Time of Discovery

The latter part of March and beginning of April have been dubbed by the preschool teachers, "The Time of Discovery". They mentioned this to the husband one day and it's really true.

Suddenly, all the children in Fellan's class "get it". They get everything. They're totally comfortable at school and with the friendships they've made throughout the year. They're just amazing little creatures and I feel so lucky to be able to be a part of this school and see such growth of character from 4-year-olds.

One of the things that Fellan has suddenly "gotten" is the ability to swing. By himself. He no longer requires pushes from us.

This is a huge, huge thing for him. Swinging is, by far, his most favoritist thing ever to do. If given the opportunity, he would swing for over an hour and not play on any other equipment at any given park.

And so, in an attempt to save our sore arms, we have tried ever since he started using the "big kid swings" to teach him how to pump his legs. "Straighten! Pull 'Em Back! Straighten! Pull 'Em Back!"

Apparently, one of these teaching episodes must have been quite memorable (I'm hoping it was due to the loving supportiveness of my instruction) and now if you ask him who taught him to swing by himself, his answer is always, "Mommy!" Poor Daddy never gets any credit... :)

Runnin' Back Shoes

For those of you who don't know me, I'm not much of a girly-girl. However, it seems that despite her mother, somehow Marxo is learning some of the finer aspects of being a girl.

She loves all kinds of pretty, frilly outfits, and if I ever let her choose the bow for her hair, she will always choose the biggest pink bow that we have (which are all hand-me-downs from one of the neighbor girls - I definitely didn't buy them!).

She loves it when you tell her that she looks pretty (and I must admit I use that to my advantage fairly frequently in order to try to make her wear whatever it is I want her to wear so that I don't have to try to pick out something else! - "But you'll look so pretty in this shirt...")

And she especially loves the multitude of shoes that the neighbor girl has handed down to her. Every day she chooses different shoes to wear. Here lately, however, her favorite shoes are a pair of hot pink tennis shoes that she calls her "runnin' back shoes". Apparently she did pick up something a little "non-girly" from the football season. :)

Farthead

I overheard a conversation between my husband and the boy the other night:

Fellan: Look at my farthead!
Husband: Your what?
Fellan: My farthead!
(at this point, I was thinking that little-boy humor must have finally seeped into Fellan's class from the older kids' class)
Husband: What's on your head?
Fellan: No, look here! (pointing to his forehead)
Husband: Oh! That's your forehead!
Fellan: (thinking a couple seconds) It's my fivehead!!!
(much laughter all around...)

TMI?

Remember how I said that we were all sick for a couple of weeks? Here's an actual e-mail I sent to my mom on Monday after the first weekend of being sick: (she asked me how I was doing)

Better today than last night.

After watching the kids dry-heaving all night long for two nights, I was really afraid I was going to do it, too. But even after trying to will it all to come out the hind end, I ended up throwing up anyway. I hate throwing up.

After I threw up, I took the anti-naseau medicine that the doctor had prescribed for Marxo. It worked like a charm! I was able to sleep from about 10:30 until 5:00 when a big thunderstorm and hail came through.

Of course, that woke up the kids, so I went down the hallway, thinking that I would climb into bed with one of them and they might go back to sleep. But, when I was telling Marxo to move over, I touched her sheets and discovered that she had thrown up.

She threw up while she was laying on her back, so it got all in her hair. I ended up having to give her a bath. Then I changed her sheets and finally, I got them both to lay back down for a few minutes. I was just hoping I could make it through the next few hours until the nanny would get there and I would finally have a break from the gawd-awful weekend.

But then I heard the phone ringing and so did Fellan.
So we all came downstairs at around 7:10 and I checked the messages. It was the nanny - her daughter had been up most of the night crying with an ear infection, so she needed to take her daughter to the doctor. She would not be coming in afterall.

Oh - and when we came downstairs, I tried to turn on the lights in the dining room and one of the lightbulbs burned out (quite fantastically) and tripped one of the breakers, so the lights in the dining room and kitchen wouldn't work.

