sianara, buy some lunch

I was teaching Ro different ways to say goodbye. Adios, Ciao, "See You Later, Alligator", "After awhile, Crocodile", Auf Weiderzein, etc. Ro was repeating me. Then, I said Bon Voyage and he said "Buy Some Lunch".

Sim is really into books. And, she really likes to sit in people's lap, so she's taken to toddling up to family members and then doing a sudden about face to sit down immediately in front of them to be in the right position for someone to read to her. I think it's funny that she just expects it. Her current favorites are more animal sounds and vocabulary type books. She's not really into any proper stories yet - nothing more complicated than some Dr. Seuss silliness.

Ro had his four year old check up today and he was so scared. He spent half an hour telling me how scared he was of the doctor. I was expecting some outbursts at the office but when we got there he did fine and was cooperative -- even for his shot. He got his band aid and his lollypop and then said, "That was fun". So much drama and it was no big deal.

winter is so far away....for some

Ro seems to really miss winter. Every day he is creating some sort of winter pretend game. Either he's Santa begging me to be his reindeer (I have to run around holding coat hangers on my head), or he's burying himself in blankets and pretending to be a melting snowman. Today, he was building a pillow mountain and attempting to go sledding on it with another pillow. It worked - sort of. And, in the bath, he was piling bubbles on his chin to be Santa's white beard. He also keeps telling me he's hot and asking me to make it cold. I can't believe he misses winter. He just isn't bothered by the cold. He wanted to play in the snow everyday. I wish I could say the same for me.

birthday boy

Ro is four years old now. His birthday was kind of a bummer because he had a 103 degree fever and was pretty out of it. He enjoyed his presents but he just seemed low on enthusiasm as you might expect. We cancelled his little party and just my parents came over. He's still at 102 today and he konked out at 7 pm. <<<7 p.m.! Unheard of. >>>He also didn't get up til 9 a.m. this morning, which is also rare. I'm hoping he'll feel better tomorrow.

He seems very pleased to be four though. He keeps saying. I'm four candles.

This week...

Ro told me he wanted to grow up to be Santa Claus with a big white beard and everything. He's so obsessed with all things xmas, that it might not be a bad idea.

Ro spent half an hour putting on a dinner time show for Sim including throwing a dish towel and dancing little train magnets around for her. She laughed so hard and they had such a good time.

Ro built a blockade to keep Sim out of his room in order to keep her away from his geotrax trains. When she got through the blockade, he didn't get mad. He just guided her over to his book boxes and got her focused on those so she wouldn't touch his trains and it worked. very clever.

Sim saw a large stuffed cow (as in stuffed animal not some unfortunate taxidermist creation) and said, "Cow!" even though it was lying on the floor on top of even larger stuffed cows. She's only seen illustrations of cows in books so I thought it was funny she recognized it. The cows were insanely expensive. The great dane sized stuff cow being $300 and they got larger and pricier from there.

We took the kids to Petsmart to kill some time and look at the fish, etc. Sim saw a kitten for the first time. She was so happy and thrilled until it walked toward her. She let out this blood curdling scream and tried to leap backwards away from it. Took like five minutes to calm her down.

Buzz buzz buzz

Ro is sooooooo intensely into buzz lightyear right now that it's starting to drive me a little batty. He basically flips between intense episodes of Thomas the tank engine and Buzz. Thomas has been in the forefront, especially since we went to Day out with Thomas in May. He doesn't play with the trains so much anymore. He mostly wants act out the stories and be Thomas himself. He likes to be Thomas when he rides his tricycle and I draw tracks in chalk on our driveway and sometimes tie cardboard boxes to the back of the tricycle to be Annie and Clarabel. Alternatively, he drags our plastic sleds around the yard, which is kind of fun. We have three and the blue one is Thomas of course. He also uses our woodstove to be thomas and our two couches are Annie and Clarabel. He then opens and closes the flue to start and stop the train and stands on chair to see how the window and tell me if there's a cow on the track, etc.

But these days, it's mostly Buzz, buzz, buzz. Sim is always XR, a robot sidekick. In fact Ro, calls Sim by XR so much she now responds to the name. Worse yet, Sim pointed at Ro this morning and said, "Buzzy". sigh. I'm usually Mira Nova, a female partner -- or Zurg, when we need a bad guy. I don't mind playing space rangers but it's soooooo relentless. I feel like Ro requests playing space rangers every 10 minutes. Usually it's the traditional sort of themes like capturing bad guys and taking them to jail or fighting Zurg. Occasionally, it ventures into more random stories like Buzz decorating his Christmas tree or Buzz suddenly helping Zurg resolve a home repair problem.

fire flies and books

Ro saw fire flies for the first time tonight. He was entranced. They really are wonderful and we have so many in our backyard. I remember when I used to squish their abdomens off and put one on each fingernail so my hands would glow. I think that's so horrible now. No one in my family ever discouraged that sort of thing. I'm definitely not going to let my kids do anything like that.

