Portrait of a boy at 5

We like to joke that we can plant a tree on that lip up there.  This was just a fake pout, but he does have a pretty good real one, too.

Happily, he’s much more likely to smile.  What lovely spacing on your teeth, Sim!  The dentist agrees. 

How, though, how on earth did he get to be five?  This happened last month, and I think I haven’t realized it yet.  Hannah’s excited that he’s half her age.  On his birthday, we spent some time looking at Baby Sim pictures. 

He was a cute baby, and completely placid.  He almost never cried.  In fact, he cried far more when he reached terrible twos than when he was an infant.  He is still a pretty cheerful kid most of the time.  His babyhood seems both like it was just yesterday and like it was ages and ages ago.

Building stuff is really awesome in Sim’s book.  He loves Legos.  He doesn’t love to pick them up, though.  In fact, when I ask him to pick up his Legos, his invariable answer is, “By MYSELF?!?”  He doesn’t see the logic in my answer that he got them out himself, so he should pick them up himself.

One of his birthday gifts was delivered on an evening after dinner.  It was a Lego set.  We told him he could build it the next day.  Sim usually sleeps until 6:30 or 7.  At 5 a.m. the next day, he popped up, turned on the light (thus waking Naomi, who also usually sleeps until 6:30 or 7) and began working on his new Lego set.  By the time Michael got up at 5:45 and saw that they were up, it was a bit too late to make them go back to bed…that was something of a rough morning, but he fell asleep in the car on errands in the middle of the day and so had an easier afternoon.

His interest in creating stuff extends to the kitchen.  Whenever Michael or I mention that we’re going to be cooking, Simeon immediately asks, “Can I be your sous chef?”  He can actually be quite helpful, and since I have seen the fruits of letting kids “help” in the kitchen (Hannah and Naomi are great in the kitchen), I’m usually happy to let him be my sous chef.  Sometimes the sous chef seems to take more tastes of certain dishes than is absolutely necessary…

Simeon has two very HELPFUL older sisters.  I often have to encourage them to let him do things himself.  “But, Mom, it’s faster if I do it.”  This is generally true, but doesn’t let Sim learn the skill, right?

Over the summer, Sim decided he was old enough to take his turn in the dishwasher-emptying rotation.  He was right – he can certainly empty the dishwasher.  Now that he’s in the rotation, though, he’s somewhat ambivalent about it.   

That tongue!  His tongue is out a lot of the time.  Unfortunately, when the heat is running a lot, it means he gets chapped lips, so I spend a lot of the day saying, “Tongue in, Sim.”

He’s learning to swim these days, which involves getting his ears wet.  He does not like getting his ears wet, but I think it helps that his class is 3 boys (including him) with a male teacher.  (Sim spends a lot of time around girls.)  At the beginning of this session of lessons, he mostly just clung to the wall (in the 2-foot section) and tried to keep from getting splashed.  6 weeks later, he’s putting his face in and blowing bubbles, jumping in by himself, and exchanging splashes with his fellow swimmers.

He’s learning to read.  He’s the only one of my kids so far to appreciate the humor in the stories in the phonics book without me having to point out that it’s a funny story. And he’s teaching himself to write.  He likes to write stories using the words that he’s recently learned in phonics.  For right now, there are lots of stories about cats, because that’s pretty straightforward to spell.  Sometimes he throws math in there, too:  1 CAT  2 CATS  3 CATS, etc.

Despite the fact that sometimes he feels like the lone boy in a world of girls – or at least a house of girls – Sim loves his sisters.  And they all love him.  He loves to be the first one to run up and greet Tess when she wakes up.  He loves to hang out and listen to stories on CD in Hannah’s room.  He and Naomi love to build elaborate forts or houses together with furniture, pillows, and blankets.  They don’t love to clean them up, though.  Strange.

 

He still loves to ride his bike.  He recently learned to pop a wheelie.  I don’t know where he learned this, and I could certainly have done without it.  His wheelies, at this point, are about 1 inch off the ground, but the time he decided to try one on the sidewalk (with gravel on it) right next to a busy street and fell…We had a discussion about how we do NOT pop wheelies anywhere but our driveway for right now.  And we also discussed the dangers of gravel on sidewalks for biking.  I find myself relying on the protection of Sim’s guardian angel a LOT. 

