Wherein the kids earn their keep

Then B got naughty:

In that one on the far-right, he's got a rubber band aimed at me & my camera. Sassy pants.  Speaking of sass, here is the Queen of Sass looking unbearably cute and innocent:

And yes, that's a for sale sign in the background. Our house went on the market yesterday. Nervous.  It's a long story that maybe I'll tell on another day.

Humor by B

A conversation between M & B that took place last weekend, as they were on their way to see a movie:

M:  I'm excited about the movie.
B:  Yeah, I love 3D.
M:  I don't know if this one will be in 3D; it might just be 2D.
B:  (insert Bevis laugh), huh, huh, ummmm, you said tooty.

Birds & the bees

B: Daddy, look what Kenai and Josie are doing!

[M looks out the dining room window to see Kenai vigorously humping Josie in the backyard.]

M: Uuuuuhhhhhhhhh..... [imagining B explaining how dogs do the nasty to his kindergarten friends]

B: Josie is trying to give Kenai a piggy-back ride!

M: Yes, yes she is. [audible sigh of relief]

Crime scene

I convinced the kids to let me outline them with chalk yesterday. B then made them anatomically correct. That little scribble at the top of his chalk-head is his brain, or so he says.

B joke

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Pee-pee fire truck.
Pee-pee fire truck who?
Pee-pee on a button you're a fart.

Five year-old boys are such a joy.

Little funny

B & I were in the car this morning (on our way to drop off kindergarten applications!) when a song I really like came on the radio. I turned it up & started singing along -- "I've been waiting for this moment all my life..." B told me I had the words wrong though -- according to him it's "I've been waiting for this snowman all night." He wanted to know why someone would wait outside all night for a snowman! A good question, really. I wouldn't do it.

We now return to regular programming

Cute pictures of my kids, of course! Actually, B wouldn't let me take his picture this weekend, so I don't have any of him, but I do have a funny little story to tell. He's been very interested in the idea of babies in mommies' tummies lately, and has been asking a lot of questions. This morning, he asked me, "Mommy, when I was in your belly, did I crawl up to your mouth and look out?" When I said "Nooooo (through smothered laughter)," he asked "Then how did I see anything?"

Here's Z enjoying her latest hobby, cramming herself into small spaces. Empty cardboard boxes, laundry hampers, her doll stroller, and the dog's toy basket are all common targets. In this case, it was a barf pan (sans barf) in my grandfather's room at the rehab place where he's currently recovering from a double knee replacement.

We finally had our first snow, nearly a month late. It was last Friday. Last year, I believe our first snow fell on October 21. It's so nice to have a blog to look back for that sort of thing!

It snowed really hard, but it didn't last long. Less than two hours after I took this picture, the sun was shining in a perfect blue sky and almost all the snow was gone. Welcome to Colorado. If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes.

I got this from my sister today. It's my mom holding me & my brother. I think it must have been taken in about mid-1971, before my sister even came along. It's one of my favorite old family photos.

Pretty, like the bowling alley

B was left somewhat to his own devices for an hour and a half on Sunday afternoon. Z and I were out & about, and his dad was working on our new raised vegetable bed. After B had been quiet for a few minutes, M started to get suspicious. When he went looking for B, this is what he found:



B had very carefully and precisely painted one stone in the back patio a bright green. M says his knee-jerk reaction was to get mad, but when he saw how proud B was of his work and heard his explanation for why he did it, he couldn't be mad.

Why did he do it? He wanted to make it pretty, like the bowling alley. We occasionally take him bowling at a place where they turn out the overhead lights & turn on colored lights and disco balls and that sort of thing for about 15 minutes out of every hour. B loves it and calls it "the bowling alley that lights up." Apparently he thought our back patio was in need of a little bowling-alley-style beautification.

Sadly for B, his improvement was only temporary. He and M hosed it off (thankfully it was Crayola washable kids' paint, so it was no biggie), and we asked B to please restrict his future painting projects to paper, or at least to ask us before he tries to paint something else.