Book reading is part of our bed time routine because we love books and Ro loves books. Recently, he seems unsatisfied with the level of stories we've been reading, so he points at different characters and wants me to make them talk. For example, Go Dog Go, which is a simple book that Ro still likes but apparently finds it lacking in depth. So, he demands that I give each dog a different voice and make them say what they might be thinking in each page. I like dramatizing the books for him but reading one book can suddenly become very long when you have to make a hundred dogs talk. This has spread over into so many other things now -- even watching videos. He's always demanding, "Talk Dog!" or "Talk Snowman!" or whatever we're reading or watching - even if they're talking already

The crazy and the stupid

Every time I tell Roey that he's going to be a man when he grows up, he gets really annoyed and says he's going to be Roey when he grows up. Today, I tried a different tack and we told him that Daddy was once a little boy and then he grew up to be a big man. Ro's response was awesome. He said, "No! That's crazy. I don't like it." Ha ha ha. He really thinks being a man is absurd.

I've been wondering when Ro would start to use words like "stupid" or "dumb" or other things that kids say to each other. He hears them all the time on the playground but they've mostly gone over his head. However, I heard him say "stupid dog" while acting out some scene with his train set. He was playing by himself and I didn't say anything but I was surprised. I know kids younger than him who say it, so it took him awhile to pick it up. Today, he called Sim, "Stupid Simone", when she wouldn't leave his room. He hates it when she's in his room stepping on things. She steps on things on purpose. It's one of her odd little quirks. Ro freaks when she steps on his train pieces. Anyhow, Daddy made him apologize. I'm kind of worried he made too big of a deal out of it. Sometimes it's better to be more neutral and not draw too much attention to something.

Sim is walking for real now and only crawling intermittently. She seemed to have some sort of walking epiphany on Wednesday. She's also starting to stake her claim on things more. She was happily playing in the sandbox, when she saw me put Ro in the swing. She instantly burst into tears because she LOVES the swing. She cried at the park the other day when I didn't take her on the swings. I didn't see them until we were about to head out. She was so sad. She kept crying and pointing at them.

fireworks are broccoli -- I mean sparkly

We went out to see the fireworks tonight. Ro seemed to enjoy them although he enjoyed the playground and playing with some little friends even more. The loud bangs scared Sim at first but then she got into it and would point and say "Whadat?", which she says all the time now. Every time a firework went off, Ro would say, "look! it's broccoli!" I couldn't figure out what he was on about. The associations he makes are very strange sometimes. Ro sees life as a Rorshach ink blot test though. He's always pointing at blobs on the sidewalk or spills of water and telling me what they are with surprising detail. So, relating fireworks to broccoli wouldn't have been totally off the wall for him. Eventually, I realized he was saying "look, it's sparkly! but it sounds a lot like how he says broccoli. I think I'll ask him if he can say sparkly broccoli five times fast.

Walking changes

Sim is still not really walking. Just little bits here and there. Ro's been helping her which is sweet. However, he helped her escape the house on Friday and I about fainted. I told Ro I'd take him to the children's museum but I had to go to the bathroom and make them some drinks first. When I came out of the bathroom, they weren't in the living room and so I went in the kitchen. They weren't there either. I made a cup and checked Ro's room. No kids. I started getting a little panicky so I bolted out the door and there is Sim sitting in the driveway and Ro standing by the car waiting to go to the museum. I don't know how Ro got her out there. He can't walk her well enough that she wouldn't have fallen on the steps, so she must've crawled. Which means he held the house door open for her and the screen door on the breezeway. sigh.

He's actually treating her a bit differently since she started trying to walk. Now, he sees her as a real kid. I really thought this is when he would start being annoyed with her but he actually seems to like her even better. They played so well together today -- actually all week, but today in particular. They played cars in the dirt. Ro jumped off the couch and pretended to fall on the floor over and over just for Sim's amusement. He wanted her to ride on the sled with him while I dragged them around the yard. He wants to make sure Sim gets a snack when he gets a snack. It's really awesome. I just have to keep Sim away from the train in his room because that will make him freak out. Not just Sim -- but anyone.

Ro is even turning to Sim for comfort. Today, we went out for ice cream but we took too long getting ready. Ro has no patience when ice cream is involved. So, a tearful Ro ran to Sim saying, "Simone, I'm crying. I want ice cream." She peeped at him and gave him a fire truck she was holding and he thanked her and it really made him feel better. He carried the truck until we got to the ice cream place. Ro's been able to stop Simone from crying a few times. It's nice to see it work the other way around.

A well placed dot

Ro and I were working on a self portrait project when he decided to draw a picture of me as well. He would study me closely as if he were really trying to analyze the form of my nose and then he'd turn around and put down a dot on the paper. It really killed me because he looked as serious as any figure drawing student, so I kept expecting him to draw something more complex. However, it was a very well thought out and well placed nose dot.