I eventually made my way downstairs to the garage to try to trip the breakers and get the lights back on, but after I messed around with them, even more lights wouldn't come on.

At this point, I was still not feeling very well, so I just laid on the couch and gave the kids some saltines and animal crackers to eat. The husband was still sleeping, so I left him up there until 9:30. At that point, I decided he had slept enought and he'd better come and help me figure out how to get the lights back on.

He's finally feeling better today after having a fever since sometime on Saturday afternoon. He claims he didn't get any good sleep from Friday until this morning from around 2:00 until 9:30.

I just can't wait to go back to work tomorrow so I can have a break. :)

Hiatus

I figure I've gone long enough without any kind of update on the goings-on here in my little world, so I'll just give you a brief over-view of what's happened in the last month or so.

At the end of February/beginning of March, we went on vacation to Colorado. My parents came out from Nebraska for the first weekend (and brought frozen Runzas for us to enjoy while on vacation, bless their hearts!). The kids had a very good time with grandma and grandpa and the husband and I were able to go skiing together for a day.

We got in a little skiing during the remainder of our week there and attempted to get the boy up on skis. We enrolled him in ski school one morning. I had serious doubts that he would stay for the entire session just because he's very slow to warm up to new situations and he gets very scared about anything remotely dangerous. So, we spent a couple of days talking about it - how the boots would feel, how to walk in them, how the skis are slippery, etc. We even visited the ski area and looked at the boots and skis he would rent and checked out the "magic carpet" that they have to get to the top of the bunny hill.

We actually got the boots on him and the helmet on him. Then we went outside to meet up with his teacher and the other kids. That's kind of when he lost a little steam. But, we went over to the little hill and actually got one ski on him. But then he fell down and he wanted Daddy. Immediately. But Daddy was busy trying to put mittens on the girl, so he wasn't immediately available. Well, that was the end of it. The boy would not continue on. He just couldn't recover his composure, so we cut the lesson short and went into the lodge. The husband and I took turns skiing for a couple of hours and that was that. Maybe next year...

After we returned from vacation, we've basically all been sick! Everyone came down with some sort of affliction the weekend after we got back and I'm actually still struggling with some kind of sinus infection. But we seem to be on the mend. Hopefully in the coming week, I'll be able to catch up with everything I want to post! Write at you soon! :)

Snails? I want a dog.

Remember when I set up my cute little office fish tank?

Well, it has since become completely overgrown with algae - the snails I had in there didn't do their job very well and then they died. So, last night I decided it was finally time to go to the pet store to get some more snails.

We made it a family outing and as we drove up to the pet store, I told the kids that I needed to go get some snails.

To which, the boy responded, "Snails? I want a dog. A sleeping dog." ???...

Baby Tara(h)

Apparently, people are getting annoyed with the fact that I haven't posted here lately. So, to appease the masses, here goes:

Towards the end of my pregnancy with the girl, we gave the boy a little baby doll so that he could get used to the idea of having a baby around and so that in case he felt the need to hold a baby once his sibling arrived, he would always have an "unbreakable" option.

The boy definitely takes after his father in the fact that he is a caring nurturer and he has bonded quite deeply with his baby doll. To this day, he doesn't sleep without his baby. And several months ago, he named her Baby Tara(h). [The husband and I don't agree on how this should be spelled - I say "Tarah", he says, "Tara"]

I'm quite proud of the fact that he named his baby. Not just because he named her, but because he chose a name for her that doesn't already belong to someone we know. It seems to have been a unique thought and considering the difficulty we had when we were trying to come up with names for our kids, I'm even more impressed!

Anyway, meet Baby Tara(h) - pronounced (tah-rah):

One eye open and one eye closed - isn't that the way all well-loved baby dolls are supposed to look? :)

So, one day last week, Baby Tara(h) went to school with the boy. Upon his arrival, a group of his little classmates (all girls) told him that boys can't have babies. This incited a very lively discussion between Fellan, the girls, the boy's male teacher, and my husband. The husband tells me that he excused himself from the conversation after they had covered the difference between having a baby and giving birth to the baby and after they talked about all the different methods of feeding a baby. I think the girls were satisfied by that point, but I predict there will be many more of these types of conversations.