You do have to admire the kid's creativity and initiative! I wonder what it would have looked like if he'd had a little more time before he was discovered?

Spiderbee!

A conversation B and I had a couple nights ago:

B: Mommy, when do people die?
Me: Well, usually when they get really, really old.
B: Like how old?
Me: Like a hundred years old.
B: (with a look of horror on his face) So you're going to die soon?!!

Girls girls girls

B And his dad have been playing superhero a lot this summer. A recently added feature in the superheroes game is girlfriends. Yes, the superheroes have girlfriends. Last night, I overheard this conversation between the two of them as they were playing a spaceman version of superhero.

Dad: Where should we go?
B: Let's go to Mars!
Dad: Should we bring our girlfriends?
B: No, they can go shopping while we're gone.
Dad: What are they shopping for?
B: Dresses and jewelry and high-heeled shoes.
Dad: Can't they be shopping for rock-climbing gear or something?
B: No, girls don't like to rock-climb.
Dad: What do they like to do then?
B: They like to plan weddings and stuff.

Can you say socialization?! Good grief. I think this boy needs to get into a ballet class or something.

This and that

We spent 4th of July with my parents. Some friends of theirs live right on the edge of the park where my hometown does their fireworks, and they always have a big party with lots of kids. We were crazy enough to let both kids stay up to see the fireworks -- Z went to sleep around 10pm and B not until after 11 -- but we didn't pay too high a price for that, believe it or not!

Most of the kids there were older, and B was determined to get their attention. He very earnestly demanded that they watch him do all sorts of crazy tricks, and that they go into a dark room in the house to see how his glow sticks worked. They all did a pretty good job of humoring him, and it was funny to watch.

B had seen fireworks before, but not since he was 2, and I'm pretty sure he didn't remember that experience. He's pretty sensitive to noise, so I gave him some earplugs. He put them in before we walked over to the park, because all the little backyard firecrackers were making him jump. When the big show started, he immediately backed up about four feet into someone's lap -- he thought they were going to get him! But he relaxed after that & really seemed to enjoy the show. Z watched about a third of the fireworks, then entertained herself by demanding that my mom, her friend and I repeatedly pass her back and forth among us.

On Saturday morning, my saintly parents agreed to feed the kids breakfast and take them swimming so M & I could go out to breakfast by ourselves. It was delightful. We had a scrumptious cajun breakfast and scoped out some neighborhoods in the town we'd like to move to. Most importantly, we had a leisurely adult conversation without any interruptions.

M found a quarter and gave it to B just before we left for home on Saturday. Half an hour later, as we were driving home, B asked me "Mommy, do you know where I put my money?" I offered the logical guess: in his pocket. "Nope! It's in my underwear!" Why? I have no idea. But I'm not borrowing change from B any time soon.

I have learned that both of my kids can open a child-proof medicine bottle more quickly than I can. I'm not sure whether this says more about their marvelous dexterity and intelligence, or my total lack of coordination.

B informed me last night that he has 14 fingers. He even counted them for me to demonstrate. He still says 11, 12, 14, 16, 11-teen, 20 when he counts in a hurry, but when he takes his time, he gets it right and can count up past 200 now before he loses track.

I am a woman on a mission. I've heard that Barack Obama's acceptance speech has been moved to a venue that will hold more than 75,000 people, and tickets are going to be given to lots of Colorado citizens. Did you know that he'll give this speech on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech? It gives me goosebumps just to think about it. I want to be there! And I am on a mission to somehow obtain two tickets.

There you have it -- my brain-dump for the day. I warned you with the title that this post would have no coherent theme!

We try a babysitter

And not just any babysitter; this was my parents. The plan was this: we'd take the monkeys up to my parents' house, hang out for awhile, then M & I would go out to dinner while my parents fed the kids and put them to bed. Sounds like a solid plan, right? Ha ha ha ha haaaaaa!!! It turned ugly on us.

