing, she'll reply enthusiastically, "I'm sitting in my seat!"

C is doing very well in math at school and is doing better in reading and writing.  He got perfect scores on his two projects:  one on the wolf and his Thanksgiving project on the turkey who dressed up as a Christmas tree to escape being Thanksgiving dinner.  As C observantly wrote, "People like Christmas trees.  They don't eat them."  He also received his Bobcat badge in Scouts.

Eric is coming to the conclusion of his foray into his alter ego, "Mr. Mom." Life will be interesting as 2012 begins, as both Eric and Tracy both will be working full-time at their universities. Which means E will join her big sister at preschool. Miss Annette may want to wear earplugs on January 2nd...

E's Physical Law of Children in Motion

With apologies to Newton and Einstein, on Sunday I documented a new physical law of the universe:  Children traveling in an undesired direction move rapidly and in a straight line; Children traveling in a desired direction move slowly and randomly.  This law explains the bend in the space-time continuum which makes it impossible to arrive on time at a desired location regardless of the time buffer allowed by the parents for herding the children into the car.  It also provides an explanation for the mathematical anomoly that you can multiply the speed of the child in the desired direction by the speed of light and the speed of light is always faster.  To predict Estimated arrival times (E), use the equation E=1/cm2 (where cm= the speed of the Child in Motion).

Corollary 1 (the Halloween candy adjustment for the rate of motion):  when the child has illicit Halloween candy in hand, his or her speed quandruples in undesired directions and causes them to disappear into black holes while they hide to consume said candy.  Today, Miss M used a step stool to climb onto the kitchen counter to get a packet of Skittles (after Daddy told her she could not have candy until after dinner), then went upstairs and crawled under her bed to consume them.  When daddy realized M had disappeared, he searched downstairs, then upstairs, and upon finding M under the crib in her room, Miss M proudly produced the packet of Skittles to assure Daddy that they were "yummy" and to invite him to have some too.  Nice try.

We have missed the yearly tradition of posting Halloween costume photographs for the imminently practical reason that we can't find the camera to take the pictures.  So for the record, C wore his Iron Man costume (much to T's consternation as she had bought him a Transformers costume), M wore an Ohio State cheerleader costume to trunk or treat at church and a beautiful yellow princess dress (Belle) for neighborhood trick or treating, E wore a lady bug costume.  Ba should have taken the shepard paraphernalia from the Advent Xmas show a few years as he discovered a second corollary and second Halloween candy calculation adjustment to his Physical Law of Children in Motion: 

Corollary 2:   children have the same charge and are thus repelled from one another and thus cannot move in the same direction at the same time.  As corrected by the Halloween candy physical spacing adjustor:  The presence of candy in a doorway is the most powerful opposite charge in the universe as it can bring the children together long enough to grab the candy and say "thank you."  Or as C amusingly put it:  "Trick-or-treat-thank-you."  He is very efficient.

E is consistently using the traditional crawl to move at high rates of speed, has been pulling herself to standing positions using furniture, and cleans all the crumbs (and dirt) C and M leave on the carpet.  She likes to chatter away happily but will also screech her displeasure when intercepted on her missions to get into trouble.

Campin' with Colin

After months of asking to sleep out in a tent, C got his chance this weekend with his Cub Scout pack.  And it was Ba's first time sleeping on the ground in a really long time ('cause once you're staff at camp, you get to sleep in a cabin).

C and the rest of his Tiger den did extremely well.  They did all their activities quickly and then just played in the woods during their free time.  We went on a hike, ran an obstacle course that included a rope bridge, made a bird feeder out of a bagel, cooked our own meals over the coals.  It was fun to see C go for a hike and on the rope bridge as he wouldn't have done much of either had he only been with me.  In fact, on the hike, he started a "Mighty Tigers" call and response cheer that impressed his den leader.

He did well overnight too.  He was worn out by the end of the day and fell asleep during the "retiring of the flag" ceremony done by the Boy Scout troop at the campfire.  But after I carried him back to camp, he took his medicine, brushed his teeth and changed into pajamas without a tiredness meltdown.  I thought he might want me to stay with him in the tent until he was asleep, but he was reassured that I would be nearby at the campfire and kept the "big" flashlight in his sleeping bag "just in case."  I went to the campfire and he fell asleep on his own.  He only woke up once during the night and fell back to sleep once I reminded him that we were camping.

Sunday morning, I had parent breakfast duty and he went along with me to get breakfast ready.  As the boys went through line, he helped by telling them how many of each item they were allowed to have and showed them where to get juice.  In fact, he was a great helper the whole time, helping me load and unload the car, setting up the tent, and--his favorite--using a rake to clear a site for the tent (and cleaning up much of the ground cover in the vicinity!)

He slept almost the whole drive back to Charlotte and it was a well earned nap.

First Crawl

E's first crawl--the official body off the ground type-- occurred Saturday Sept. 24.  It was only a few feet until she reached her sock drawer (so she could distribute them across the floor...) but both Mommy and Daddy saw it.  Since Sat, she has only crawled one other time (also briefly) but continues to cover territory quickly with the commado crawl (using elbows and dragging the body).  She also is pulling herself up into sitting and kneeling positions.  She'll stand for a while if someone holds her or leans her against furniture.

M and C both are terrific helpers with E and she gets very excited when she sees them--she smiles and squeaks and fails her arms and legs.  C has been busy with Tiger Scouts on Tues evenings and soccer practice on Thurs evenings and games on Sat mornings.  M is obsessed with "Yo Gabba Gabba".  T got Fufa (the pink one) and Toody (the blue one) dolls for her and she takes them everywhere.

Mena Elise--U.S. Citizen

First, apologizes to C since his birthday festivities haven't been posted yet.  But today is M's day.  Her citizenship "ceremony" was this morning.  We dressed up, took C out of school for the morning, so we all could be there for the big moment when mommy or daddy would forcibly try to get her to raise her right hand and then would say the oath for her.  (As she presumably would be yelling "No, Daddy.  No, Daddy.  No." to the amusement of everyone in the room but me.)
 
In fact, there was no ceremony, oaths, or anything close.  I basically went up to a bank teller window, handed in her green card, signed two copies of the citizenship certificate on her behalf, and that was it.  Other than trying to coax C and M to stay with me or at least be quiet as they chased each other through the rows of chairs in the room.  No flag-waving (though they did give us one to take home), no speeches, no Star Spangled Banner, no fuss, nothing.  Maximum anti-climax.

But it's official and final.  M is a US Citizen.  God Bless America.