The Cutes

After almost a year in speech therapy, BobbyBlabberMouth is finally starting to open up and use his words to tell us what he needs.  A year ago, he wouldn't say anything or even try to communicate with us non-verbally, so this is amazing for us.  We finally know what our little boy wants.

He wants juice.

Lots and lots and lots of juice.

All day long, I'm pouring this kid juice.

He drinks so much of the stuff that I've had to start watering it down to a 75/25 water to juice ratio.

His pronunciation of the word 'juice' has been something of a small matter of contention between his father and me.  Instead of 'juice' he says 'cutes'.  I don't know why 'cutes', but it's friggin' adorable.  I have a hard time correcting his word.

Awwww, cutes!

Then SallyScientist gave me a logical excuse to keep calling it cutes:

Bobby: I wanch cutes!
Awesomeness: Aw, buddy, you need cutes? (Please don't tell on me.)
Bobby: Yeah! Cutes!!
Awesomeness: Come get your cutes, bud.
Sally: It's water and juice.  Water and juice makes 'cutes.'

Yes.  Yes it does.  Good call, kid.

Life and Death

The decision to keep LucyLearnsALot out of school for the next year was not an easy one.  Or one that we even got to make without a degree of coersion.  We felt strongly that she was ready to join her friends in a structured class environment and to learn things beyond what we've been teaching at home, but unfortunately the school system disagreed. 

In short, we live too far away from work to send her to school near our house, but the schools near our work won't even consider taking her.  Faced with this flagrant lack of cooperation, we did what any sane parent would do: we decided to homeschool and built our own curriculum.

Oh, I mean insane.  Insane parents do that.

Sure, parents homeschool all the time.  Parents who are actually home to parent.  Moms and dads that aren't out of the house for about 60 hours every week.  If you think about it mathmatically, though, one week is comprised of 168 hours, so 60 is not really that much.  Who needs sleep anyway, AMIRIGHT?

Over the last month-ish, I've been slowly piecing together a series of lesson plans.  As I go along, I've become more at peace with the idea of teaching her myself, since I like the idea of  an element of exploratory self-guided discovery as a part of a learning agenda.  I am totally ready for this.
Until I got to the first lesson: death.

Lucy like to play roughly with her brother.  She likes to sit on him and put various things around his neck: her hands, cords, blankets, etc.  We have to watch them carefully while they're playing and strip them of anything that can be used as a garrote while they're playing unsupervised.

I'm a lot like a prison guard.  I might put that on my resume.

The other day when Lucy grabbed her little brother by the neck and threw him into the couch, I'd had enough.  She took a nice, long time out and we had a hard discussion about what happens to her brother when she puts her hands around his neck.  It ended when I told her that when her brother can't breathe for too long, then he would go away forever and she would never see him again.  I didn't stop describing the finality of choking her brother until she was bawling.

Later that same night, we were exploring some information that she wanted to know about seahorses.  For some reason, this has become her favorite animal (this week).  One of the videos we watched showed a seahorse having babies.  It was my opportunity to explain to her how the male seahorses are the ones who have babies, which is different from other animals. 

She was so fascinated that she wanted to watch an elephant have a baby too.  And fish.  And bunnies.  And dogs.

We talked a lot that night about how some animals grow babies in their tummies and eventually push them out of their vagina (hiply referred to in my house as the 'gina) and other animals lay eggs that the babies grown in and then hatch from.

Our night of fun ended when she asked, "How you put babies in the mama?"

I bailed on that answer.  I figured I'd already covered life and death in a matter of just a couple of hours.  Sex can wait.

How Dare You!

In the daily struggle to keep things fair and balanced, we sometimes have losing moments.  They're not all bad, though, because sometimes they turn into unexpectedly funny moments.

Mr. Awesomeness: Buddy, what do you want to watch?

Buddy: Wanna watch Wall-E!

Not Buddy: No! We watched Wall-E already.  We need to watch Tangled.

Mr. Awesomeness: Honey, I think it's Buddy's turn to watch a movie.  You got to pick a movie last time.

Not Buddy: No!  Buddy already got a turn today.