First off, Z was in no mood to go to bed at bedtime. I don't think it was the fact that we weren't there so much as it was that she was in a different room than home. She & B were supposed to share a room at my parents', but Miss Z was doing so much screaming that poor B couldn't sleep. Apparently it took three or four tries to get her to go sleep. When we got home after 9, B was up reading books with his grandma. 9:00 is way, way past his bedtime. We got him to bed right away, and then got ourselves to bed at a decent hour. We had to stay up a little later than we wanted because there was a backyard wedding two doors down with a really bad band that wouldn't stop butchering Pat Benetar covers. As M said, no one should sing Pat Benetar songs except Pat Benetar, and even she shouldn't be doing it after the 1980s.

It got bad, and I mean really bad, after that. Z cried twice, causing me to leap out of bed each time, run across the hall, and quiet her down before she woke up B. Then Kenai escaped from our room, and I was afraid he'd go to the bathroom somewhere in my parents' house in the middle of the night, so I got up and chased him down (not as easy as you might think -- imagine a slow-speed chase in pitch darkness, me on tippy toes & frantically whispering at the d@mn dog, trying to avoid waking everyone up). Next it was B's turn. He woke up at around 4:00 (just as I was going back to sleep after the slow-speed dog chase), screaming at the top of his lungs that there was something scary in their room. That woke Z up. B went right back to sleep, but Z kept fussing.

After two more runs across the hall, we threw in the towel. M crawled into the bed where B had been sleeping & stayed in that room with Z (she was in her pack-n-play), and I hauled B across the hall to sleep with me. For the rest of the night, M had to go "shhhh" every ten minutes, while I was repeatedly squeezed, snuggled, and kicked in the kidneys by pointy little four year-old feet. I had to sit up & move him back to his own side of the bed twice. I actually really like sleeping with B, but I'm never going to claim it's a good night's sleep. Z woke up for the day sometime between 5 & 6. When B woke up at 7, I went to relieve M of Miss Z, and the kids and I got up for the day.

Sounds like a bad comedy, right? Welcome to our lives. Today wasn't exactly a stellar day either, considering none of us had much sleep. There was a lot of crying, and it wasn't all the kids. Needless to say, I don't think we're babysitter-ready afterall. Sigh.

On a more positive note: both kids started swimming lessons yesterday & they both did really well. Apparently Z goes completely limp and totally relaxes when she floats:

On the way to swimming lessons we passed a yard sale. M and I both spotted what you see below at the same time. I ran over there with Z while B started his lesson and snagged this for $1. He's been wearing it almost constantly ever since, most of the time with a bike helmet too:

I've always loved it when I see other people's kids dressed in stuff like this while they're out grocery shopping with their moms. I think it's hilarious. B wore it to play on the playground, walk the dog, and grocery shop this weekend. It makes me smile.

I actually hit the yard sale jackpot this weekend. We scored a train table that wheels under B's bed for $5, a fancy-schmancy hose reel for the backyard for $2, a push broom for another $2 (I may be more excited than you think I should be about these last two, but they're things we've been needing and haven't wanted to spend the money on new), and best of all, a new (to us), very nice, much bigger patio table for $20. Score!

And just to show you both our kids look good in green:

Last but not least, Miss Z. Her receptive language has been getting better really rapidly lately. Yesterday she kept going over to the dog bed & plopping down in it. My mom started saying "Night-night," and every time she did, Z would run over to the dog bed & lie down. Mom got her a pillow, a blanket and her panda, and after that we couldn't keep her out of the filthy, furry dog bed. She'd go over there and say "ni-ni" until someone covered her up in her blanket, then she'd wiggle with joy, clutching her panda. Silly bao bao.

How did a whole week go by?

