Santa Claus Giveth…

…and Santa Claus taketh away.

We’ve been telling the kids that Santa Claus will be coming soon. And he’s going to take away their binkies (because they’re big girls and don’t need them any more) and give them to the little babies at daycare who DO need them.

As soon as you mention Santa now, if Sam has a binkie, she’ll pull it out and hand it to someone and say, “All done.”

For the most part, they’re down to just using the binkies when they’re in bed.  They also get them when they’re sick, and since they were both sick over Thanksgiving weekend, they’ve had them a bit more over the last few days than they usually do.

So, every so often, while we’re hanging out, Sammie will out of the blue say, “Santa Claus coming.”

“Yes, Sam, Santa Claus is coming soon.”

“Binkies away.”

“Yes, Sam, he’s going to take the binkies away and give them to the little babies and bring you presents.”

The other night as I was sitting around thinking about that, it occurred to me that they really don’t understand abstractions as well as adults.  And that we’re unlikely to find a real Santa Claus that will come over and accept a handful of binkies.  And that it would be really difficult to explain to the Mall Santa why our kids just handed him a dozen binkies.

So, if anyone has a good solution for getting two-year-olds to believe that Santa really came and took their binkies to unfortunate babies who couldn’t afford their own binkies, please let me know.

And the kids aren’t as gullible as one might think.  We’ve been putting THUM on their binkies during the day.  It’s a cayenne pepper extract and it’s nasty! Sam wants nothing to do with daytime binkies and her favorite refrain these days is “binkie ucky!” (She even was singing a song about it one day) Jessie just makes a face, pulls the binkie out, gives it a dirty look, and pops it back in her mouth.  Kid’s got an asbestos tongue, I swear.

The other day Jessie was sitting on the kitchen counter, and she absent-mindedly picked up the bottle of Thum.  She looked at it and said, “Binky yucky” – this in spite of the fact that we’ve done everything possible to disguise the fact that Matt & I are putting something onto the binkie before we give it to them.  She’s a pretty sharp little kid.

So, anyone got a connection to Santa that we could use?

Treehuggers

Tree’s up!

We haven’t had a tree up and decorated since 2005.  In 2006 we had a very crazy little kitten who threatened to undecorate it for us, so we set up the tree but didn’t decorate it.  2007 we had two little infants who wanted bottles every couple of hours.  They pooped a lot, too.  We decided a tree was a luxury we could do without that year.  Last year the kids were newly mobile. We set the tree up, but never put the decorations on because we didn’t think they’d stay on very long.

On Sunday we put the tree up during the kids’ naptime. It’s a pre-lit humongo very-real-looking fake tree.  They came down from their nap and were just thrilled. Sammie did a little singing and jumped up and down, she was so excited. She also aimed kisses at it.  Jessie gave it a great big hug.   We decorated it after they went to bed that night, and they were even just as excited to see it with cool, breakable balls on it the next morning.

We had planned to put it up Thanksgiving night, but Jessie and Matt spent the night in the ER. She had croup and by the middle of the night was having breathing problems.  She was finally looking much better this morning when she got up.

Manners

We’ve been diligent about teaching the kids to say “please” and “thank you.”  Daycare is pretty strict about that, too.  As a result, the kids are developing great little manners and say “thank you” every time someone hands them something.

And we’ve been working harder on “you’re welcome” now that they’ve got the “please” and “thank you” part down. Perhaps a little too hard.  Jessie has now decided to just skip all the extra nonsense, and when someone gives her something, she very sincerely says, “I welcome.”

Makes sense if you’re two.

In the “be careful what you ask for” category-

Someone brought on the holidays.

Jessie woke up Thanksgiving morning with a slightly croupy cough.  We debated back and forth, but she was feeling pretty good, so we went to Toledo. She was fine while we were there.  Sfter we left she got worse, and in the middle of the night she couldn’t breath, so Matt took her in to the ER. They got home sometime before 6 the next morning.  Great start to the holiday season.

