When I grow up ...

Ro is always telling me different things that he wants to be when he grows up. Usually, it's some typical occupation - although two days ago, he told me he wanted to be a dancer and he proceeded to get really "Flash Dance" in the dining room. He leaps around and strikes all these strange poses. It is so hard not to laugh at him sometimes.

Yesterday, as we were about to read a jungle story, Ro said, " Oh, I love jungles! When I grow up, I want to be a hunter. I'll go through the jungle and hunt for marshmallows!" snerk! It's hard to catch those elusive jungle marshmallows.

Today, he wants to be a waiter/acrobat, who owns a big restaurant and who delivers your food by balancing it all on his head. I think he picked this one up from a Maisy video though.

The case of the missing mail

Sim and I were folding and putting away laundry when the mail arrived. We got letters and a package from Grammy. After opening the package and letters, I had a phone call and then Ro got home from school and then I started dinner. After that, I went to get the bills out of the mail to put on my desk. I couldn't find any of the mail. Not one bit of it. I looked all over the house for about half an hour and then chalked it up to my "Mommy Alzheimers". After dinner, Daddy and I looked for the mail but we had no luck. Finally, after bath time, I was getting Simone's PJs out of her drawer when I discovered all the mail in her drawer with the clothes she'd been putting away earlier. I expect she was trying to be helpful. She likes to keep busy. If I don't find something for her to do, she gets up to monkey business. I'll discover her in the bathroom slurping saline solution out of my contact case or in the kitchen shaking pepper on the floor and then wiping it up (i.e. spreading it all over the floor with a towel). It's amazing how five minutes of low toddler supervision can result in hours of cleaning and/or searching.

Dr. Suess gone wrong

Rhyme wasn't something Ro caught on to until recently. Going to school has definitely influenced Ro's "boy" humor. I feel like boys (and a lot of men in general) have pretty sophomoric humor. Tonight, he was pretending his bath was poop soup and he kept trying to get me to eat it because I was a "Bad Superpower diaper Bad guy". He kept asking me if I wanted poop soup with submarines, snails, and snakes. And I'd add to his poop soup rhyme. I'm no dupe. I won't eat a scoop of poop soup. It looks like brown goop. He'd laugh so hard I thought he'd be sick. Then, he suggested that we have mustard custard for dessert. Ewwwwwwwwwww!

surprise breakfast

I heard Ro knocking around downstairs the other morning. Usually he yells for me to come downstairs within minutes of getting up but he continued to bang around for about 15 minutes. Then, he woke up everybody to come down for a "suprise breakfast". I think he got the idea from a Calliou episode. He had made us each a "meal" at the table. For him and Daddy, he had made small bowls of yogurt. Simone had an empty bowl and a jar of little gerkhin pickles because "Simone really likes pickles." She does like pickles but I'm not sure if pickles are such a great breakfast. Mommy had a plate with a small cup of applesauce on it. Ro had also poured him and Simone cups of milk. Simone's milk was in a tiny dolly sized tea cup. He only had one minor milk spill. I was shocked he'd gotten it all together without much trouble because I know he must've moved a chair to get dishes from the cabinets. Simone really enjoyed eating pickles first thing in the morning. It made my stomach crinkle up just to watch her.

NOW! thank you

Sim is pretty quick to be polite. She says Thank you for almost everything you give her and even for taking her places that she likes. She thanked me for taking her to the grocery store the other day -- but she also says thank you when she's being naughty. I feel like she does it to convince me and others that we are in fact giving something to her rather than her simply taking it. She'll get into an occasional squabble with Roen and she's desperately trying to wrench the toy from his grasp all the while saying (and sometimes shouting), "Thank you! Thank you, Roen!"

She has a fixation with my spice drawer and is always rummaging in it. She recently realized she could drag the stool from the bathroom to the kitchen and have better access to the spices. She especially loves unwrapping stock cubes. So, if I catch her at it she'll wave the cube at me and go running off shouting, "Thank you, thank you Mommy!" I have tried and tried to convince her that it's not candy but it doesn't dissuade her from wanting to unwrap them all.

Her other big word of the moment is NOW!
Tea!... NOW!
Maisy! NOW!
Mommy! NOW!
At this point, it's novel and kind of funny... but something we'll have to nip in the bud.

you are fat!

We saw a big man - and astoundingly large man. He was 6' 5" and somewhere between 400 - 500 pounds. Ro gaped in astonishment. Then, he started to babble and eventually started to form words, "Wow Mommy look at the fat man! He's fat! He's fat! He's big and fat!" While Ro was reveling in a new vocabulary word, Daddy and I wanted to sink into the ground and die. The big man walked off like he hadn't noticed Roen dancing and squealing. I felt sooooooo bad. It was a horrible moment.

The thing that interested me is that Ro rarely comments on anyone's physical appearance and it took someone of extraordinary size to even get him to say the word. Fat isn't a bad feature to Roen though. Many children's books use fat as a common descriptor such as Thomas the tank engine, Dr. Suess books, Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Catepillar. We also have a very old nursery rhyme book that talks about a little boy that is too thin who needs to eat more and be fatter. So, despite all the exposure I've never actually heard Ro use the word "fat" before. I think he's learned his lesson about commenting on people's appearance but he's only four so it's sure to come up again. I remember hearing a girl tell an old lady in the grocery line that she had very yellow teeth. eeeeee. You have to get over being easily embarrassed when you're a parent.

evelyn

Ro has had a bit of a fixation with a little girl in his class. He's always telling me how much he likes her and how he wants her to come over and play. He would like to share his toys with her. He says she's nice and she's cute. The really hilarious thing is that he basically seems to ignore her in school and on the bus. He never says hi to her on the bus -- even if she happens to be conscious. She's typically asleep. When I've gone into class with him, he has never treated her any different than he treats his other classmates. Yet, he mentions her almost daily at home.

Then, he wanted to write her a letter. I was intrigued. What would it say? It said "Evelyn Dear I love you Roen". That's how he quoted it and I told him how to spell each word and each word is there but scattered mostly randomly all over the page so that you can't possibly figure out what it says without knowing. I thought he could just give it to her at school but he wanted stamps and an evelope and everything. The only problem was that I didn't have Evelyn's address. I called her mother but it was a work number and the fellow that answered made me feel nervous and the mother was gone -- so I never got it. Ro badgered me for a few hours about mailing the letter and then he totally forgot about it. He still goes on and on about her. It's really funny in an odd way. I guess I'll squirrel the letter away with his drawings. I'm not real keen on mailing it since I don't know the family at all.

WANTED: Bearer of bad news

Lately, while we've been driving around town, Ro has been asking for me to give him some bad news. He usually says something like, "Mommy, give me some bad news about the trees please and be angry!" So... I tell him a story about rampaging beavers coming and gnawing down trees all over the city and causing traffic chaos from falling trees, etc. I'm angry about the beavers so we trap them and take them to a lake and let them go far away from the city. Ro loves this and then wants bad news about roads and bridges -- or something else we pass along the road. I think he has slightly morbid humor like his mom.

Shaving Cream - Be Nice and Clean

Shaving Cream - Be Nice and Clean, originally uploaded by skweerell.

We played with shaving cream this morning. It was a big mess but a lot of fun. The kids were initially a little bit freaked out by it - but they got over it quickly. Then, we made race tracks and castles and washed cars. We also played with food coloring to make colored mountains. The only drawback was that the house had that cheap aftershave sort of smell for a few hours.