This past week just flew by. It was supposed to be "my" week, since I was going to have kid-free time on my hands for the first time in three months. Z started child care, but instead of lounging around on the couch reading trashy novels and eating bonbons, I spent most of my time working in the garden. [OK, I did spend half a day at a spa, and I got all my hair cut off one day -- so short that I have to wear makeup now, so people know I'm a girl.] We had a huge load of compost delivered on Monday:

We ordered the same stuff last year when we re-landscaped the backyard, and the gardens back there went absolutely berserk. They're like little jungles. I'm hoping my front gardens do the same this year. They're nice, but have always been a little anemic. There was rock in this garden when we bought the house, which the previous owners had put down when they removed 30 year-old juniper. I hate juniper. It's scratchy, stinky, dirty, and full of spiders in late summer. Not to mention ugly. It's the lazy man's answer to landscaping. And it leaves the soil very acidic for several years after you remove it. That's my excuse for why this garden hasn't thrived. I'm hoping that four years' worth of gardening plus this infusion of lovely, dark, rich compost will help. If I don't have the happiest gardens in the neighborhood this summer, I think I'll give up on gardening entirely. Here's how the front garden looks now:

I'm going to photograph it again in a month, just so I can compare and see if the compost made everyone happy.

We had some friends over for dinner last weekend. They have a son who is one month older than Ben, and another who is about three months younger than Z. We get together with this family every now & then -- they're fun -- but hadn't since we'd both had two kids. It was CHAOS. Crazy! Kids everywhere. Constant screaming. We adults shoved our dinner into our mouths in under five minutes so as to continue supervising the monsters, making sure the big ones didn't injure the little ones. We wound up the evening by roasting marshmallows on our backyard fire. Here's B and his friend, whom he calls Bashi:

M is getting a new bike, and it's arriving at our house in bits and pieces. One of the bits came in a very nice plastic box. I saw it in the trash and pulled it out for B, thinking it would make a nice place to store markers or action figures or something small like that. What did he decide to put in it? His snuggle animals:

That's Underdog (actually a fire-safety dog given to him by my brother, with his fire department's name on the t-shirt, renamed by B arter he saw the movie), Pink Panther, and Beak. These are the three animals he sleeps with every night. It's a bit of a problem sometimes, because they are so small that they are easily lost. About once a week, he wakes us up in the middle of the night because he can't find one of them.

The first night he had this box, I went in to check on him before I went to bed, to make sure he had his blankets on. He was sound asleep, clutching this:

Not very snuggly, in my opinion, but I guess it's not mine that counts.

Stinky butt

That's what my darling, sweet B called me this morning. What a way to start the day.

Some photos of springtime in Colorado, taken yesterday evening. Oh, and the day before yesterday it was in the 80s. Today it's back up into the 40s and the snow is almost melted.

Do you see the robin in the last picture? The snow must have brought out the worms, because B & I counted seven of the fattest robins I've ever seen in the front yard at one time.

What happens at naptime stays at naptime

Unless your mom has a blog.

This is what M found when he went to get B up from his so-called nap yesterday (I was at Target, spending what was left of our life savings on stuff for our trip to China):

Now in all honesty, not everything funny that B does or says makes it onto the blog. A kid deserves a certain amount of privacy, so the REALLY embarrassing stuff doesn't get on here. But this one was too good to keep to ourselves.

My countdown clock: 13 days to Zhi Yi

Be vewy vewy quiet

I've been meaning to post this for days, but it's been a crazy week. I have to get stuff organized at my job so that someone else can do it for three months. No small task. And no free time. But here's a little B story to make you smile...

He's been very into sneaking lately. Not in the bad way, as in sneaking cookies when you're not looking (only because that hasn't occured to him yet). Rather, he loves to sneak up on people. We have this routine where we take turns putting him to bed. One of us will get him in his jammies, help him brush his teeth, and read books. The way it USED to be, we would then tuck him into bed, and then the other parent would come in to cuddle. Not anymore. Now B likes to sneak up on the parent who's had the night "off."

