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.

School! Round two!

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DING! The bell has sounded, the learners are in the ring, mommy throws a fast jab to the right, delivering the reading lesson, dodge-dodge, the two boys duck out of the way, mommy gives a high-math kick, leap-jump, the boys outsmart her! Tired and out of new ideas, mommy sags over the ropes, sure she's defeated....but just when all seems lost the boys fight back! Hi-YAH, roudhouse kick from the oldest, he can now read four sight words, uppercut from the younger, he can count to ten by himself! Mommy WINS! The boys WIN! Homeschooling, round two, has succeeded!!
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Sometimes teaching kids seems like a losing battle. You preach and rant and try to cram information into their little brains in tricky ways that are disguised as "play" and it never seems to stick. "I know, mommy, I know" My soon-to-be four year old is constantly saying when I try to explain a new concept to him. But then, in the end (actually it happens a few days, or even weeks, later) they heard you, and understand, and usually repeat the information back in such a way that astounds me. Be it to them to actually be learning something and having the brain power to turn around and create new ideas with the information I've given them. Especially amazing given that my brain power theses days is nil due to lack of sleep and fuzzy new-again mommy brain.

This year we are doing a little bit more organized preschool than our random when-I-had-the-energy teaching moments I pulled out of my hat (pinterest I love you) and deployed at will last year.

Monday we do reading. Were using Bob Books and following 3 Dinosaurs printables to go along with the books. So far we've read book 2 and book 3 of set 1. We have four sight words and are working our way up to every word in the first three books so Monster can read them by himself. He can read the third book almost verbatim from memory now (mostly because we lost the second book for a few weeks...). Monkey gets a worksheet to work on and reads the books with us as well. I also have done a few writing our name projects, one with beans, one with bingo dot painters, and next week we will do another with pom pom balls.

Tuesday is music and our weekly playgroup. Tapping the corresponding letters to the keyboard and writing out a simple song was a little too advanced for us, so we usually just play "kids" music and sing and dance. :)

Wednesday is math day. Most of it has revolved around those interlocking plastic building blocks kids love (you know what I'm talking about). Today we did some measuring objects with them and guessing how many it would take and charting it all. Monster did really well with the guessing, getting most spot on to what it actually measured out to, and Monkey had fun playing with the objects we had gathered for measuring.

Thursday we do science. Most of our science projects I have gotten from pinterest or a book called Mudpies and Magnets. We have explored concepts such as friction with a ramp, sand paper, and different objects; germs with cinnamon oil, and hand washing and placing food in the fridge and on the counter to see which molds fastest; and (the boys favorite) "science experiments" with baking soda and vinegar or just colored water to dump and pour with.

Friday we have a play date with friends and when I feel up to it we do a season or holiday themed craft. We made hand print trees this month so far. 

We started school a few weeks before September mostly because we welcomed our third boy the beginning of August and since we were not leaving the house much in August, I decided to implement school to keep us busy.

Below, Monster and Monkey are meeting baby Muskrat for the first time. :)

The undies factory

"Mommy, you know that place, the fac-orie, where my underwear are made by ma-sha-sheens?"

If you don't speak toddler-going-on-four-year-old, he means the factory with machines that makes his underwear.

After a few moments of repeating that sentence in a dozen different ways and getting interrupted a few times by his little brother, his thoughts took a different direction:

"You know, the fac-orie that makes chocolate."

"What?" I say, half smiling to myself, "The factory makes chocolate underwear?"

"No!" He gasps in annoyance, geez mom, keep up! , "There are two fac-ories. The one makes my underwear, big ma-sha-sheens make them and into boxes and then out the fac-orie and they go to the sto-war, and that's where we buy them."

"Oh, what about the chocolate factory?" I ask, because we all know moms are much more interested in chocolate factories than little boys underwear factories. (or maybe that's just me...)

"They make chocolates, and sometimes brownies, and sometimes more chocolates."

"Oh, but no chocolate underwear?" Trying to tease a smile out of him, because even if your not an adult chocolate underwear should be funny.

He paused for a moment, all serious like, "No, mommy. They don't."

Well, ok then.

Catch up!

Despite my hopes of making this a monthly blog, I currently have not posted in about 6 months. Here's a little catch up to tell you what we have been doing school wise with some fun stories of the boys development over the last six months.

 

In January we celebrated Martin Luther King Day talking about love and acceptance of all peoples. We did a project with a picture of MLK a the top and cut out pictures of people of all colors from magazines to paste underneath. We also watched a few videos online about his speech and what the day in about.

 

 

For Presidents day we did a fun money matching project. We started a chore chart with Monster which he gets money for completing each week and he has been picking up the names of coins pretty quickly.

 

We also did a presidents project and made these two lovely gentlemen.

For Chinese New Year we made homemade sushi (yeah, I know, kind of the wrong country...) and noise makers out of paper plates and beans. I wrote words in English and in Chinese on the plates and we talked about different things they do to celebrate in China. 