She’s doing better. Her voice comes and goes and she has a nasty cough, but her breathing has been pretty good since she got home from the ER.  She has periods of great crabbiness and then gets these spurts of energy and runs around like an idiot.  And then she starts coughing. But trying to get her to settle down and just sit is futile.

We were going to put the Christmas tree up on Friday, but since none of us had much sleep the night before, that didn’t happen.  Matt had to work this afternoon and the kids wouldn’t settle down for a nap, so I’m too worn out to do it tonight.  Maybe tomorrow.  Or at least just sometime before Christmas.

Bring on the Holiday Season!

This’ll be the first year we really do Christmas for the kids.  It’s their third Christmas, but the first one they just drooled through and last year they were old enough to reach the tree and just young enough to undecorate it, so we put up the tree (pre-lit) but never decorated it.  This year they understand, “No! Do not touch that ornament or I’ll put you in Time Out until you’re 30!!!!” Of couse, that doesn’t mean they’ll listen to us, but at least they’ll be aware that they probably shouldn’t be chasing one of the cats up the tree.  Fortunately, they’re also too young to be able to count how many presents they’re getting, because it won’t be a whole lot.  They have plenty of stuff already to play with and they spend most of their days at daycare – we couldn’t possibly hope to compete with the fun and activity level of daycare.

Sister Marci gave us a bunch of her kids’ outgrown toys when the kids arrived.  We’ve been taking them out of the basement every-so-often and giving them to the kids (the toys are in the basement, not the kids, just in case that wasn’t totally clear).  One of the items was a Bob the Builder doll with a jackhammer.  He talks when you push the button on the jackhammer.  He’s been renamed Bruce, after Bruce the guy who fixed our house so we could put it on the market.  Jessie’s big expression for the last month has been “Bruce fix.”  When Bob first said something, it was, “Can we fix it? Yes we can!”  To go with Bruce the Fixer Matt picked up a cheap Bob the Builder dvd at the grocery store the other night.  The kids got a big kick out of watching it and saying “Bruce!”  I expect that the real Bruce would be pretty happy about that.  (And if anyone in Lansing needs the phone number of a really good fix-it guy, email me.  This guy is fabulous!)

The realtor was over on Friday.  The numbers he came back with were pretty much what we expected. As Sister Marci said, we’ll lose our shirts, we’ll just be happy if we don’t also lose our pants when we sell it.  We’ll be listing it right after the new year.  If you know anyone looking for three bedrooms within walking distance of downtown Lansing, have them give us a call.

I Suppose It Was Inevitable…

nevertheless, it was painful.

We went grocery shopping Sunday morning.  The kids have discovered the “horsey” at Meijers.  They have a mechanical horse that the kids can ride for a penny.  It’s great for getting the kids to behave at the store, because only good girls get to ride the horsey.

Anyway, Matt was paying for the groceries and I was supervising the horse rides.  The horse is located right at the end of one of the self-check-out lanes.  The guy who was buying a bunch of stuff at that lane walked around the horse to get to the bagging area so he could stick his stuff into his cart.  He looked familiar.  It was the guy who ran the snack shop in at work for the past year or so. A week ago they took over the snack shop at the Capitol.  I asked him how the new place was going.  It was going well.  His wife, who was paying, looked up and said hi.

And then it happened.  THE question.

“Are those your grandkids?”

Ouch.

No amount of “Your kids are adorable!” can make up for “you look like an old hag.”

To make it worse, about a week earlier I had met Matt at the downtown Chinese place for lunch.  They’ve got a really good buffet.  Turns out he was a regular there and the older lady who rang us out was quite fond of him and was chatting him up as he was paying.

She should have stopped before she asked, “Is that your mom?”

I’m not sure if I need more sleep or if I need a good makeover.

