Famous Lines

Andy: I just like to be asleep.


The child isn't even close to being a teenager yet.....

Note to self: remember to get up periodically

Writing writing....grading online grading online....more writing...can I even focus anymore if it isn't on a computer screen? I wonder when my eyeballs will fall out.

Moral(ish) Dilemma

Do I ask a professor for clarification on an assignment at the risk that she may have forgotten about it and my asking will only serve to remind her?

Academic Question

If you live in a hole somewhere and have never seen all of the Star Wars movies...this post contains serious spoilers....





I have been pondering....where should you start the Star Wars saga for someone who had never seen it before? Should it be chronologically at the beginning of the story as Lucas meant to originally tell it?

Does it make a difference to already know that Darth Vader is Anakin? or that Luke & Leia are twins? Or that Senator Palaptine is really Darth Sidious?
Where would you start?

Mommy Skills

Sometimes I amaze even myself.
Last night I went in to check on Josie after I could hear her coughing.
She was asleep in her bed (well...half on half off) but had obviously coughed up some phlegm.
I managed to change her pillow and sheets with her still asleep on the bed and I didn't wake her up. Granted she is on a crib mattress in a junior bed, but I still count it as a major accomplishment.

Go to Sleep

While the children go to bed pretty easily (though not without the occasional complaint), some days it can be tough to get them to stay in bed.
Last it had been quiet for awhile. Jim and I had done a few things upstairs and then headed downstairs. After awhile I heard Jim say "Josie go back to bed" and sure enough a little face was peering around the wall at the bottom of the steps. We heard her go back upstairs and close her door.
I was impressed that she had gone back to bed on her own....but then a few minutes later she showed up again.
This time she was naked and carrying two skirts and a pair of socks.
I asked if something had happened to her pajamas.
Her answer....I took them off.
Ok, so duh...I took her back upstairs and put her in some pajamas that I knew she could not get out of on her own. I tried laying her in my spot on our bed in hopes that it would help.
After a little while we could hear chairs being drug around in the kitchen.
She came back downstairs with a glass requesting I put water in it. I already had a glass with water so I let her have some of mine.
She played for awhile and finally a certain aroma made its way over to Jim and I. After a diaper change she was finally able to go to sleep.

Alive and Well

The Imaginary friends are alive and well at our household.
Andy still has a "crew" of people. Now they have developed slightly more interesting names. He came in this morning and informed me that one of his friends had a birthday today and had slept in my bed. He had missed part of the party for Tigah so he wasn't going to have cake, but that Tigah was going to open presents on our bed. A few minutes later he decided that there were more with birthdays. It started that there were two birthdays and when I asked whether the two were twins he said yes...lots of twins and held up ten fingers. Aparently Tigah and his 9 siblings were all turning 3 today.
Doug has "brothers" as in Star Wars Clone brothers. They have interesting names like Chabul and help him fend off bad guys.
Hopefully we have squelched the Imaginary Friends getting the boys in trouble at preschool. When I asked about Time Outs yesterday as we were coming home, Doug said that he had told his pretend brothers to stay at home.

Tired

I feel like my butt is molded into the shape of the chair at my computer. It is the end of the semester. I have things to grade. I have things to create for my own assignments. I have summer program applications to organize. Josie had a fever last night. It's just one of those days when I'm running around crazy like.
I'll settle for my head on my shoulders let alone my head screwed on straight.

What a wonderful world...

Having children I am beginning to get a glimmer (or maybe a blinding light) about how complicated we adults have made the "rules" of the world.

Exhibit 1:
Doug has issues with laundry. Perhaps you are not guilty of using this term quite so much in a blanket sense to cover so many different stages of the clothes cycle as I am. For me laundry could be the stuff in the dirty clothes hamper, the items in the washing machine, the stuff in the dryer or out on the line, or the pile in the basket waiting to be folded. Unless it is in the drawer or on your body it is laundry.
So I have had to work on being a little more specific with Doug. I think we are past him putting his shoes in the laundry hamper (a little over zealous in clearing off clothes he was taking off...and believe me it made it awfully hard to find his shoes when we next needed to go out). I just have to make sure that he doesn't put clothes from the drawer directly into the hamper and that he doesn't put dirty clothes in with the clean clothes in a basket.