 

We managed to do the most school activities in the last six months for St. Patrick's Day. Although I never got corned beef and sauerkraut (one of my favorites) we did make some green play dough, make four leaf clovers, and leprechauns. Thanks to Grammy who came to visit most weeks through the winter, we had a few other green themed crafts in March.

Epic example of Monkey's "stinky" face.

Clovers and glitter. A big hit with the boys, a not so big hit with my broom.

 

 Leprechaun!!

Also thanks to Grammy we had a St. Patrick's Day themed cupcake decorating kit and so we made some tasty green banana muffins that we frosted.

March also brought a few sensory projects. We talked about different senses, played eye-spy, had a taste test snack one day, made loud and soft sounds, and make a scent plate with spices.

Monster has become addicted to craft books. He pours through them four hours and begs every hour of the day to make another project. In April we made junk robots adapted from an idea of using photos of random objects to make robots. I dug through our junk drawer in the kitchen and came up with washers, screws, tin foil, rubber bands, paper clips, safety pins, and so much more for them to use to make robots. Monster's came out super awesome and Monkey's came out how his projects always do- a pile of art pieces glued to the middle of the paper. :)

In April we covered Easter with a discussion on why different religions celebrate, who the Easter Bunny is (Monster let us know he is the bunny that lays chocolate eggs and gives it to you in a basket) and we made some really pretty ribbon decorated eggs.

Unfortunely I didn't take a picture of the finished project it looks like, but here Monster is contemplating which ribbon to put on his egg next. This project was really good for Monkey, whom I placed glue on his egg and he just got to stick stuff places. We have been doing more projects where he can just stick objects in glue and it comes out looking nice. I think he feels much more inspired when his project looks like Monsters in the end.

May has snuck up on us fast! Not only are we less than three months away from meeting baby number three now, but the last six months have just flown by! We missed celebrating for May Day since we were getting over a cold; however, we are busy preparing for Monkey's upcoming birthday. He will be two this month and it totally shows. Every thing he says starts with "I want to do it!". His vocabulary has grown so much he is on par with Monster, I think. He has an amazing knowledge of how the English language works and can put completely, grammatically correct sentences together almost better than I can. :) To celebrate him we are having our family and friends together for a Rainbow Art party and to keep in coordination of our all art year of school (or at least it's come down to just art projects this year), I have rainbow themed projects for every day this week to make decorations. Today we made paper scrap rainbows and did some painting with rainbow colors.

Our paper scrap rainbows are going to look nice in the windows.

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Monster potty trained in February and his favorite place to pee is outside in our yard. It's been interesting trying to teach him where is ok and where it isn't ok to pull your pants down.

Monkey is super interested in using the potty currently as well, and in result of that we have let him run naked a lot more often to hopefully encourage potty training before the baby comes. However, it has instead resulted in him peeing in the most random places in our house, including the toaster, off the dresser in our bedroom, and in the heater vent.

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Hopefully in the months to come I find time to keep adding to the blog. Also, I hope to be better at writing down the silly stuff the do so I can share that as well. Here's hoping your spring has been as warm and fun as ours has been! :)

The joys of play-dough

Play dough  has been a big hit around here lately. Monkey has finally reached the age where he does not immediatly stuff it into his mouth, and Monster's imagination has really taken off in the last six months so he does more than just squish it.

The boys were helping me clean it up one afternoon when I got distracted by the new puppy, and Monster decided to keep playing instead of cleaning. This is the conversation I overheard:

One lump of dough, shaped by a spoon and slightly resembling ice cream, said to the other lump of dough "I love you."

"I love you too" the other lump replied.

"You look small" the first lump retored.

"Don't worry, I will get bigger" the second explained (this is much more funny in person because Monster says "don't worry" in this adorable little voice, like he can fix the world for you in any circumstance. We get a "don't worry" a lot when we tell him no, and he has an idea on how to compromise.)

"Where is my baby sister?" The first lump says. The lumps start looking around, Monster forms a third and forth ball of dough. "There is my baby sister!"

Monster loads the four lumps (not sure who the fourth is...) into a bowl and takes them to the play kitchen.

"Let's go in the cooker and cook!" the lump family says. He inserts them in the oven and starts to sing about cooking.

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Right about here is where Monkey picks up the dog's empty water bowl, places it on his head and runs, with just enough hop in his get-up that the dog pan bump-bump-bump's on his head with every other step, making a ping-ping-ping noise.

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Monsters dough family finishes baking and he takes them out.

"Now let's get you all cleaned up!" at which point he "washed" the lumps in his play sink and ran back to the table.

Most of the rest of the conversation was mumbled random words, but I did over hear more about a baby sister and then one lump ask the other "Are you a baby daddy?" and the other lump replied "Nope." Thinking there was some confusion of names there...

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And at this point the play dough adventure is interrupted by Monkey standing in the middle of the table, holding onto the chandelier and screaming "DING-DONG, DING-DONG" and, of course, I had to go pull him down. Monster decided it might be fun to try and in the yelling/screaming/upset mommy parade that followed, play dough was forgotten.