(Especially since last night as the kids went to bed, they were having quite a lively conversation about penises and paginas...)

Code name for the girl

Since I've now got a code name for the boy, I thought I'd check out my T9word function to see what would come up for the girl's name. Her name is not very popular, so I expected a similar outcome as for the boy's name.

But I typed in her name and oddly enough, it worked perfectly. Well, I couldn't have that, so I typed in an alternate spelling that we had considered for her name. Much better: Marxo.

Fellan and Marxo. Those are some code words I can live with. :)

Fellan's Story

Part of the requirements of the boy's preschool is that each parent must work at the school about 5 to 6 times per semester. My turn to work at the school was a week ago on Friday.

I always have fun working there because I love seeing the boy play with his friends and I get to see what he actually does every day at school. But last Friday was even more fun because they've started something at his school that is pretty neat - the kids each get to tell a story and then act it out. It wasn't the boy's turn during my "parent-helper day", so I've been anxiously asking him every day after school if he got to tell a story that day.

Finally, this past Friday, I forgot to ask him about it, but found a sheet sitting on the dining room table. The front page was an explanation of the project:

"We are please to contine to participate in a variation of the Classroom Storytelling Project that originated with participation in the School Literacy and Culture Project at the Rice University Center for Eduation... As a part of the literacy curriculum, in our school, your child will act out adult written literature. S/He will also be dictating and acting out his/her own stories. Copies of your child's storieswill be sent home so that your child can share them with you. We encourage you to take the child's interest in these stories as far as they wish to go. Act them out with siblings and friends. Enjoy the enthusiasm your child brings home along with the stories. The stories may be factual or fictional, or some combination of both. Children tell stories that help to make them part of the community of children in our school and to cement developing friendships... The stories will be dictated by your child and as children go through stages in making sense of this language, occasionally a story will have nonstandard grammar. For example a child might say, 'He goed to the store.' We will then give your child the choice by rephrasing the sentence as 'He goed to the store, or he went to the store?' If the child chooses the nonstandard grammar, we will write what he/she says. Ultimately the words of the story belong to your child..."

Ok, I know that's a really long explanation of the story, but I just think this project is so cool. After seeing how excited the kids were about the story on my parent-helper day and how important is makes the story-telling child feel, I couldn't wait to see what kind of story the boy would come up with.

The day before the boy told his story was "teddy bear day" at the school - every child had brought a teddy bear to school and then the teddy bears spent the night at the school. When we arrived the next morning, the kids weren't allowed to go into the school room right away because the bears had gotten into some "mischief" the night before. :)

So, Fellan's story was:

My bear was stringing on the beads. Then I found him. I got him to the circle.

My husband wasn't home until almost bedtime Friday night, but when I found the story, the kids and I read it over and over, acted it out, and the boy was thrilled about his story. By the time Daddy got home that night, both the kids knew the story by heart and were very excited to tell him all about it.

We went and got the page with the story written on it and the boy stood in front of his Daddy, holding the page with both hands, proudly reading his story. When he finished reading, he put the paper down by his side and took a very deep bow. I'm not sure who was more proud, the boy or his Daddy. It was the cutest thing.

Fellan

I've been trying to get better over the last couple of years about being organized and remembering things, so one of the tools I've begun to rely on heavily is my phone. I set reminders for myself in it all the time these days and when I go to edit the "content" of the reminder, the keypad on the phone automatically goes into "T9word mode" - it's supposed to be kind of smart and predict what you're trying to type - a pretty cool feature when it works.

But, most of the time for me, it doesn't work. I set reminders for myself to go pick up my son and when I try to type in his (not very well-known) name, it comes out "Fellan". And because I'm too lazy to change the mode to the regular, horribly time-consuming text messaging mode, I just leave it!

I just set myself a reminder to "Go home" early today and instead, it says "In good". If anyone ever gets ahold of my phone and tries to snoop into my life, they're really going to wonder what kind of strange code words I use for myself. :) It's always good to keep people guessing.