Mr. Awesomeness: (failing at reverse psychology) Well, Buddy, it looks like you don't get to take your turn because your sister is being very selfish.

Not Buddy: I AM NOT A FISH!!

Short Circuited

When you ask me about my favorite part of the morning, I might respond in 4 different ways:

1. When I walked into the kids' room to find NatureBoy completely nude, but his sister in the corner trying to hide the fact that she was wearing his pajamas.
2. When the kids ran out of the room and I had to slow them down by reminding them that they forgot their clothes and NatureBoy said, "Sowwy Mama."
3. When I asked the kids what they wanted to see and RebaRobotLover wanted to see Short Circuit, but her brother wanted to watch Pingu.  She said, "But I gotta watch Number 5 before you watch Pingu."  Taking turns.  Awww.
4. When I handed NatureBoy his cereal and he proceeded to stand behind me in the kitchen swinging his bowl around while singing the alphabet song.  I told him to take his cereal to the table.  Surprisingly, he did.

Happy Mother's Day?

Check.

The Koala Bear Diet

I love Nick Jr.  Most of the time.  Most of the time, they play fantastic programming that helps my kids learn an amazing amount of information.  Sometimes, though, there's a 30-odd-year old dick on there singing about wanting to be a polar bear.

I've always had a certain amount of hatred for grown-ups who sing kid songs.  Even when I was a kid, I wondered how the hell their life went that wrong.

So now PennyPretender wants to be a polar bear.  That leads to this discussion:

PennyPretender: Mama, I want to be a polar bear!
Awesomeness: Ohmigod!! Then go be a polar bear!  (I was eating dinner.)
PennyPretender: Mama, you want to be a polar bear too?
Awesomeness: No, honey.  It's too cold where polar bears live.  Snow is too cold for me.
PennyPretender: What kind of bear are you?
Awesomeness: I would be a grizzly bear.
PennyPretender: And what kind of bear is brother?
Awesomeness: He can be a koala bear (no lectures about what constitutes a "bear").
PennyPretender: So, I am a polar bear and you are a grizzly bear (it actually sounded like "greasy bear") and brother is a koala bear.

So, now that we had that all settled, I thought I could go back to eating dinner.  I was only right for about 10 seconds before FreddyFishNabber decided to steal his sister's Goldfish crackers.

PennyPretender: NO!  NO!  THAT'S A BAD KOALA BEAR!!  Mama, tell Koala Bear that koalas don't eat fish, they eat leaves.

Uh, yeah.  It's one of those moments when I want to concentrate on being super impressed about the fact that she knows what koalas eat, but can't because I have to mediate.  Explaining to a 2-year old that he's going to have to munch on koala-appropriate leaves is not an option.  Explaining to a 5-year old that koala bears sometimes eat fish seemed like a better idea at the time.

PennyPretender: Daddy! Daddy!  I am a polar bear and I live in the snow.  Freddy is a koala bear.  He eats leaves and fish.
Mr. Awesomeness: Koala bears don't eat fish, where did you hear that?

I'm hiding.

This is almost like the time that she ate stale popcorn out of the backseat of the car and I absent-mindedly told her that, "When things don't taste good, they're probably not very good for you."

Parenting Fail # 163.

Our Driveway Phone Crusher

The other day, on the drive in to work, I thought I lost my phone.  I could clearly see myself tossing it into my purse before leaving the house, but it was nowhere in my purse, on the floor of the car, anywhere.

Mr. A and I immediately began to discuss what could have happened and, since we were only a few minutes away, whether or not we should turn around to find it.  We had PunchlinePatty in the car with us.  We sometimes forget that she listens to our conversations.

Awesomeness: I know I put it in my purse, it was one of the last things I did before I left the house.
Mr. A: Are you sure you didn't tip your purse over at some point?
Awesomeness: Yes.  Right after I put my phone away, we left.  I didn't have time to negligently toss my purse around. (I don't like to be accused of dumbassery.)
Mr. A: Okay, are you sure that the kids didn't get into your purse?
Awesomeness: They didn't have time.  I grabbed my purse, grabbed my phone, tossed it in, then we left.
Mr. A: Are you sure it didn't fall out into the driveway somewhere?
Awesomeness: I sure hope not.  If it fell into the driveway, we should go back and get it.  If it wasn't crushed by a tire...
PunchlinePatty: Crushed by a tiger?  Your phone was crushed by a tiger?!!

