Growing WarriorsJust your typical family…

Lydia’s Name, originally uploaded by deannajo.

Lydia wrapped this present for a friend of Allison, and then created this tag by writing her "name" on a piece of paper. She did this all by herself and was very proud of it. So was I. I love seeing the prewriting stuff coming out in my kids. She really has a good grasp of some fundamental print concepts! Left to right, all the letters in a line, and most of those marks are actual letters. And she has received no instruction at all, this is just natural print development in action folks. Isn’t it cute???

ahh yes, the birds are twittering, trees are budding, but how do we REALLY know that spring has officially arrived? When you find the first dead, chewed on baby bunny at the top of the stairs.

Starting today, I am taking a few days off from working to spend a lot of time with the kids. I’ve been crazy busy the past couple of months, and the girls have been neglected. Today we decided to launch this “vacation” off with an Easter craft activity. I just got a bunch of foam stuff – easy enough for Lydia but still fun for the bigger kids, right? They were very excited. “Will you do them with us Mommy?” “Sure I will!” I reply. I spend the first 20 minutes hot-gluing bunny basket forms together so they can decorate them. When I finish, again I hear, “Are you going to make something too?” – “Absolutely!” They squeal with joy, “Yay! Mommy’s going to make something! Yippee!” Literally MINUTES after I start making the best Easter scene EVER, I hear, “Oh, Jack’s home and outside playing, I’m going to go play with him” and then, “Really? Me too” and then from my staunchest supporter, three year old Lydia, “Well if they are going outside, can I go play Nick Jr.com?” – Guess what happened next….Sure enough, I had put one thing onto my picture and all of the sudden I was alone – sticking things to foam. By myself.

And not only did they leave me alone making bunny pictures out of foam, but they also left me alone with this:

So 20 mins prep, 2 mins crafting with the kids, 10 mins crafting by myself (yeah, I finished my picture, what of it?) and another 10 mins cleaning up by myself. Hmm…my plan to spend more time with the kids and less time working is off to a swimmingly grand start, wouldn’t you say?

today they were testing the warning sirens – you know, tornado warnings, etc. The girls were outside playing (YAY Spring!), and Lydia knocks on the front door (she can’t reach the handle) – when I get there she says in a quizzical way, “there’s a strange noise out here” – so I explain what the sirens mean and what they are doing. After I’m done she pauses and then says, “Oh……that’s good because they sound like UFOs”

At the library last week, she was standing with Allison and I started walking towards them and she says, “ACK, she’s coming right at us!” to Allison. And then yesterday I put her in the car and she was wearing this “super pig” cape that Allison made for her, and carrying a small pig, and she tells me, in a superhero voice, “Super Pig never forgets her trusty sidekick Pinky!”

Every day she cracks me up!

I’d have to look through the blog history, but I suspect my blogging picked up quite a bit when Meredith was this age. She was also a crack-up around the age of 3-4.

Yesterday Lydia had an “accident” – she didn’t want to stop playing to go potty (she’s ONLY three as she told me after it happened). While cleaning it up, I asked her what she was going to do next time she had to go potty while she was playing. She said, “Well first I am going to work on holding it longer” – um yeah, not exactly where I was trying to lead that conversation.

Driving home from Oklahoma yesterday, there was a dead animal in the road (shh, it was a dog, don’t tell the kids.) Being that we were on a two lane road, Eric tried to straddle the animal – drive over it without hitting it with the wheels. The animal apparently was too big, generating a loud thump and a shifting of the vehicle. Ewwww. Eric pulls over to check out the car…all is well. The kids, naturally, full of questions, ask what we hit. They were informed it was a dead animal…already dead. We did not kill it. They then proceeded to ask what it was. We knew that if we told them it was a dog, they would be crushed. Allison especially would dwell on it for a very very long time, so we played dumb. Don’t know what it was..didn’t really see it. That seemed to suffice as answer enough, until this tiny voice from the backseat pipes up, in all seriousness, “Was it an elephant?”