The Land of Nod

Sammie has inherited my sister Marci’s sleep gene.  When she gets tired, she just loses the ability to function and needs to go to bed. Immediately.

Last night Matt had to work until 9pm, so I had to pick the kids up alone from daycare.  They’re used to that because quite often he’ll work until 6pm and if it is raining outside, we’ll swing by the library and pick him up, tossing his bike in the back of the van.

Sammie is now Daddy’s Girl. She wants nothing to do with me. I can’t dress her, change her, put her in the car, get her out of the car, sit next to her…nothing.  It has to be Daddy. (no hurt feelings here…) She was ok with Daddy having to work last night and most of the way home kept saying, “Daddy. Work.”  Right up until we got to the intersection just before our house.  To pick Matt up, we have to swing past our house and then down the street another mile to the library.  Sam noticed I was slowing down and went into full panic mode.  “Daddy up. Daddy. UP!  DADDY UP!!!!!!”  Translated, that means, “We need to go pick Daddy up.”

I explained that we couldn’t because Daddy had to work late, until after she went to bed. But he’d be here in the morning to get her dressed.

That made her very sad.  She was ok, though, until I got into the house and hung the keys up.  Then she lost it.  She just laid down on the floor and wailed. Bawled.  Big tears.  Finally I just had to ignore her and get Jessie into her booster seat and started on supper before they both lost it.  Sam ended up making it into the dining room, but then when I tried to get her into her chair, she lost it again and crawled under the dining room table to cry. Wail.  She may even have gnashed her teeth a bit.

I threatened her with a time out.  She cried harder. Jessie noted, with great seriousness, that “Sammie [needs a] time out!”  By the time I could pick her up and drag her out from under the table, she was just a puddle of sad kid.  I took her into the dark living room and held her until she calmed down a little.  By then Jessie was asking for more orange slices and threatening to mutiny.  So, Sammie and I got Jessie some more oranges and I scooped them both out some Hamburger Helper (homemade and with ground turkey – it was a culinary disaster).  Sammie waved her hand at it and said “no supper” but I brought it with us just in case she changed her mind.  Eventually she ate her oranges, but neither one of them wanted the turkey/noodle/tomato sauce concoction.

She sat on my lap eating, and crying. Every-so-often, she’d wipe her eyes, take a deep breath, and say, “All done crying,” and turn around and eat a little.  Then she’d start sobbing again.  And try sooooooo hard to stop.  And eventually say, “Awww done crwying.” and we’d wipe her little nose.

After supper, we went to watch Sesame Street. She was ok for a while, but when Elmo went to bed with a lullaby, she just started to cry again.  Asked me to turn off Elmo.  I got her and Jessie some cheerios because they hadn’t had much for supper, and Sam ate a small handful then started to cry.  She said she had to go “ni-ni” and so I left Jessie downstairs with her Cheerios, carted Sam upstairs, changed her diaper, threw on her jammies (all the while she was just bawling so hard she was almost screaming) and tucked her into bed.

Then back down for Jessie.  Diaper. Jammies. Brushed her teeth.  And she went right into bed.  I think Sam was sound asleep by then.  Poor little thing. She just loses it when she’s tired.  And not too many kids ask to go to bed (early, even!).  But it’s great to see her getting older and trying to calm herself down, and trying to be so good, saying, “All done crying. Nose, please.”

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like

One of the things we did this weekend with the kids was take them to Menards to look at the Christmas trees. They have their artificial trees set up inside with all kinds of landscaping and decorations. Last year we took them through in the stroller to kill some time one weekend. This year they were free-roaming offspring.  On foot. Running.

They loved it.  They wanted to touch everything and ran through the display I don’t know how many times before we finally left. Somewhere in the center of it all, they had a music system set up playing Christmas music.  Every time they’d run through that section, they’d both stop dead in their tracks and start to dance.  It was way too cute.

And all the way there, as we were telling them that we were going to see the Christmas trees, they kept saying, “Trick or Treat!”