Exhibit 2:
How do you explain to Andy that, while I don't mind in our backyard and it is fine on Nana and Pop's farm, it is not acceptable to pull down your pants and pee on the playground during preschool....

How to dress for success

It is interesting to me how Doug and Andy dress when they have complete choice on what to wear.

Andy: Navy blue long sleeve shirt, black corduroy pants, fun socks

Doug: Red long sleeve train shirt, maroon sweatpants, red socks

I want my mommy!

I realize Josie has probably had me around more than the boys did at this age.
I also realize that, being a girl and having close in age siblings to watch, her speech is much clearer than even Doug's was at this age.

However, her Velcro behavior and subsequent very clear declarations of "I WANT MY MOMMY" can be a bit disconcerting for me.
She will be fine once she doesn't see me. She will eventually grow out of this. I am not a mean mommy for leaving her with people besides myself.

Breath Prayer

A breath prayer is a short prayer that you can say in a breath. I've known some people who walk around with breath prayers on slips of paper in their pockets so that they can pull one out at certain times during the day; like when they are waiting in line.

My breath prayer is normally "peace that passes understanding."

Today there is enough going on in my life and in the weeks to come that my prayer is simply "just breath"

Dads

Andy asked me if girls could be daddies.
So I asked him what a daddy was. He told me that daddies use hammers, cook in the kitchen, and that they are there to help you grow.

Camping

We are camping the past couple of days (well...if you can call being in a trailer with all of the essentials including wi-fi as camping).
Andy wants to stay "for lots of days" as he said.
We ended up at a place that has tons to do right at the campground. There is a train ride (officially rated "that was awesome" by Doug), swimming in a pool, a beach/lake area, and a playground.
The pool has been great. Josie has been more hesitant than I thought she would be. Doug, with some forcing and tons of cheering, has actually done some "swimming" with his floatee on, and Andy has been all over the place with his floatee. Andy did try a little swimming without it so we are making progress in the swimming department.

Amazing

It's amazing when you are just getting yourself up or just driving by yourself how much faster you can be without children in tow. However, I did miss them for the 48 hours I was away from them.

Fuzzy

I feel a little fuzzy at the moment. I spent all day on campus working and teaching. Most of what I have to do is on the computer and I feel like between my own classes and the classes I am teaching that my mind is going in too many directions. So I am a bit fuzzy.

The worst sound...

I had to make a u-turn to get home because the entrance I normally use to our subdivision had a tree and power lines down. I will say that the worst sound in the world is the bag of jelly beans that you thought was closed falling over and spill out where you can't reach it....I estimate there were at least a couple hundred jelly beans on the floor of my car.

Easter

I could hardly get Doug to go to the bathroom first thing because he kept spotting eggs and was very excited. The kids found 75 eggs pretty quickly and it was that last 76th one that took a bit longer. So far Josie is doing well without her pacifier but it may help that we slept in the trailer last night so she got to be in a "room" with her big brothers and to sleep in her sleeping bag which makes it special and different than normal.
Church was good and the kids looked great in their fancy Easter clothes. The boys did great with children's church. No one was in the nursery right away so Josie didn't go there until after the children's sermon. She was pretty good but kept saying loudly "be quiet" because that was what I was saying to her.
We went to the house of Aunt Jenni, Uncle Michael, and cousin Delaney for lunch and more Easter fun and the kids had a marvelous time. I think I got coated in bubble solution and nothing is funnier than 3year olds and grown-ups trying to play multiple games of badminton across the same net.
The kids had another egg hunt. Doug kept opening his eggs rather than looking which meant that he also tripped and dumped half his candy out on the ground. Andy was all about the eggs and had more than his bucket could hold. It was fun and we had a great Easter.

