Christmas but no snow

I suppose this was Cybele's first real Christmas that she can maybe sort of slightly remember. It was nice and quiet this year with just the five of us and Aunt Maggie. The kids were all pretty excited about presents and Santa and snow, which we didn't get. We did have a snow recently as you can see from this picture and Cybele enjoyed it as she seems to enjoy everything. She is incredibly good natured and very easy to entertain. That being said, Cybele is not always happy. When she is unhappy it is easy to know because she tends to release a very high pitched shrill scream that means we must figure out what she wants and we must do it immediately. She mostly makes this noise while we are at dinner at a restaurant or at a store that she has deemed boring. The general public loves it. But most of the time she is just my little snow bunny. Laughing and somehow keeping up with her brother and sister.

rampaging!

Cybele will eat most anything. she gets a little piss-y if there's no banana to be had for breakfast, but otherwise, she eats anything anytime. pickles and olives, broccoli and (especially) cauliflower, beans and rices, meats and potaties, bread and all kinds of cheese, even the cheddars, even the bries, &
catfood (once). this vast array gives her the energy she needs for what she currently seems to regard as her primary vocation: rampaging. running from room to room endlessly, constantly checking to see if elias and sophia's room is open, 'cus it's her favorite, and when it is she plows in there and sits in each of the seats in turn, finds her favorite, flops down on it, rolls around on it, gets up, leaves the room to rampage to another, so she can return to her favorite one and repeat the process. she is seriously zealous about her maraudings and leaves a wrecked mess in her wake. most of the time, this is hilarious. when everyone else is tired though, i wish we could put mittens and rollerskates on her. then it would be hilarious all the time.

fish

on friday, elias' dance teacher, miss celine, told me that elias said he was going to get his mommy a special christmas present.
the one he told her he'd chosen reflected the fact that elias is very thoughtful.
he pays a lot of attention to other people and their interests and is able to devise presents peculiarly suited to such interests.
at least he is able to do so with regard to his mommy.
for most of this school year, he would draw a picture nearly every day at school that said 'i love mommy'
with himself and his stick-figure mother. recently, pictures of fish have been creeping in more, but i'm sure he's not trying to replace her pescatorially. the funny part is that he doesnt complain about missing her when he's at school, except very rarely; he just expresses it with a picture, daily, ritualistically, which must make it feel better. well-adapted.

Blades of Glory

Today we went ice skating. It was awesome... and terrifying. It was terrifyingly awesome. The whole school went which may not have been a great idea because there is such a broad spectrum of skill levels and ages, but it wouldn't be the Children's House if we didn't do things strangely. Elias was one of the first kids out on the ice. He got on, and fell. Got up, and fell. Took a few steps, and fell. Then he fell and hit his head. After screaming for a while, and passing an abbreviated neuro check, Elias took off again. Then he fell. This time he hurt is hand. After checking all his fingers and making sure nothing was broken Elias took off again. This time he took a different approach. He fell on purpose. This seemed to be much more fun to Elias because he was in control of the falls. Turns out Elias is not too bad on ice skates. He was probably one of the more confident kids on skates and he stayed on the ice for a solid two hours. I wonder if Indy has an ice hockey team....

new boots*

sophia has new boots. they are the cutest lil sh#tkickers. sophia doesnt like wearing shoes much. even in the winter she tries to get around the hassle. one good way to get her to wear appropriate footwear is to buy her new shoes. heeeey, wait a minute. girls are sooo sneaky. she doesnt dislike shoes, only shoes that are more than a week old! outrageous. anyway, it's hard to keep track of exactly now old four is, but i think sophia commonly makes me forget. she is tough and good at looking out for herself and her needs. she gets shuffled around a bit, being in the middle, and she doesnt mind much i think, we middle children adapt quickly. but she really makes the most of it when she gets one on one attention. when she doesnt, she just eats snacks and draws. she can do both things all day gladly. well, four is not very old. it's very young, and very adorable. sophia is very young and also fearless and intrepid. she's my rough tough hard-to-bluff baby girl

The difference between right and wrong

Sophia talks nonstop these days. I guess by these days I mean the last four or five months so its not really something new. She just kind of gets on a roll and she can't stop. One of the teachers at the school thought that we could probably run the school off of Sophia's energy if we could just figure out a way to wire her.