Staying on Track

We’ve done it – we called the realtor on Monday and we have an appointment with him on Friday afternoon.  Hopefully he’ll tell us we might be able to sell the house for enough money that we can afford to sell it.  Keep your fingers crossed!

Matt took the kids for most of the weekend, leaving me home (alone!) to get the rest of the painting and cleaning done. We’ve only got a few little things to touch up here and there, and Matt needs to do some more organizing in the basement, but otherwise, we’ve done a heck of a lot of work in the last month or so.  It looks like a totally different place.  Those of you who have been here probably wouldn’t recognize it.

On the bright side, I got a 1% raise starting October 1.  That should make the bills a little easier to pay.  Or not.  It worked out to about $4.00 per pay period (every two weeks) extra in take home pay. Absolutely every little deduction went up, especially the health insurance.  That pretty much ate up the entire raise.  So, what it works out to is that Matt & I can each afford to get a candy bar in the checkout line at the grocery store every week.  But none for the kids.

Spring Cleaning (a little late)

Almost there!

We’ve been painting and cleaning and cleaning and painting. We’re almost done.  Matt & I have each taken some time off over the past week to get some painting done. We’ve had the handyman back this past week to fix the stucco on the back of the house (and we’ve come up with a whole list of projects to bring him back for if we don’t sell the house before next summer).

Today Matt took the kids all day and I stayed home and cleaned.  The upstairs is almost done – I ran out of steam up there before I finished the vacuuming and I still need to wash the bathroom floor. Otherwise, the second floor is all set.  It’s scary how much emptier it is up there – and how much cleaner.

Tomorrow I’ll finish up the floors up there and then work on the dining room and kitchen. The dining room just needs a little touchup paint around the new thermostat and the china hutch needs to be straightened.  The kitchen is a disaster area.  I need to go through the cupboards (the few that we have) and pack up everything that we don’t use on a regular basis.  And get rid of the crap that is sitting around everywhere.  And wash the floor.  And we need to replace the piece of carpeting in the breakfast nook. That was meant to be temporary when the guys we bought the house from still lived here.  All these years later, it’s still there and looks really, really bad.  I’d put some peel-and-stick tiles down in there, but there’s so much glue from the previous flooring that it would take forever to get the floor clean enough to put anything down.  We’ll probably see if we can find a carpet remnant somewhere.  I’m sure whoever buys the house will want to re-do the kitchen and they might as well be the ones to figure out what kind of floor they’d like.

In anticipation of the house actually selling, I’ve been looking at rentals in East Lansing.  That’s just depressing. There isn’t much available, unless no one there advertises.  The cheaper places are pretty far north of where we’d like to be.  We’re not planning to get a second car after we move (ok, it would be more accurate to say that we’d get a second car again over my dead body!), so wherever we move has to be bikable.  We’ve got it figured out, how we’ll get everything accomplished with just one car. We’d like to keep the kids at the daycare that they’re currently at – it’s close to work and they really like it there.  Plus, it’s really diverse.  Anyway, one of us will bike to work, the other one will take the van in with a bike on the back, drop the kids off, then park the van at Matt’s library (he gets free parking, I’d have to pay), take their bike off the van and go to work. After work the first parent would pick up the van, stick their bike on the back, and go pick up the kids.  The other parent would need to bike home.  We could just all carpool, except that Matt & I have different schedules.  Plus, then we wouldn’t get to bike.  ;o)  Right now, any time we need to take the bikes somewhere, like the bike store, we stick them inside the minivan. It’s a real pain in the patootie, trying to lift them in, tip them just so, maneuver them past the back seat, wedge them in between the kids’ seats so the bike doesn’t tip over, and get them in far enough to close the back hatch. We’re planning to get ourselves a bike rack for Christmas.

