Snow!

We awoke yesterday to some fantastic snow.  It was my first day off from work, so we could go out and play.  We were out in the snow even before breakfast!

It begins, of course, with a snowball fight.  Even Sim throws hard now:

Naomi acted as Sim’s sled dog:

I actually had some chores to do in the morning, so I came back in to do them.  Hannah and Naomi did not approve – they’re throwing snow at the window:

After chores, we went to the nearby park for sledding.  Tess came, too.  Check out the look of joy:

When the sled was in use, Naomi went body-sledding:

Naomi launching Sim down the hill:

Tess mostly watched, but she was still pretty psyched:

In the evening, the older children and I went caroling with Northwest Girlchoir.  We had a good time with that, too, especially since they were serving hot chocolate:

It was a lovely day.  I’m a bit of a Scrooge about snow when it disrupts my commute to work, but when I have a day off … the timing could not have been more perfect.

Bits and pieces

Forethought:  Having the snowsuits in the right sizes for the first (and quite possibly last) snow of the winter.

Not so much forethought:  What are the kids wearing for Christmas?  -- Don't worry, I have it figured out now, but as of yesterday morning, I hadn't. 

***

Me:  Tess, come here please.
Tess:  I'm not listening to you, Mama.

***

As we were driving somewhere in the car this week, Sim yelled out:  "Look at all the exclamation points, Mom!"  Since the only things around with writing on them were freeway signs, I was stumped, because even here, signs for exits don't read, "Exit 139!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Mercer Road!!!!!!!!!!"

Then Sim told me where they were -- on the freeway.  Yes, it turns out that the intermittent stripes with dots look like exclamation points, especially when you're learning to read. 

***

The time spent having Hannah (and other children) "help" me in the kitchen -- which sometimes in the past made me think that maybe my idea of doing all kitchen work after the kids were in bed was actually BRILLIANT -- with baking is paying off!  Hannah has become quite the baker, and has moved on to cookie dough recently.  She told me, "Mom, it seems like the recipes for cookie dough do the same thing."  Okay, so it's a little embarrassing that she discovered that at the age of 10.  I didn't figure that out until someone pointed it out to me not too long ago. 

It's fantastic, though, to say, "Hannah, will you please make [whatever]?" and have her make it, including the other kids in the process (down to putting aprons on all of them, for goodness sake!) while I eat bonbons and watch soaps do other things around the house.

***

Naomi -- not quite 8 years old -- can work the electric match better than I can.  Somewhat embarrassing. 

***

Snow day fun with a new reader/writer:  having "ossum sno!" written on the condensation on the inside of the window.  Complete with exclamation points, of course.  If you sound it out phonetically, you get how the kids felt about a snow day today.

***

Tess likes to randomly decide she's going to wear her sunglasses.  This is especially amusing at the grocery store after 5 p.m. here, when it's most definitely dark outside, and not that bright in the grocery store. 

***

Me:  Naomi, do you want to wear the red Christmas dress that I made Hannah a few years ago? [Yeah, see the first point on this list...]
Naomi:  No, Mama, I want to wear something matching with Hannah!
Me:  Ah...[Yeah, I had nothin'.  But I didn't reveal that and I solved the problem, so I think we're okay.]

***

Hannah's crafting eyes are much bigger than her...okay, crafting stomach doesn't work, but she had HUGE plans for crafts for this Christmas.  I managed to try to talk her down a bit.  She's done some really cool projects -- which we'll hopefully show photos of sometime -- so she's been creating.  But she didn't do all 72 of the things she proposed she'd start 10 days ago.  I feel like the biggest squelcher of dreams as I'm trying to help her figure out what to do and what to not do.  However, I think (hope) she recognizes the wisdom in just doing a few of them and actually getting them done...

***

I hope to have some good pictures up soon, but 'tis the season for lots and lots of grand plans (see previous point) that end up with arriving the end of the day and finding that everyone got fed and feeling a sense of great victory.  

Halloween

I had grand ideas about putting up a Halloween post the day after Halloween.  Then I left my camera at my sister’s house, and a Halloween post without pictures is not really a Halloween post, so I’m late, but at least there will be pictures. 

First, we have the arrival of the costumes and the initial try-on.  The costumes are made by Grandma Ellie, who takes such requests as Snowy Owl and runs with them.  I think I would probably have tried to figure out a different costume, but the kids don’t know how lucky they are that I’m not in charge of their costumes. 

The do love the ones Grandma Ellie makes.  Above, we’ve got the tiger and the lamb.  Tess wore her costume for the try-on, then again for 3 minutes at the party we attended the week before Halloween.  I wasn’t sure if she’d be willing to wear it on the day, but she got into the spirit of the thing. 

 

Hannah loved her Ranger costume.  The cape was a huge success. 

 

And she could hide whole siblings under it!

Naomi’s snowy owl – impressive!

My sister did the face paint for the tiger and the owl.  Technically, the lamb could have had some face paint, but we didn’t want to push our luck.

 

Again, the kids don’t know that, if their aunt was not a talented artist, their face paint would have been either nonexistent or poorly applied by their not-very-artistic mother.  The kids are blessed in their connections around Halloween!

I mean, really!  This is an awesome tiger!

 

The paint on Naomi’s face showed yellow owl eyes when her eyes were closed.  It was really cool.

He was a very fierce tiger.

 

The lamb brought Lima with her trick or treating, too.  It made it tricky to carry her – her costume was bulky to begin with, then there was Lima, then there was her candy bag.  She did enjoy getting candy, though.  Not that she’s going to get to eat it…but we didn’t tell her that.

Full snowy owl with eyes open…

…and closed.  Isn’t that cool?  I don’t think I’d have ever come up with that idea.  Genius.

Hannah, the Ranger.  Of course, you can’t really see her in this picture because of the camouflage. 

 

Michael made the knives for her belt.  She made the double holster.  We had to tell her that NO, she could NOT carry a machete trick-or-treating.  “But we have one in the garage!”  Availability was not the stumbling block on that one.

 

They were all excited to go, but in this picture, only Hannah looks it.  Not sure what was going on with everyone else.

 

Since Hannah’s allergic to a bunch of candy, we have a tradition to come home and do the Great Candy Swap, in which all our kids trade out the peanut candies they got, and Hannah trades out those plus all the other ones she can’t eat.  It’s become a beloved tradition to all, and my niece and nephew end up with a huge proportion of peanutty candy, something that would have made me very happy in my trick-or-treating days.

We were up late, and the kids’ behavior the next day did not convince me that we need to move bedtime later.  But we did have fun!  Thanks to Grandma Ellie and in-town aunt for their help!

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!