Well the other day she was jabbering on and on as usual. I try to pay attention to everything she says but sometimes I find myself listening only enough that I know when to say uhh huhh or really? in between breaths. This time I was forced to pay attention because the big kids were arguing about the accuracy of what Sophia was saying. So I stopped, listened and then had to inform Sophia that she was wrong. Sophia promptly decided that she must test yet another of her theories which I also sadly informed her was incorrect. After her third wrong idea Sophia stomped her feet and stated in all seriousness "See, I'm right... I'm always wrong". This time she was right. So does that mean that she's wrong, again?

march-dance

cybele is starting to do slapstick. i am amazed when i see her doing this thing i can remember doing myself (though now i cant imagine why i did) when i was little. she crawls around on the ground with her head on the ground like the front of a bulldozer. she seems to find this is deeply gratifying. she also has a march-dance she does. she perambulates the house lifting her right leg high with every step and stomping it down. sometimes she accompanies this by lifting her arms up and out and mimicking snapping. but i think she's gotten lazy with her vocabulary development, because she has such good non-verbal communication skills that with a small handful of syllable combinations she can express and get what she wants. she is very dance-y these days.

Ritalin for Toddlers

I finally understand how young children end up on stimulant medications for ADD/ADHD. I have the most hyper child that I have ever procreated and I suppose that if you weren't madly in love with this sort of behavior it could seem troublesome. Cybele is truly a maniac. She is in constant motion from the moment that she awakens until the moment that we force her to go to sleep. She, unlike our other children has the run of the entire house and she utilizes every inch of it. When I say every inch, I really do mean every inch. For example, recently cousin Bridget came for a vacation and we were making cookies of course. Spritz cookies with chocolate drizzle and sprinkles on top, which means there were sprinkles for decorating on the table and we were going back and forth between the kitchen and dining room while the cookies baked. At one point during this process Uncle Boo laughed loudly and we all came to see what was so funny. Cybele dancing with the sprinkles on top of the table of course.

cheflet

elias helped me make spaghetti sauce, or gravy, last night. he did very well. stirring, no splattering.
crumbling herbs in with a deft hand. and tasting all the time. it turned out quite well. this morning,
he made pancakes and waffles for himself and sophia. really quite competent with the toaster oven. he and sophia received digital cameras yesterday. they are being used almost constantly. it is like being under surveillance. mostly there are pictures of shoulders and the tops of heads. sometimes there are people in the frames.
what should i teach elias to cook next? suggestions welcome.

Annual meeting of the pumpkin goblins

On Tuesday the school had its annual meeting. This means that there is lots of boring stuff discussed and eventually there is some entertainment provided by the students. As is the custom with the school, we had no idea that Elias was performing at the meeting. I happened to ask his reading teacher before school about the event and she said that he would be dancing. We were very excited. All afternoon we asked to see the dance and Elias kept saying that he couldn't, that he didn't have the pumpkin and he was supposed to be a goblin. I did not understand and I did not succeed in getting a preview of his dance. When it finally came time to see Elias' dance I understood why I was not able to see if ahead of time. It was interpretive dance and it was interactive dance. Three students were involved. One was a pumpkin and two were pumpkin goblins. The goblins approached the pumpkin and they poked. Everywhere they poked the pumpkin changed shape and moved. The goblins danced and laughed and poked and danced some more. It was absolutely hilarious. Elias had an opportunity to be both parts and he was awesome at both. My sweet little goblin loves to dance.

zebra bar?

there's a boy at sophia's school who is not, according to sophia, her friend, because he is not "cheerceful". but she still gives him a hug when she leaves. in fact, she gives everyone a hug when she leaves, especially when she stays for a full day as she did today, and which normally happens about once a month. she'd probably prefer it happen more. anyway, today she needed to give everyone his/her hug before leaving. imani wasn't all that interested in stopping what he was doing to embrace her,
but she said "hey, you", actually more of a yell, and then "come here" in the imperative, with her arm out, and her fingers beckoning him. not an invitation or a suggestion but a command. he dutifully obeyed and she got her final hug. for snacks they had zebra bars, she told me, which are kinda a big but a little small but not very much small, but kinda big but small too and medium big. what the bloodclat is a zebra bar and exactly what size is it?