I don’t think the house has been this clean since before I got knocked up pregnant.  It’s kinda scary.  Even if it doesn’t sell for a few years while, it’s really nice to have it clean again.  I can’t wait to see what it’ll be like trying to keep it clean with two messy two-year-olds.  And two very furry cats. It scares the daylights out of me to think about trying to sell it and move to an apartment, but at the same time it’ll be really nice not to have to worry about paying the bills every month.  And we made our own self-imposed deadline. We plan to call the realtor Monday. Sure, it would probably make more sense to wait until after the holidays to put it on the market, but I don’t think we could wait that long to find out if he thinks we could sell it for what we need to sell it to avoid losing our shirts. No, actually, we expect to lose our shirts on this; we just hope not to lose everything else we’re wearing as well.  It would be really depressing if we just went through all this work to find out that we can’t even afford to sell it.

Cross your fingers for us!

Ch-ch-ch-changes

We’ve been putting in a lot of work on the house.  Matt & I took two days off last week to clean and get some work done. I think we got rid of half the stuff in the basement, most of the stuff in the upstairs “den” (I’ve never been sure what to call that little room on the back. Library sounds too pretentious, but it’s where we kept our books and the computer).  We brought several loads of stuff to Goodwill, took three bookcases to the pawn shop, and got rid of a whole bunch of garbage bags of stuff.  And we still have a lot to do.

We also had a handyman come over and fix a bunch of stuff. The floor in the entry closet had some water damage, there was a hole in a bedroom ceiling from before we got a new roof a couple years ago that I’d been avoiding fixing, and there was the hole in the bathroom wall from the plumbing issue that had also become the hole in the bedroom wall on the other side.  While he was here, we asked him to fix the living room ceiling. Our house has a lot of decorative plaster and the living room ceiling (right under the upstairs bathroom) had suffered some damage two owners ago.  Someone had fixed it in the meantime, but it wasn’t looking very good, so we had our “guy” fix it again.  He didn’t replace the decorative pieces, but we did get him to do a whole lot of repair to the flat surface, plus he painted the whole thing when he was done. It looks soooooo much better.

We’re almost ready to call the realtor. The dining room and kitchen need some cleaning, I need to paint some of the wall patches upstairs, the front entry needs to be painted, there’s a little painting outside, and we have to do something to the half-bath where we took out the wallpaper a few years ago, intending to redo the whole bathroom before the kids came, and then ran out of both time and money.  We hope to have everything done or almost done by 11/15.  It’s a stupid time to put the house on the market, right before the holidays, but if we wait, the house’ll just get messy again.  This gives us some motivation to keep cleaning and purging.

I’ve got the afternoon off today to get some painting done and then go to the kids’ daycare Halloween party.  The painting may or may not get done. I’m exhausted.  Jessie was sick last week (the doc thought it was h1n1, but since they aren’t testing anymore, we don’t know) and Sam spent a few nights sleeping poorly (meaning the adults also slept poorly) and now I’ve come down with something and feel crappy.  The kids are doing much better, but they were a little crabby this morning when we brought them to daycare.  Hopefully they won’t get sick again before tomorrow night.  Maybe I’ll just go through some stuff in drawers and decide what to keep and what to toss rather than paint.  I can do the sorting and tossing sitting down. Or, a nap on the couch sounds really good, but I’ll feel guilty, knowing how much needs to be done on the house yet.

There are quite a few changes going on at work, too. We’ll be hiring two new people soon.  The Dept of Energy has a lot of stimulus funding for weatherization and we’ll need to review those projects – they could be almost as many projects a year for three years as we normally review already.  It’s been pretty stressful lately, not knowing if we’d get the funding for extra staff, or if we’d get stuck doing all those reviews with the already-overworked staff we have.  Now we’re scrambling to figure out where to put the new people, and who will be doing what, and all that.  Plus, it looks like we might be hiring a couple of other people in the office (although not as fast as people to review the weatherization projects). After all the moving we’ve been doing at work for the last two years, it looks like we’ll do it again soon to reconfigure our whole office space.  That’s a good thing, but some days it feels like our hamster wheel is spinning way too fast. And some of the new projects are already coming in, so we’re swamped already.