Trippin': 101

For the last few years we have made a pilgramage south to visit Daddy-Cakes family. Mainly his grandma who currently lives in Vegas. Last year we flew, which was fun, a little easier in some ways, but also a huge headache. Trying to cart two kiddos, car seats, luggage and carry-ons through the airport was difficult to say the least. This year we decided to drive. And to visit friends and my aunt in California on the way. We also made the decision to visit the little mouse who lives in Anaheim.

We have taken several long (i.e. 8+ hours of driving) road trips with the boys and there are some things that have been great, and some that have not. Here is a list of ideas to help you get to your destination without leaving the kiddos at a rest stop, or getting out and refusing to go any farther yourself. ;)

1) New things. Doesn't matter what they are, just as long as its something new. The dollar store is your best friend here. Some of our favorites this trip were glow sticks, cheap dollar sticker books, and I splurged on $2.50 airplane which had a moving propeller and lights. These were a huge hit and even more fun when the boys realized they had candy in the bottom. It became a game then, with them asking for candy, me placing a few small candies in the bottom, and them opening it like, ta-da, candy magically re-appeared!

 2) Candy. Or snacks they don't usually get. Try to go with clean foods, but if their favorites are messy (like my boys) just remember extra baby wipes. Some of our favorite rare treats for trips include fish crackers, plastic cups with mandarin oranges, gummy candies, jerky or pepperoni sticks (only a hit with Monkey who was then banned from eating them after choking and puking all over himself and his carseat), and pretzels.

3) DVD player. This was our first trip with one and Monster LOVED it! Monkey on the other hand hated it and would scream when we turned it on. So think about your kiddos ages before deciding to use one, or give the older child his own device to watch videos or play games. We had our tablet with us and Monster used it on the last day of our trip.

4) Organize your car so everything is within the co-pilots reach. If you are traveling alone with kids, put everything in the passenger seat organized in separate bags or buckets such as food, toys, new items, etc. I had a bucket of toys between the boys, pillow and blankets within their reach, and the food/new items bucket on the floor in the back seat. We also kept coats, shoes and an extra set of clothes for each boy up front with us and stored everything else in the bed of the truck.

5) Take kids music. We didn't and we ended up singing random songs we could remember the words to for 3/4 of our trip. Then my mother in law gave us some kids Cd's while we were in Vegas and the boys really enjoyed listening to them instead of Daddy-Cakes and I's off key singing. :)

6) Make stops count. I have the smallest bladder in the world, so I need to stop every 1.5 hours. Daddy-Cakes doesn't care, but it doesn't go over well with the two back seat drivers who want to get out every time we stop. We aimed for stopping about every two hours. We ate at the golden arched fast food trap for most meals on the road because it is the ONLY one in most towns with a play place. But it saved our sanity as the boys got time to run, they love chicken nuggets and Monster is hardly eating anything lately, and although none of their food is extremely great for you, they do offer salads and un-fried chicken sandwiches. We did take food with us and stopped at parks occasionally, but sometimes it was just easier to let someone else cook.

7) Daddy-Cakes wins again with his ingeniousness for this trip. We bought a mini fridge over the summer for $20 at a garage sale to keep eggs in, which we buy in bulk from friends. Daddy-Cakes hooked it up to the truck and we had it in the back- keeping cool whenever we drove, staying cool when we stopped because the little freezer compartment held ice packs, and getting nice and cool when we were at a house because we could plug it in to an outlet. We took ham sandwich making, pulled pork filling for sandwiches, extra snacks, and the boys milk. I don't know if I could ever go on a trip again without it!

8) Stay with friends. It's cheaper, you get to visit, and they usually know the best places in their area to take kiddos who need to get some energy out. If you don't have friends or family on your trip, book your hotel the same day, but at least four hours ahead of time. You can get discount deals on the same day you are staying, but if you wait too long, we found out, they sell out or the offer expires. Or if you are brave (I wasn't) take your tent and camp along the way.


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Funnies from our trip:

We had gone about 1/2 a mile on our trip with Monster asked "Are we there yet? Or not quite yet?"

Monkey screamed the first hour and a half of our trip.

We asked Monster what we wanted to do the first night (we stayed on the coast in CA), and he said "See fish and the ocean". We never made it to the beach that first night, but we did see ocean on the drive, and we found a cute little aquarium in Cresent City, CA. We got to pet sharks, see an array of fish, and watch some seals and sea lions do tricks for us. Monster is obsessed with a certain children's pirate show and mis-names a couple pirate items. We drove past giant anchors next to the aquarium and he shouts "WOW! Look at all those hookers!"

The only way to get Monkey to sleep in the car (he hated the driving, by the way), was to sing. The first day out I ran out of new songs and asked Daddy-Cakes what to sing next. He broke out "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall". On average it took about twenty beers and Monkey would be out.

At some point during the trip the conversation of how babies are made came up and Monster instilled this knowledge in us: "Maybe you put food in your mouth and then you have a baby sister!"

Monster was eating pretzels in the back seat and giggling to himself "*giggle giggle* boobies *giggle giggle*" I asked what he said and he shouted "IT LOOKS LIKE BOOBIES!" Yeah pretzel fun...