Foresight

Me in the morning vs. Me at the end of the day.

Tea for Three

It is another rainy spring day here. That and the boys are still tired from camping over the weekend, and I am sick, again. Trying to come up with calm, non-argument inducing activities that doesn't make too big a mess isn't always easy. Usually we stick to movies, playdough, puzzles, lego towers, and books.

Monkey asked last night if we could have a tea party, at approximately 7:30PM. Half an hour from bedtime, just after dinner, and me barely keeping my eyes open and myself upright from the cold I am fighting. "Maybe tomorrow" I suggested. Lucky for him I had enough rest, and gumption, to set up our tea for three this morning.

Monster likes his with milk, Monkey drinks his plain, both have chamomile and I drink a caffeinated green tea. I even broke out a silly British accent "Good day, sirs! Would ya like a spot o' tea? Are you enjoying the weather?!" Monkey told me it was a great tea song, and Monster asked me to please stop. I guess they were not impressed.

Of course we don't do much without some sort of educational aspect to it, and we did a big lesson on tea a few months ago, so I just touched on what we had spoken about before: where tea originated, how it traveled around the world, what tea comes from what countries today, and how different people drink their tea.

If Monster wouldn't gag at the thought, we'd do a history of coffee and have a decaf party next week!

up, Up, UP and AWAY! A exploration of Rockets.

The last few weeks of May we are studying outer space and all things planetary. Today we had a fun day of rockets!

Monster and Monkey made name rockets to hang on our art wall. Monkey still has a very Picasso approach to his art work, ha ha, and Monster really wanted to put all the letters from bottom to top, so we had a lesson on what direction we read and write. (That spider is fake, by the way...)

As they glued their letters on, I opened our Usborne book of Earth and Space, and we talked about the planets in our solar system. They boys really liked learning how big each planet was, how many moons each planet has, and how many earth years it takes each planet to go around the sun.

We created some toilet paper rockets, which they stapled flat, because stapling is super fun. Monkey layered his rocket componenets and stapled them together as more of a rocket "pile", because, you know, Picasso. ;)

Next we tried out an experiment I had read about online: seltzer water and Splenda. Supposedly, when mixed together, it has a similar reaction as baking soda and vinegar. We wrote out graphs to track how much of each substance we put in the bottle, and then the results. Monster practiced writing numbers and we talked about how you write out one half, something we hadn't talked about yet. Monkey scribbled some lab notes:

First we sampled the sugar substitute and seltzer. Monkey really liked both, Monster wasn't so sure about the seltzer, and I missed getting a picture of the awesome face he took after trying the "sparkly water".

The results were not as cool as we had hoped, just some fizzling. I have has the Splenda for a while though, so maybe it is better fresh?

I asked both boys if they liked the experiment:
Monster- Yeah, but it just went splat.
Monkey- Yes! It was good. And a VERY BIG explosion!!!

Three year old's are pretty excitable creatures. ;)

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New Words/Terms: Galaxy, artificial sugar, seltzer, carbonation, orbit,  and Galileo (he discovered some planets moons).

Four is the new cool.

I love babies. I love, love, love, LOVE babies. I loooooove them. They are the best. All snuggles and warm baby smells and just all around nice to hold, look at, kiss and love on.

BUT. Babies do not stay babies forever. Soon they start rolling, and walking and talking...and then, then they turn two.

But they do not stop there! Oh no! It gets worse! They turn three-going-on-thirteen with attitudes to put teenagers to shame!

 And then one day you wake up, and your chubby cherub, your precious pumpkin, is now four. He's a kid. A for real, talking back, making up his own rules, child. You can barely remember those sweet days rocking him to sleep or kissing his pudgy cheeks as he depends on you day after day for everything. And instead your memories are being replaced by day after day of argumentative come backs that are better thought out than you ever would have imagined from someone so small.

Some days I wish I could magically send us back to the beginning where it was just me and my tiny newborn, getting to know each other for the first time. No four-year-olds demanding things at the top of their lungs. Asking for things not politly, but by saying one word in a totally demeaning way. "MILK!...MILK!...MOOOMMY! I SAID MILK!!"

BUT. Four-year-olds are amazing. The imagination, the ideas, the intuitive-ness of them is overwhelming some days. They come up with interesting thoughts that are all their own and you are blown away by how all that knowledge you had been stuffing into their little brains for YEARS has finally been taken, rearranged, and spit out as totally their own conscious thought.

Monster has been amazing the boots off me recently.We had a day discovering Martin Luther King JR. and differences in people and how we are all the same in the end. And he came up with these ideas for how to make the world a better place:

-Everyone should put lids back on pens so they don't dry out
-Keara-dog should stop getting everything dirty, like the windows
-Everyone charge your phones, wash your windows, and eat and drink
-Talk about it instead of fighting
-Everyone should wash their hair
-Say nice words to people instead of mean ones

If you ever wondered what four-year-olds thought was important in life, there you go.

Bike bombs.