Cute kid story for the day:

When I picked the kids up at daycare yesterday (they were the last ones left), the daycare person came over with a plate of freshly-baked cookies.  The kids had made cookies and they’d baked them up in the kitchen.  She let Jess and Sam each pick one (so much for eating supper right when we got home) and I got one. Jess got a cat-shaped one and promptly started devouring it. Sam got a bat-shaped cut-out cookies.  I told her it was a bat and she carried it all over on her way out of the building, showing everyone that she had a bat.  She pestered the heck out of the daycare owner’s mom, trying to get her attention and show her the bat.  When we got to the outside stairs, Sam had her hands full with the cookie, so I picked her up and set her down at the bottom of the steps (she’s not quite there with the balance yet for going down stairs without holding someone’s hand) She took two steps and fell down. Broke her bat in two.  Oh, the tears, the grief.  She just wailed. She was so proud of her little bat, and just like that it was gone. She was the picture definition of “bereft.”  I tried to comfort her as best I could. Finally I told her it would still taste yummy.  She calmed down and ate the bat halves on the way home. I was quite relieved because the way she was distraught initially, I though we’d be dealing with bat fallout for the next week or two.

Enough stalling. Off to clean the house (I decided it was too dark and rainy to see what I was doing to paint).

Messie Jessie

Jessie lives life to the fullest, consequences be damned.  Everything is a big laugh to her (getting into the car after daycare involves a chase around the building, getting into bed involves multiple laps around and under her bed.) She eats with gusto. She’s probably more coordinated with hand/spoon/fork action than I am, but she still ends up with food all over the table, her clothes, her face, and her hair.   She’s a little like Charlie Brown’s bud, Pigpen.

The kids’ daycare is right next to the former GM assembly plant.  GM abandoned the plant shortly after we moved into the neighborhood and began disassembling it a couple of years ago.  They made great progress in getting the building down, crushing the materials, separating the various components apart into separate piles and recycling most of it. Then came this little thing….um, bankruptcy.  The machinery just sort of drifted away and the site sits there with massive mountains of crushed asphalt.  We go right past it on the way to and from daycare.

One of the kids’ earliest words was “mess.”  They’ve come to apply it to just about everything that is disorderly.  Given the amount of stimulus-funded road work going on in Lansing, we hear it a lot from the back seat of the van whenever we run errands.  We’ll come up to the inevitable orange barrels and torn up streets and the kids, in unison, will exclaim, “Mess. Big mess.”

They also mention that as we go past the old GM remains.  The last two days Sam has said, “Mess.  Jessie mess.”  Upon further questioning, it’s become clear that the little neat-and-tidy one blames her sister for the state of the property adjacent to daycare, not the global economic crisis.

Wow. I hate to think what Jessie will be capable of destroying when she’s a little older.

Making Progress

Matt had the morning off today and I had the whole day off. We spent our time cleaning out the house – packing up stuff, sorting through to see what could go to daycare for sale at one of their monthly sales, figuring out what could go to Goodwill (a LOT!), and generally seeing how much of the crap we’ve accumulated could be given away, sold, or thrown out.  We’re digging deep on this move – I’m even getting rid of the beer steins that I’ve had since the trip to Germany in ‘85.  If we end up selling the house and not being able to find a rental house with a basement and/or garage, I want to be prepared.  It’s not easy getting rid of almost 40 years worth of stuff. (We’re both taking two days off next week to continue cleaning and packing and fixing. We’ll also be carting furniture off to Dicker and Deal)

One of the projects for this morning was to install the programmable thermostat I’d bought back sometime in August. I’ve been afraid to install it.  The instructions were pretty easy and it almost came out and said that any idiot could install it in 15 minutes. I knew that if I tried to do it, something would go wrong and it would end up taking all day. So, while I was tempted to install it when I got home from work some evening, I resisted. Good thing.

