Halloween

The beginning of the sugar rush…

 

And if you’re looking for a last minute costume idea…

Take a salad spinner and voila: old-school hair salon.  

Pumpkin Decorating

I was debating how much pumpkin decorating to do with Caleb this year.  Painting?  Carving?  How much will he want to do?  How much will he want me to do?  What would be fun? 

So we were sitting at the table playing with playdoh with the naked pumpkins right there waiting for some decoration when inspiration hit:

Caleb had fun.  It wasn’t messy.  You can start over if you make a mistake.  The worst part?  Putting the playdoh away.  I suppose if you want to sacrifice a jar of playdoh, you could leave it on the pumpkin.  The best part?  We can do it again tomorrow if we want.  Or we can carve them later in the week!

Chalk

  Sidewalk chalk has been a frequently requested activity around here over the past few weeks.  Our neighbor introduced Caleb to its wonders, and since then we’ve been enjoying the warm, dry afternoons jumping on letters of the alphabet, counting, drawing simple shapes, and just getting messy. 

Caleb also loves finding letters all over the place (at the grocery story, in the car, in books…).  One place is his hand.  Can you find the “Y” that he sees? 

Creator

Heard on the car ride home from church today:

Me (holding up an inverted "U" with tissue paper stuck to it): "This is a beautiful rainbow Caleb. What did you learn about today at church?"

Caleb: Snack.

Me: Did you hear a story about Noah? What did Noah do?

Caleb: Boat.

Me: What happened?

Caleb: Rain, rain rain!

Me: A lot of rain or a little bit of rain?

Caleb: Lots.

Me: What did Noah do after he got out of the boat?

Caleb: Thunder! Boom boom boom!

Me: Yep. I bet there was lots of thunder when it was raining. Caleb, who makes rainbows?

Caleb: Caleb!

Me (laughing): Yep, I suppose that's true. You did make a very nice rainbow. Who puts rainbows in the sky?

Caleb (thinks for a moment): God!

6 months

Happy half birthday, Sophia!

You are a joy to have around.  I’m thankful that I’ve been able to share in all the days God has given you already. 

In the last several months, you’ve earned a few extra names:

• Little Gyroscope – when you spin, turn, and roll your way across the room
• Miss Sunshine – at 5 am when you’re really happy to see another face
• Miss Tootsalot –at 1 am and 3 am and…
• Fia!! – when Caleb wants a playmate.  It’s also a common refrain in the morning when I go in to get Caleb up for the day.  He loves to see you first thing in the morning and have you read our morning story with us.
• Miss Persistence – when you find another leaf to stuff in your mouth and when you successfully eat a Cheerio all by yourself after trying again and again and again
• Punk Rocker – for your mohawk.  I’m trying to decide between pink barrettes and purple hair dye.  Halloween is coming up…. (With Caleb’s mohawk, we simply cut it when it got too long.  What do you do with girl hair at this age?  And no, this is still not an option.) 

Miss Sunshine (with a toothy grin)

  Miss Bank-Robber-In-Training
(otherwise known as “Mommy hasn’t gotten me a girly hat yet”)

General Sophia update:

• Close to dropping her 3rd nap during the day.
• Not close to sleeping through the night. at all.  I don’t think she’s slept through night once since I wrote about it last.
• Started eating some solid food, but isn’t very interested.  She’s very interested in getting Cheerios in her mouth, but not very excited about actually eating them. 
• Tries to get up onto her knees into a crawling position, but it’s rather difficult on our wood floors, so she usually ends up scooting backwards and stuck underneath chairs.
• Loves sitting up and watching everything that’s going on.

Good Manners

In honor of my mom, who taught me which fork to use for what when there are three forks at my place setting… and how to eat spaghetti politely… and how to use chopsticks… and how to wait to start eating dessert until everyone is served, I thought I’d review a few children’s books on the subject.

Achoo! Good Manners Can Be Contagious is a fun, modern approach to manners. 3 simple rules taught by farm animals who then learn the golden rule is more important than any other rule. While I don’t agree that good manners will solve all the world’s problems (as the happy ending in this book suggests), I do appreciate its focus on being kind to others as the most important social “rule.”

The Polite Elephant by Richard Scarry definitely falls into the classic book category and it follows a more traditional approach to teaching manners. The polite elephant is held up as an example of what to do when playing, eating, saying hello, etc. I hope Caleb learns to be a gentleman on par with the polite elephant!

Caleb loves both of these books, and the benefit of reading them has been opening conversation with Caleb that we wouldn’t otherwise have. We’ve been teaching Caleb to say “please” and “thank you” even before he could verbalize those thoughts, but these books take good manners a bit further and help me consider what else we should be teaching Caleb. Incidentally, Caleb didn’t know he could chew with his mouth open until we read Achoo! Maybe we should just stay away from the books…

But from this video, it looks like we’d better keep reading. We have a lot of work to do.

Family Pictures

Quality.

Sophia’s looking at a puppy.  Caleb wants to climb up a wall (literally).  And we’re just trying to hold it together until the camera clicks.  Maybe we should hire a professional.  or maybe we should just enjoy the hike.  We did get a few good pics of individuals, just not the whole family.

This is one of my favorites: 

We enjoyed another hike through Palisades last weekend (over a week ago), crunching leaves, hunting acorns and acorn hats, walking along retaining wall balance beams.  Hiking with a two-year-old is both fun and frustrating.  He slows us down enough that we notice and enjoy things we would otherwise have missed, but it’s a bit difficult to be amazed by the 26th acorn he’s picked up. 

Fun at the Park

Drawing Lessons

Caleb has been incessantly begging me to draw smiley faces for him.  Since I got tired of hearing his “smiley face!” litany, I’m trying to teach him how to draw his own.  Can you figure out which ones he drew? 

Since I know you’re curious, here are the instructions:

1. Draw a circle.
2. Draw 2 bumps. (Then say, “Eyes!” in a really excited voice.)
3. Draw a V.  (Then say, “Mouth!” in a really excited voice.) 

As far as I know this is his first attempt to actually draw something more than squiggles, lines, and dots.  Maybe someday I’ll discover he’s been drawing elephants all along. 

Quarantine

We’ve been quarantined for the past week and a half waiting out a mystery virus.  I think we’ve used more infant Tylenol in the past week than in the past two years (which tells you how healthy we’ve been over the past two years).  I’m also thankful that a mystery virus that we knew we’d eventually beat has been our biggest concern over the past few weeks!  We broke quarantine today by having a picnic lunch and playing at the park.  It’s a beautiful day, and we were all stir crazy.  We may go out again this afternoon. 

In the meantime, I’ve been smelling a lot of paint fumes as I’ve been painting lots of this:

Last time we refinished our deck, we never managed to get the lattice replaced as we were hoping to. Two years later…I’m hoping the lattice gets put up this weekend. 

 

Looks nice!  And I can say that since I didn’t do any of the staining on the deck itself.  All the credit goes to this guy:

Remember Wilson from Home Improvement?  I think there are several similarities…one of which is their uncanny ability to avoid cameras. 

While we were painting the deck, Caleb got to paint too.  His masterpieces:

   

 

And his paint clothes:

In other news…there isn’t much other news.  Evidently when I don’t meal plan, we eat a lot of rice.  Sticky rice.  Cilantro-lime rice with burritos.  Spanish rice with tacos.  Rice with cranberry chicken.  Wild rice.  Um, yeah.  All very good, but I think I’ll wait to make stir-fry until next week.