Dear Easter Bunny

It has come. Josie has left her pacifiers for the Easter Bunny.
We've been talking about how she is a big girl and only babies need pacifiers and for the most part she has been telling people this. (I a big girl...I not need paci)
She was upset to leave them in her basket. So we threw them out onto the front porch into the darkness for the Easter Bunny to get.
She did pretty well going to bed tonight. We'll see how it goes from here.

Colder Than....

Despite it being April and despite the fact that I live in what is supposed to be a subtropic (or something to that effect) Southern state... according to the computer it was 35 feels like 29 degrees out this morning when I got up.
Somehow, however, explaining this to opinionated three year olds has little influence on their choice of what to wear. You can only argue with them so much. Doug went off in long pants but with a sleeveless sports jersey, and Andy went off wearing a long sleeve turtle neck and shorts. Both refused coats of any sort.

Josie was at least sensible dressed for the weather.

Merry Go Round

We went to an outlet mall recently with a carousel. It was interesting because the last time the children had been on one was about a year ago. Andy (who you can just the remnants of his black-eye) was about the same as he was last year. Doug was braver and enjoyed sitting on a horse that moved (last year he sat on a bench). Josie (who had a great time on a moving horse last year) was just not quite sure about the horse going up and down.

Happy Palm Sunday

Today was Palm Sunday. The children got to parade in with Palms at church and there was all sorts of special music so that Jim and I did not sit in the choir.
Josie was cute in an Easter Bunny one piece outfit. A bit early to wear it I suppose, but she has a beautiful dress to wear for Easter so we had to wear the Easter bunny outfit sometime. Apparently, the bunny on her front was all she would talk about according to the Nursery Worker.
Doug was all cuddly with me during the service. I don't know that he would be that way every week if I wasn't in the choir loft, but he was good and liked being held.
Andy was the "Palms Police." Don't you dare pass into the sanctuary without taking a palm and don't you dare get more than one. He will hunt you down in the sanctuary to correct the situation.

Observation

It is interesting to me to see what things my children notice.
Andy notices details and always wants to know the "why" behind things.
Josie is usually the first to notice if I am wearing earrings. She likes to look at my barrette and she will move my hair to check out the earrings. She thinks that my silver stud earrings look like "rain drops."
Doug sometimes can seem oblivious to details, but he surprises me. The other day we were in a restaurant and he said "I like that." It took a minute to figure out what he was talking about, but it turned out that one of the servers had a ponytail and he liked it. Another day he came into the master bedroom and and noticed that we had moved our quilt keeper chest to the end of the bed. He looked at me and told me that he liked how we had moved it and that if we would just move one of the laundry baskets to the other side of the room our room would be "Beautiful, mom."
Doug's favorite color is pink. I happened to wear a pink sweater the other day and when he first walked out from his room and spotted me for the first time he started to say something, then stopped and said "Mom I like your shirt" and then went on with what he was going to say before.

Jellybeans

The church we went to in our old town had a man who would carry a bag of sweettarts in his pocket. He would give them out to the children (and some children at heart) at church. I don't know if Andy remembers meeting Mr. Paul when we went back for a visit, but yesterday the child filled his shirt pocket with jellybeans and dispensed them to people at church on Wednesday night.

Tom Boy

I realize that Josie is going to be tomboy. With two brothers who are right at 2 years older, how could she not be?
We have arguments over whether she is a girl or a boy.
One of her first "words" was "bam, bam"...and we're not talking the Emeril type either.
I've seen her lay down at the top of the steps and put down "cover fire" for advancing monsters coming up the steps.
Yesterday she took a stuffed sea horse and, holding it by it's snout so that it looked like a gun, she helped her brothers "take out" a whole crew of "bad dinosaurs."
We actually have no toy guns in the house. She does occasionally take care of some baby dolls...but she enthusiastically gets involved with her brothers' play. I'm not quite sure what I am raising...only time will tell.