One of the things Sim is teaching me is how to let the reins slip through my fingers – maintaining just enough to help while giving him some freedom.

 

Five.  It promises to be another exciting year.

Head scarf on a ham

 

  

                                            

Tess the Unstoppable

Teresa turned 2 in August, and I didn’t have a celebratory post for her.  Not that we didn’t celebrate.  We did, of course, and there’s a lot about Tess to celebrate, I just didn’t document it here.  But there are so many Tessisms that I want to be sure to record that I need to do a post now. 

Tess has always loved music.  She can sing the tunes to a whole bunch of songs now – and she’s getting to the point that she can sing the words to a lot of them, too.  She also makes requests, and since Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah is one of her favorites, we frequently hear her asking, “Sing Hallelujah Doris?”  That one’s a bit trickier than Happy Birthday, but some of us can do some of the parts.

One of Tess’s favorite new pastimes is playing the songs from the playlist on Michael’s electric keyboard.  This is somewhat old, so the selection is interesting.  There’s a very jazzy Swan Lake that has quickly become a favorite, and there are many schmaltzy 80s songs that she likes.  DJ Tess is in the house.

Tess has been experimenting with not napping on some days.  These are not my favorite days, but I must admit that she’s getting to the age when my other kids also quit their naps.  I’m not interested in giving up my nap, though, so I think we’ll need to reach a compromise…

Tess has many people who like to talk to her, and as a consequence, she talks a lot, and can say multisyllable words without trouble.  The other day I noticed that she had something of Hannah’s, so I asked her, “What are you doing, Tess?”  She looked up and said, “Lookin’ at Hannah’s vocabulary notebook!”  It was very clear and really cute.  She also has any number of useful phrases, like, “What’s happening, Mama?” or, “What you doing, Mama?” and, “What’s wrong?”  Sometimes when I ask her a yes or no question and she wants to answer yes, she’ll say, “Of course!”

Tess has adopted Naomi’s doll (with Naomi’s blessing), St. Rose of Lima – she of eyepatch fame.  St. Rose of Lima no longer sports the eyepatch, but Tess doesn’t seem to mind that, when she closes her eyes, the right eye rolls to reveal a socket with some inner doll eye workings.  Also, Tess is not a doll name purist, unlike Naomi, and has given the doll the nickname Lima.  She carries Lima with her pretty much everywhere.  I finally designated a basket in the dining room as the basket where Lima sleeps during meals because she was in grave danger of getting extremely dirty with Tess’s food.  And you can’t just set Lima down on the FLOOR!  Good grief!  What a suggestion!  You can see Lima in the first picture of this post, and you can see she’s being clutched in the photo below.  No need to set babies down for piano playing.

 

Lima, now on her second young mother, is definitely a bit worse for the wear.  She’s got the eye problem still – now without a patch – and her once-white undergarments are now a medium grey.  Tess objects strongly to Lima wearing clothes for longer than 30 seconds or so.  Despite piles of potential doll clothes, Lima travels about in her grubby undergarments. 

[No lack of dolls for this baby.  The fact that she chooses to drag around the oldest and most beaten up makes it look like she has no options, but this isn’t even all the babies she could choose from.]

Lima’s plastic parts are also pretty dirty.  Tess doesn’t worry about this at all.  What she does worry about is Lima’s whereabouts -- “Where Lima go?” is a frequent (and dreaded, if we don’t know the answer!) question here.  We went on a daytrip without Lima one time, and the number of times we had to sing Happy Birthday in order to distract Tess from her absence was a large one.  

More phrases Tess knows now:  “I don’t want it.”  “YOU get it for me.”  When Michael got home one day recently, he asked her how her day was.  She thought for a moment, then replied, “It was good.”  She’s also taken to asking him how his day is.  Okay, that’s really incredibly darling.

When asked how old she is, she either admits to being two, or says, “I’m ten.”  Yeah.  Small for your age, aren’t you?  She also says things like, “I’m not a baby, I’m Tessie!” 

More with Lima.  You can see her lovely undergarments.

 

Do you see the top of Lima’s head?

Tess is the boss of her siblings.  They can’t seem to stand up to her toddler persistence.  They can’t take it when she cries.