It's not that easy though. There's a trick to it. If you spot him while he's sneaking up on you, even if he has genuinely surprised you (and thus succeeded in sneaking), he has a major hissy fit. Even if he's two inches from you, if he hasn't actually touched you or said "boo" yet, there'll be hell to pay if you let on that you've seen him. This has been turning out poorly for me lately. Pretty often he'll sneak up behind me while I'm on the computer. I'll be genuinely surprised, and I'll even jump when I hear him behind me. This is not the reaction he's looking for (it's too early), and he'll just plain freak out. On the other hand, if I know he's coming, I can whistle and look straight at the wall for two minutes while he "sneaks up" on me, and as long as I pretend to be surprised when he wants me to be, everything is hunky-dory.

He's developed a new strategy to combat this problem recently. Take tonight for instance. I got him ready for bed. When we were done with books & it was time for bed, he had me yell down the hall, "Daddy, B is sneaking up on you. Don't look!" Daddy can then very studiously ignore B until B chooses the moment at which Daddy should be surprised.

This has been working out very nicely, at least in terms of avoiding total meltdowns. Yet somehow I think he has not yet quite grasped the concept of "sneaking"...

Adoption update: We're still waiting on our TA (travel authorization) from China. Once we have that, our agency can set our travel date. If we had received it in the past couple days, we could conceivably have traveled before the end of January. I think it's too late for that now. Why? Chinese New Year begins February 7, and everything shuts down for a week. Some things for more (all the factories M's company deals with are closing for two weeks). Best case scenario now is that we travel around mid-February. Better news -- our passports are on their way back from San Francisco, via Fed Ex, with our Chinese visas. They should be here tomorrow. Still waiting on the I-171H though (advance permission from the US government for us to get a visa for our daughter). Sigh. So much paper. So much red tape.

Evel Knievel

I got a ticket today. I was driving B to preschool, and we went on a street we don't usually go on. It's a two-lane street, and there were a whole bunch of cars in front of me waiting to turn left. Since there was no left turn lane and there was a lot of oncoming traffic, it looked like it was going to take forEVER for them all to turn. So I did something I thought was perfectly reasonable: I pulled around them and passed them all on the right, and went on my merry way.

Well, apparently the cop two blocks up the street didn't think that was such a reasonable move. He had somebody else pulled over, and as I approached, he stepped out into the middle of the street to block me, and waved me over to the side. Then he wrote me a ticket for improper passing on the right. I actually thought that was perfectly legal! I had no idea it wasn't. People do it all the time. Not that that makes it legal, of course, but honestly, it didn't even occur to me when I did it that I could get a ticket for it.

It's not a super-bad ticket. Four points. He said since I have a clean driving record and I got "a smiley face for attitude" (good thing he couldn't hear my inner voice screaming BITE ME -- I'LL SHOW YOU MY ATTITUDE!!), the city would probably send me an offer to plea bargain down to a two-point ticket for driving a defective vehicle. Which technically my car is -- I have a headlight out. I actually thought that was the reason he was pulling me over at first.

B was very upset at first. While the cop was back in his car writing up my ticket, B's bottom lip poked out and started to quiver. His eyes filled with tears. He thought I was going to go to jail! Once I explained what a ticket was and made a baby joke or two, he was OK. Then, as we were driving off, he asked me "Mommy, was that thing with a button on his belt a GUN?" Yes, it was. "WHY??" Police officers always carry guns, in case a bad guy is about to hurt someone and won't stop when the policeman tells them to. "And then they SHOOT them?" Yes, but only if they have to. "DEAD?!!!" Sometimes. "Then do they eat the meat?" Oh god. My son thinks police officers are cannibals. Actually, he laughed as soon as he said it, so he knew he was being funny. It's because we'd been talking about hunters the other day, and how they shoot animals and eat the meat. My kid is weird.

Smart cookie

(Photo left over from November -- I know the pictures are the real reason the grandparents come here, but I don't have a new one.)

We've been wishing B would learn to read. M & I both love to read, and hope to pass that on to B. And frankly, life would be a lot easier if B could read for, say, ten minutes? Enough time for me to maybe wash the dishes or, god forbid, have a moment of quiet time in the house. But he has shown very little interest, and we haven't been pushing it.