It all started at Christmas. Santa Clause and his idea of a "good" gift. Monster had asked for a train set (to, you know, go with his other five train sets), but Mr. C thought he might like a bike better.

Great. Perfect. We could all use some more exercise. New Years resolitions and all, you know.

So here we are, two sleep deprived parents, way past our bedtime, building this awesome bike. It does not even dawn on our tired, slow functioning minds what having a bike in the house on Christmas morning might involve. Obviously we could have put a stop to it right away, set rules from the beginning. "Take your bike outside to ride", but then there is no place outside to ride at our house. A sloped driveway leads to a sloped road, which ends on a flat, busy street. So that isn't happening.

This bikes sole purpose is for walks, fun times at the park, and camping trips. However, as soon as the kid saw the bright red bike, he did the obvious thing. He jumped on it and started to ride it! We laughed, thinking it was funny, and commenting how our ugly laminate floors can't get any worse, so what was the harm?

Fast forward to this week. Our friends lend us a bike for Monkey to use. It's raining. It's pouring. It's frickin' storming out there! We are stuck home, tired, bored and nothing to do. "Mommy, can you bring our bikes in to ride?" Why not! It sounded like an awesome idea to get some energy out!

Fast forward to today. Three days of riding out bikes in the house. (Gotta say, as ugly and tacky laminate flooring is, it is one tough surface). We alternate this with playing Lego Batman on the Xbox, and making blanket forts, and valentines crafts, and all that jazz.

And then the reason for this whole post happened. The incident that made me wonder if bikes should be allowed in the house. No. Not for safety reasons. No. Not because they broke something. But because of pure imagination. Pure brotherly "love". Pure innocent childhood fears.

Monster blew up Monkeys bike bombs. Yup. He popped them. All three of them.

It sent Monkey into a screaming, crying, crocodile tear sobs of sadness. His whole world was shattered.

Needless to say it was an interesting moment of decision for me. Since I had asked Monster to stop blowing up Monkey's bombs during the commotion, he had to take a minute and go sit in his room. Then we had a talk about how we don't do things that make other people sad.

And Monkey? How did I end my big blue eyed babies saddest moment of the day? I made some new imaginary bombs for him, of course.

The Invisible Migrain

Our couch has a magic button on it.

Once pressed, the button turns the couch into a giant fire truck, complete with loud, whirring sirens that blast whenever that invisible button is pushed.

It's super. It's great. I love the imagination the boys have these days.

But...

Monster will push the button "WHEE-OOOoooOOO. WHEEeeEEE-oooOOOoo" and sound the fire truck alarm. Monkey will come next, to partake in the super, imaginary fun his brother has started. And in his excitment, he will start pushing his OWN imaginary button. "WHEE-ooOOOoo. WHEEE-OOOoooOOOooo", they will chant in unison.

And then Monster decides it is HIS imaginary fire truck and starts yelling at Monkey,

"You can't push the button, I am pushing the button!"

And Monkey yells back,

"I want to push it! It is MY button!"

Then the pushing and shoving starts, the fighting, the pulling hair, pinching and scratching and I have to ban them from the fire truck. Forever.

I thought this was bad enough. And then this morning it got worse.

We were in the sewing room, and Monster says to Monkey:

"Here is your pretend lunch! I put it in your mouth for you!"

Monkey was NOT excited about pretend lunch.

"No! I don't want pretend lunch!"

"HERE! I made you pretend LUNCH!" Monster shouted back at him.

"NO!!! I don't want pretend lunch!" Monkey replied and started to cry. "I sad 'cause I don't want pretend lunch!"

 "You have to eat it, I MADE it for YOU!" Monster replied.

And then the fighting ensued.

I think I have a pretend migrain now.

Oh. Wait. Nope.

It's real.

Lessons in Anatomy

You don't pee by yourself when you have kids. You don't do anything by yourself when you have kids. I have learned to adapt, mostly. We even have a baby gate on our bathroom doorway so I can at least have a minute without people touching me, even if I still am watched and yelled at. Recently, however, they figured out how to scale the baby gate, so even that doesn't work anymore.

Today, while I was peeing with company, Monkey, the always curious two-year-old, stuffs his head between my legs and shouts at me "Where's your peee-nis?!"

"I don't have a penis, I have a vagina. I am a girl, and girls have vaginas."

"No!" He yells back, "WHERE is your PEE-NIS??" Because, duh mommy, four fifths of our household have penises, so of course you have one too.

"Nope," I repeated, "I don't have a penis. I have a vagina. Boys have penises, girls have vaginas."

At this point I get a close up and personal inspection as he stuffs his head back in my lap.

"Oh." And then he starts to walk away, but turns back to clarify, "You have a vagina?"

"Yup, I have a vagina." I figured we had it settled and he figured it out, mommies are just different. But then he turned around again on his way out of the bathroom to inform me:

"You have a vagina. A GOLDEN vagina."

Wow.

I'm pretty special I guess.