 

They are spoiling her rotten. They got used to Tess the Inexorable before she could really understand, and they’re still working within that framework.

I have to coach them to talk to her, since now she can understand almost everything that’s happening.   Here’s my line: “Instead of screaming MOM GET TESS SHE’S GOING TO GET MY PENMANSHIP,

you say to Tess, ‘No thanks, Tess, please don’t touch that.’”  I know, it sounds crazy – she’s two! – but it actually works most of the time. 

I did tell you that Lima goes everywhere with us, right?

It is really, really, amazingly cute to see her growing up, though.  Despite her sometimes destructive inexorability, her siblings love, love, love her, and she feels the same way about them.  Each one has a special relationship with her, and often her first words on waking up are, “Where Hannah?  Where Mimi?  Where Simeon?” 

I could go on and on and on, but I should probably stop here so that there’s a chance that someone will actually read to the end of this post.  We love Tessie!

Greek Day

We’ve been studying ancient Greece in history this year.  Last year Naomi and Hannah were studying different times of history, and this year we were going to add yet ANOTHER student studying yet ANOTHER time in history, and I couldn’t handle it all, so we’re studying all together this year.  Not everyone absorbs all the offered information, but at least we’re all working together now.  Hannah has more books assigned to her (not that she minds) so that she can get even more out of our study. 

Hannah found a book I have called Classical Kids, and looked at all the fun ideas in it.  She’s a girl who loves crafts, costumes, and cooking, so this book spoke her language.  Pretty soon I heard myself agreeing to have Greek Day…sometime…and maybe we can invite some friends over.

Michael was away over last weekend, and I decided that Greek Day would provide a good distraction for all of us so that we wouldn’t pine too much.  We invited friends and planned food and crafts, then worked on costumes.  Considering that we decided on Thursday that Greek Day would be Saturday, we had a highly successful time.

Sim’s costume consisted of an undershirt of Michael’s with a belt.  This made a chiton.

 

Normally, Greek boys didn’t wear pants under their chitons, but Sim was more interested in practicality and warmth than historical accuracy, so he had sweatpants on under his chiton.

Naomi did her headband herself.  “Mother [she’s taken to calling me Mother these days – not sure why], I just need you to put a bun in my hair.  I’ll do the rest.”

[Unrelated to Greek Day, you can see in the picture below the flowers my husband sent because he was out of town over the weekend.  Isn’t he great?]

She wore a palos which had been made that morning from an old sheet.

It looks pretty elegant, though!

Naomi and Hannah were more concerned with historical accuracy than Sim, so they were barefoot and didn’t wear long sleeves, even though it was a chilly day. 

It was warm inside, of course.

Hannah sewed her palos herself.  Naomi could have done her own, too, but it was going to be faster for me to do it, and since the costume was completed about half an hour before our guests arrived, speed won out over sewing practice this time.

 

It’s somewhat ridiculous how tall and grown up the girls looked in their costumes.  BACK TO THE BRAIDS!  They did enjoy their costumes, though.

 

This is certainly anachronistic – Greek girl changes the batteries on the speaker so that the kids coloring the map of ancient Greece can listen to an MP3 of Greek myths. 

        

Next project:  use math manipulatives to build a Minotaur’s labyrinth.

 

The finished product.  Simeon contributed Lego figures of Admiral Akbar (to be the Minotaur) and Han Solo (as Theseus) to make the labyrinth complete.

We then had a Greek (ish) lunch, followed by the making of mosaics with beans.  The kids rounded off Greek day by going to their girl cousin’s gymnastics meet.  This fit well, since the Greeks were very into athletics.

 

Tess’s concern for historical accuracy in her costume was nonexistent.  She was mostly concerned that Lima – yes, that St. Rose of Lima – be able to fit into her palos.  I got a picture during the five minutes when Lima wasn’t actually in the costume, but rest assured that most of the day she was wrapped up in there.  Tess’s costume is held on by a binder clip.  Again, total historical accuracy is tough to attain with a two year old.

Sim got the impression that Greek Day is a national holiday -- “What do other people do for Greek Day, Mom?”  Naomi and Hannah are hoping we can do another one soon.  I had to break it to them that we’re moving on to the Romans, but they don’t mind too much, since there’s hope for a Roman day – and TOGAS!