Then last night, two things happened that astonished me: first, he looked at my sweatshirt and said "Mommy, that blue shirt you're wearing says the same thing as that gray shirt you were wearing yesterday." Whoa. He was right! He didn't actually know what it said, but he totally recognized it. (In case you're wondering, it said 'Kansas.' Rock chalk Jayhawk!)

Then just a few minutes later, M was reading him his bedtime stories. He was trying to show B how when you spell a word, you have to name all the letters in order. He has a habit of picking random letters off a page of the newspaper, yelling them out, and asking what it spells -- think "Hey Mommy! What does W-Y-H-F-R-L-M spell?" Then he gets pissed off when I either say the nonsense it spells ("wifferlim," in this case), or tell him it doesn't spell anything. So anyway, M was asking him to name the letters in a word. B got cranky and starting whining "But I don't WANT to spell that word. Just READ, Daddy!" M said "OK, I just thought you might want to know how to spell 'boy' since you are a boy." B replied "Duh Daddy. It's b-o-y."

I think he can secretly read and is hiding it from us. Crafty little devil.

Totally unrelated, random thing that made me laugh yesterday: We were driving back from my parents' house & passed a hay field. B yelled out "Hey, look at all those big huge clunks of hay in that field!" Some people call them 'bales.'

Scariest thing in the world, if you're 3

For Christmas 2006, M's company had their holiday party at the zoo. Our zoo does this really wonderful holiday thing called Zoo Lights, where they decorate the whole zoo with Christmas lights. A lot of them are in the shape of animals, and they are animated. They move. Think of those little flipbooks you used to make as a kid in order to create animation. The lights work sort of like that. Anyway, it makes for a great company party, and I've gone to at least four Christmas parties there over the years that I can remember.

So last year, it was frigid, just like it always is at Zoo Lights. It's guaranteed that if M or I have a holiday party at the zoo, the temperature will drop down to around zero. (Supporting evidence: this year, my party was at the Botanic Gardens. It was warm and toasty, in the 30s at least. I'm positive that if we'd had it at the zoo again, it would have been positively arctic.) We decided to go into the hippo house to warm up. The elephants were standing off to one side, staring silently at the handful of people inside. The rhinos were on the other side, apparently sound asleep. The hippos, all three of them, were in their pool, swimming underwater. All in all, very quiet and not terribly exciting. Every now and then, a hippo would come up for air, and we'd all go "ooooooh."

After about 30 seconds of this, B's attention span was shot. He started wandering around the open area in the middle of the hippo house, examining the artwork painted by the elephants. At this particular moment, one of the hippos came up for air again, and as it did, it let out a deafening roar. Have you ever heard a hippo? It sounds like a cross between an elephant and a lion. It's a big, BIG sound, and it was amplified by the small, low-ceilinged concrete building we were in.

Upon hearing that noise, B shot straight up into the air, let out a piercing scream of pure terror, did a 180 in midair, and started sprinting for the door before his feet even hit the ground, sobbing hysterically as he ran. A zoo volunteer happened to be walking in the door of the hippo house and witnessed the whole thing, and I distinctly heard her giggle as I ran past her after B, trying but failing to stifle my own laughter.

The poor kid cried HARD for a good five minutes, and couldn't get away from that place fast enough. He clung to us for the rest of the time we were at the zoo, insisting we carry him everywhere. For the next six months, he refused to go back to the zoo. We finally convinced him to go back last summer, but only on the condition that we not visit the hippos, or even go near that general section of the zoo. Just this morning, B was talking about going to the zoo, but he made sure to add, "But not to see the hippos Mommy, OK?"

I'm pretty sure B will have a lifelong fear of hippos. That's OK. B is not terribly likely to run into hippos on a daily basis. Think of his poor daddy, who has had to live with a fear of birds since age five.

Purple thing-a-ma-jiggies

On the way home tonight, B asked me "Why do fing-o-ma-jiggies have three eyes and a big long trunk?" My response: "Uhhhhhhhhh..."

M was more on the ball than me. His answer: "Natural selection."

Makes perfect sense to me.