One!

Simeon has his very first birthday today! To celebrate, we flew home from visiting Grandma Ellie and Grandpa Larry. Well, they also hosted a party for him yesterday with lots of cousins -- many young ones -- and he heartily enjoyed that, although he had to go to bed in the middle of it. We made sure that he got his birthday song, though, and chance to blow out the candle. It turns out Michael blew the candle out, since Sim doesn't seem to have practiced that skill yet, but we'll see about next year.

Lately, Sim has been growing and developing by leaps and bounds. Here are some of his latest accomplishments:

 

--combat crawling at the speed of...well, I guess light would be an exaggeration, but he's fast!

--eating lots of things...most of which he’s supposed to eat, but not all.

 

 

--signing lots and lots of things…his favorites are “potty” and “dog.”  “Potty” is definitely the very favorite.

 

--saying words, too, including “dog” and “potty,” but also many others.

 

--learning how to open cabinets in the kitchen…much to his mother’s chagrin. 

 

--playing peek-a-boo and laughing hilariously about it.

 

--screaming (for fun) in small, enclosed spaces, such as an airplane…yeah…

--attending his first wedding since he was in utero.

Today we turned his seat around in the van.  He seemed pleased, but also a bit confused. 

 

His sisters were quite excited about the whole thing.  He proceeded to fall asleep.  It had been a long day with only a short afternoon nap. 

It’s been a very full year, and it seems to have flown by.  I can’t believe how big he’s gotten.

Oh, and I forgot another recent accomplishment:  he can climb stairs.  When we left for our visit, he could only do one.  Now he’s figured out how to keep going, but, of course, not how to remain up there…he always tries to sit down and would tumble backwards down the stairs if we weren’t right there.  It looks like another gate is going up in our house.

We’re just beginning to discover this sweet baby’s personality.  We love him with all our hearts.

 

It’s hard to believe he’s only been with us for a year – on the outside.  It feels like he’s been here forever.

We look forward to many more happy years.

Noise levels

Yet another thing about Sim that is different:

I turned on the electric hand mixer today to mix some cupcakes (feast of St. Pio, you know!). Hannah has finally made peace with the hand mixer and doesn't mind it...too much. Naomi has made peace with it...as long as she has her hands over her ears.

Simeon, sitting on the floor, playing with the bowl and spoon I gave him, looked up at the first sound, grinned from ear to ear, and started babbling...probably about how awesome the hand mixer noise is.

Potty! Potty! Potty!

Simeon and I were at a baby shower today, and "Potty!" was what Simeon told everyone. Repeatedly. He had fallen asleep in the car, and when he woke up and I brought him in, I took him to go potty. He seems to have really been impressed with the bathroom, because when I took him back out, he signed potty and said, "Pa! Pa! Pa!" at every opportunity. I don't know exactly what it was about the bathroom there, but he loved it. It did make things somewhat confusing for me, since he sometimes indicates that he needs to use the potty by signing "potty" and saying, "pa," but this time, he was just trying to tell people about something that interested him.

Of course, nobody who talked to us understood what he was trying to get across, so I kept having to explain (since everyone asked, "Oh! What's he saying?"), "He's saying potty." Many people there knew about Sim's potty usage, but it's still funny to see someone who can't even say the whole word, "potty," get so excited about the bathroom.

He often gets on a kick of signing something over and over and telling everyone about it. It's just that it's usually "dog" or "ball" or "eat" or "Dada." Lately "telephone" has been added to the list, too. But today, it was "potty."

But we're OKAY!

This morning we have some cousins over to play. After breakfast, we had four lions, stalking their prey. Then we had Borrowers. Now we've got Paul and Maureen and their pet lion cubs, and their ship has been sunk. They're on Lonely Island, and are trying to negotiate how to get back. The tugboat is not really in shape to take them back, apparently. One suggestion is that they might swim back, "With a BABY?!?!" says Hannah -- Maureen -- incredulously. Then she changes her mind. She's going to swim home. Paul says it will take her a year. He's done it before. Oh, and then he changes it to a year and a half, because they have the baby...it takes longer to swim with a baby, you know.

But the good news is that Michael and I haven't been affected by the shipwreck.