The instructions expected one to find about 4 colored and coded wires coming out of the wall.  It told you exactly where each wire had to go, depending on the letters on the wiring.  I got our old round thermostat off and …. there were two copper wires coming out of the wall covered in cloth.  The instructions said nothing about that.

Three calls later and we found a heating company that could come out today rather than later next week (which was good, because the old thermostat was in so many pieces there was no way I could put it back onto the wall).  Took the guy about half an hour to hook up the new one.  Now we don’t have to worry about forgetting to turn down the thermostat before we go to bed (I hate running back downstairs for that!) and it will get up to a normal temperature BEFORE we haul our lazy butts out of bed in the morning.  Life is good. Although we might have spent as much paying the guy to install the thermostat as we were supposed to save in heating bills this winter.

The kids are talking up a storm.  Every day they get a bit clearer and can put more words together. It’s really wild to watch them develop more language skills and be able to suddenly tell us what they want, instead of just sitting there grunting until we figured it out.  This morning Jessie made it clear that she wanted to wear the shirt with the dinosaur rather than the football shirt I’d picked out for her.  It’s her favorite shirt, and she and Sam both roar like dinosaurs when they see it.

Tuesday Mom called while we were on our way out for pizza.  Towards the end of the call, I put mom on speaker phone and held the phone up towards the kids in the back seat so she could say hi to them.  What did the kids say as soon as they saw the phone?  “Hi, Nan?”  Nope.  They said, “CHEESE!!!!!”   I think the ladies at daycare must take a lot of pictures using their phones.  A couple of little hams.

Good news – they still fit into last year’s winter coats!  One less thing to buy this year.  Hopefully the snowpants will fit, but I almost think those might still be too big.  The coats and pants are size 18 months.  The kids are two.  They’re very shrimpy. I’m not complaining, because they’re also still fitting into all of their pants from last winter, too.

Work’s still crazy. It’s even gotten busier in the last week, although that just doesn’t seem possible.  A couple of state agencies that got some federal funding found out that their projects would need to be reviewed by our office. The number of projects they’re planning to do in each of the next three years is far more projects than we review from ALL the federal agencies on an annual basis.  Job security.  And maybe a new co-worker or two.  It’s just insane how busy we’ve been lately.  Plus, the transfer to the new department took place 10/1 and that’s made things pretty crazy, too.  You wouldn’t think it would be that big of a deal – change the letterhead and move on.  But it created a whole new layer of bureaucratic paperwork.  Just opening the mail has become a nightmare because of all the new restrictions. On the bright side, it has been bringing some good things, too – mostly an inflow of funding so that we can actually do the jobs we’re being paid to do and have been trying to do without decent equipment.

Work’s busy, the kids are getting more and more busy, and then we’re trying to get the house ready to sell.  I suspect the blog posts will become even more rare as I try to maintain some semblance of sanity. Plus, once the house is listed, we’ll be spending every free minute dusting, picking up toys, and trying to keep the cat fur off the floors and furniture.  What kind of idiots try to sell a house with two two year olds?????

Ta-Da!!

Big breakthrough tonight.  Both kids put clothes on All By Themselves tonight.

It started with Sammie and socks.  The kids take their shoes off after supper if they’re sitting on the couch.  For some reason they have it in their head that if their shoes come off then their sock must also come off.  No amount of arguing dissuades them from the firm conviction that that’s how the world works, so for now we’ve given up. At some point between supper and bedtime Sammie sat down with her socks and put one on.  They’ve been wanting to do that for ages, but just could never coordinate the hands, feet, and a floppy sock all at the same time.  And then, Poof! Sam managed to put two socks on with almost no effort at all.