She spent the next 10 minutes asking us why a tiger was in our driveway.  Was it a big tiger, with big teeth?  Why did it crush Mama's phone?

It distracted me from the distress of potentially losing or running over my phone long enough that I remembered what happened to it.

I tossed it in my purse, but then remembered that the pants I was wearing that morning had pockets.  It was in my pocket the whole time.

Captain Demando

My baby's finally talking.  He's needed about 6 months of speech therapy to open up, but he's finally getting there.  I can't believe the progress he's making too.  He's not just saying words, but also answering questions.  On top of that, he's actually asking for things he needs.  Like tonight when we had a real conversation:

ChattyCharlie: I'm hungry. 
Awesomeness: You need some food?
ChattyCharlie: Want crackers.
Awesomeness: You want some crackers, buddy?
ChattyCharlie: NOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!  NOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!

Aw.  That's my baby.  My hungry, hungry, no cracker gettin' baby.

Is This A Trick?

I'm catching up on my reading when PatientPatty walks up and taps me on the shoulder.

PatientPatty: Mama.
Awesomeness: Yes, honey.
PatientPatty: Mama, can I wait for a little while?
Awesomeness: Um, what?  I don't think I heard you right.  What do you need?
PatientPatty: I want to wait for just a little while.
Awesomeness: Yeah....well, you can wait all you want.  Go play.

She does.  I get back to my reading.  Ten minutes later:

PatientPatty: Mama.
Awesomeness: Yes, Patty.
PatientPatty: Can I wait just a little while longer?
Awesomeness: Knock yourself out.
PatientPatty: I'm very good at waiting.
Awesomeness: Yes you are.

It's Really, Really Day

I worry about my girl sometimes.  She gets along okay in school, but she doesn't seem to enjoy it very much.  I figure I'm in trouble, since this is preschool, so the hardest thing she has to do all day is trace a Q with a crayon. She's also turning 5 this year, which means that Mr. A and I have a hard choice to make about whether to send her to Kindergarten in August or to give her one more year to work on her communication and focus.

Comments like this make me think we should wait:

Mama, school is really, really hard.

It made me sad to hear her say that today.  I asked if she was having trouble with her work, but she said, "No."  Was she having problems with the other kids?  "No, Mama, they're fine."

I'm positive that getting up at 6:30 in the morning is a drag, but she get's plenty of sleep, so I don't think that's it.  She and her brother are usually up around that time anyway.

I couldn't think of what else to ask her, so I just started worrying for her future filled with homework that didn't involve cutting and gluing squares.

Then I heard her say:

Mama, my guitar is really, really lost.

And then her brother grabbed her brand new sunglasses off of her face and demolished them faster than I could blink, which brought on:

Mama, my sunglasses are really, really broken!

What a relief!  She'll be fine.  It's just Really, Really Day.

A Star Is Born

This year we decided to get the kids Easter baskets that had more gifts they could trash my floor with enjoy and less candy for us them to eat.  What we ended up with was a pink basket with "rock star" themed toys for her (that he would totally play with) and a big truck basket for him (no seriously, it just had a truck in it...I'm not even sure why they bothered with the basket).

While TommyTruckMan is using his new truck as a roller skate, SallySuperStar has decided that today is the first day of her illustrious career as a rock star.

SallySuperStar: Mama, I can't wait to be a star.

Awesomeness: Well, what are you going to do to become a star?

SallySuperStar: I'm going to put on my sunglasses.

Awesomeness: And then what?

SallySuperStar: And then I will be a star!

If only it were that easy....

Now if I can get her brother to stop making this face in every picture, he may be able to join her:

CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE!

The only way I can get a normal picture of the kid is when I surprise him:

Happy Easter everyone!