Oh, and it seems that the kids have built a new boat, now being portrayed by the front porch.

Tales that teach

I've recently needed to address some difficult behaviors in Hannah. This is never fun, of course, for either of us. Okay, it's not fun for the rest of the family, either. But I've discovered one tactic that works very well: storytelling. Hannah will settle down for a story even if she'd just been screaming her head off at me...which is, of course, hypothetical, since my sweet kids wouldn't ever raise their voices...

But I digress. I've invented a farmer with 50 dairy cows, 30 sheep, 20 chickens, and 3 horses. He and his wife have 3 small children who aren't old enough to help with the chores. This poor man has had some very difficult times getting farm help. He can't take care of all that milking on his own, so he has to have someone. The first hired help was pretty good, but then started showing up for work later and later, and one Saturday, when the farmer had taken his family to visit their grandparents (fully trusting that the hired help would be there to take care of the farm) the help didn't show up until after 3 p.m.! Needless to say, he didn't last.

Today, a new hired hand decided to play baseball when he was supposed to be milking. When the farmer asked him to return to his task, he threw the ball at the farmer's head (luckily the farmer has quick reflexes and ducked in time) and then stomped off to the barn, angrily finishing his chores, but upsetting the cows quite a bit. He was let go, too.

This farmer has been VERY helpful to me, despite his difficulties in hiring good help.

I've also invented a town with 2 bus drivers -- they switch off days. The one occasionally falls asleep at the wheel and drives off the road, and many people in the bus get injured. Naturally, the mom in our story decides to stay home on the days that this driver is in charge of the bus, even though it only happens sometimes. Hannah was most indignant when the occasionally careless driver offered to drive the mom around in an attempt to convince her that he wasn't such a bad driver after all. "Hannah, do you think the mom took her kids on the bus with him?"
"NO!!"

Hannah is a junky for stories, verbal or written -- they calm her down and allow her to focus on something besides her feelings of ill-usage. When I use them to illustrate why certain behaviors are undesireable, she seems to get the picture much better than if I only tell her what the problem is and how I would like it fixed.

Naomisms

Because she doesn't always scream. Sometimes she says hilarious things. Right now, here are some of them:

Washclosh or washcosh-- I can't describe how fantastically cute it is when she says this!

Sibby baby -- a nickname for Simeon

"You're joking! You're joking!" -- said whenever something isn't going her way. For example, if I say to her, "Naomi, if you don't stop climbing on the back of the couch, you will get a time out," this is her response. It's also her response to bedtime, nail clipping time, and any other thing that she doesn't like. She most often uses it at times when I'm not even thinking of joking.

CD on tape -- Naomi is used to CDs. I recently introduced her to the tape player we have and the children's stories on tape. This confuses her quite a bit, so she often asks if she can listen to the CD on tape. Technology!

Snow White or Snow Christmas -- What she calls White Christmas, which the girls have been watching in 30-minute increments. They're about 2/3 of the way through and are loving it, but Naomi can't seem to keep the title straight. It's darling. Of course, it's going to take another 2 weeks to watch to the end at the rate we're going (about 1/2 hour once a week), but they don't mind.

Kyouston -- What she still calls Houston.

"I'm tired! I'm too tired!" What she says whenever she doesn't want to do something you ask her to do.

"My mama's name is Mama and my dada's name is Dada." Someone was asking her about her family and their names. She'd already covered Hannah and Simeon and thought that the person should know about her parents, too.

Sometimes, we are that family.

You know, the family at Costco with the crying, screaming 3-year-old? Yes, sometimes that's us. That was us yesterday.

I used to occasionally wonder why people took their kids out when they were hungry or tired or had something that was clearly wrong with them, whatever it might be. That was before I had kids of my own. She was not hungry, or tired, and what was wrong with her was that I wasn't doing everything exactly as she wanted.

Unfortunately, we've been that family a lot this week. I'm not sure exactly why it's happening, but it's definitely wearing on me. I suppose that the fact that it's wearing on me so much is good news -- we're not always that family; I'm not so used to it that it doesn't bother me any more.

We'll try to keep it to occasionally, and those times will be good times of humility and remembering to pray for the other moms I meet whose turn it is to be the moms in that family today.