Jessie tried to do it, too, but just couldn’t get her foot into the sock hole.  She’s easily frustrated if something doesn’t work by the second or third try, and then she just loses it.  I went over to show her how it worked, and in demonstrating convinced her that she’d just put her socks on. It was a bit of cheating, but got her past the meltdown stage.

Then she spied her jammies.  And tried to put the bottoms on over her pants.

For fire-retardation purposes, most kids’ pajamas are very tight things.  Her jeans are very big.  Putting the tiny, skinny pj bottoms on over the jeans just did not go well. So, I suggested she take her pants off. She did.  Then she proceeded to put both legs into one leg of her jammie bottoms. And I went back over to demonstrate the one-leg-per-leghole technique that most of us use.  Then she moved on to the tops.  And promptly put the top on upside down. Makes sense from a toddler perspective – if your head goes through the neckhole, then you should of course start by sticking your head into the neckhole, not the hole where your belly is.  A bit of advice later (and some hands on help) and she had her head in.  Then she stuck her right arm over the top through the neck hole and into the sleeve.  And the left arm went up under the shirt and through the left sleeve.  One side (left) was on just fine, the other side was, well, just not “right.”  Some more talking and showing, and the next thing she knew, she had her pjs on.  And then off again. And on again. And off. And on. And so on.

Sam also managed to get her pajamas on with some advice, assistance, and just a wee parental cheating.

More or less, the kids can now get some of their own clothes on.

A fabulous thing on one hand, because soon we’ll be able to hand them their clothes and tell them to get dressed while we do other useful things.  A not-so-fabulous thing, since I’m sure that will slow down our finely-tuned morning routine which allows us to get out of the house and to daycare less than 45 minutes after I get out of bed.

And, bad news: Matt got the stomach bug that Sam and I had earlier in the week.  Poor guy had a rather miserable day. Hopefully he’ll be feeling somewhat better tomorrow.

About the Kids…

Man, are they growing up fast.  We used to see big changes every 4-6 weeks, when they’re reach a new stage. Now it seems like they can do something new every week.

Like tonight.  Sammy was playing with a thermometer, sticking it under her arm and pretending to take her temperature (daycare sent her home early because she wasn’t feeling well. Turns out she had gas and a couple of {big, wicked} farts later she was fine) under her armpit. Cute as all get out, most of the time she’d just get it stuck in her belly button. Anyway, Matt went to pick up Jessie at the usual time and I stayed home with Sam. I saw the thermometer and realized there would soon be one thermometer and two little people. That’s always a recipe for disaster.  So, I calmly explained to Sam that we should put it away before Jessie got home because Jess would want one to play with and then she’d cry because we didn’t have one for her.  Sam refused to put it away.  Then suddenly, she said, “All done. Jessie.”  Jessie got home about 10 minutes later and Sam went running to the door then thrust the thermometer at Jessie.  I wasn’t sure whether to be more impressed at her ability to follow my discussion about putting it away and Jessie not having one, or by the fact that she gave her favorite little “toy” to Jessie when she came home.

Sam’s big thing lately is to spread her arms out wide and say, “Huck!”  meaning she would like to hand out a hug to you.  She’s a great little hugger.

Jessie has Uncle Marv in her. Really.  She doesn’t take anything seriously.  It’s fun, fun, fun and giggles all day long. Diaper changes you have to catch her to change her. Then hold her giggling, wiggling little self down to change her. She refuses to settle down to go to bed…there’s too much horsing around to do. She doesn’t walk anywhere when she can just as easily get there by running or jumping.  She’s a fabulous jumper.

They both repeat absolutely everything that comes out of our mouths. Especially the last word we say.  The conversations when we drive around in the car can be rather comical when the last word out of Matt or my mouth is repeated in stereo from the back seat like we have backup singers.

No pictures yet, sorry. The dvd drive on my computer is still broken.  Still no photo software.  Trust me, though, they’re still cuties.  We’ll try to have something working by Halloween for those pics.