Day-snoring

Sophia likes to play hard. She is happy to stay up late watching movies and for a long time when she was younger she used to ask if we could stay up "All night long". We have never given her permission to stay up all night long and it doesn't seem to matter because the girl cannot do it. The first clue that Sophia is getting sleepy is that you suddenly hear her snoring. When you look over at her she is still awake. This is something that you might expect Homer Simpson to do, not my beautiful little girl. No matter, she is an awake snorer and there is nothing I can do about it. After the daytime snoring starts, people normally start giggling. This sets off many claims that we are "Teasing on her" and we are often warned that she is "Not going to be our friend anymore". So we quiet down and watch. Her eyes start to droop. Many yawns escape. She seems like she is never going to give in. I think for the most part she waits until we are not looking. Our Sophia sleep vigil becomes just slightly less attentive and she drifts off while our heads are turned. And then the daytime snores become night-time snores.

on/off

cybele has discovered how to turn the tv on and off now she derives immense pleasure from turning it on when off and off when on. she always looks around to see who noticed and then puts on her most innocent, 'who me?' face. i enjoy following her around durning her daily perambulations, especially at her grandparents' house, where there are lots of hallways and turns to be taken. those turns, she takes 'em as fast as she can. she usually bumps into a wall she is in such a hurry to take it tight and fast. she really careens around the place with such purpose that you'd think she is late for a very important appointment, but as far as i can tell, the only appointment she has is one with a refrigerator magnet and her mouth.
it would be great if she were completely converted to 'legurar' (that's sophianese for 'regular') food, but we still find ourselves giving her baby food on occassion, because her way with food she feeds herself is a little to free and easy, i.e. appallingly filthy messy, to be tolerated 3X/day.
she has become a mistress of the verbal combinations made of the 'n' sound combined with various short vowels. she has at least 5 words of intent or names for things that she devises using them. they all pretty much sound like 'non'. but we know exactly what she means by each one, because we're her parents, and we make things up on her behalf.

The pumpkin whisperer

I love October. I realize it is November now and I do like this month too, but I love October. It is like one big family month, what with the pumpkin patches, hayrides, haunted houses, leaves for jumping, trick-or-treating, you know what I mean. I tend to start coming up with all sorts of things that we need to do with the kids, mostly because I really like doing these things and it looks better when you bring your kids with you. Last year I think I made everyone go to the pumpkin patch five times. This year we only went twice but somehow we ended up with about fifteen pumpkins on the front porch. When we went to the first pumpkin patch we noticed something strange about Cybele. I think she is a pumpkin whisperer.

The other kids get in the pumpkin patch and they start running around, tripping over pumpkin vines trying to find the perfect pumpkin. Cybele gets very quiet and very serious. She approaches each pumpkin with caution and she lays her hands on it. Then she leans in like this and she listens.

I don't know what she hears, but it must be something cause my girl was listening to those pumpkins and she is no dummy.

better half

mary is the world's greatest mommy. and dead sexy. and a splendid american.
i couldnt have done what she done with that boy and his bike. and not just on account
of my length. i would have been less heroically patient than mary, more content to just butt heads with
elias over our shared frustration, which wouldnt have been a good strategy owing to
him's wearin one o' them helmet hats. when mary first started taking them both out with training wheels and she on her feet,
she would wear a helmet too, to set a good example. that's called superlative parenting, boys and girls.
three cheers for my wife, america. seriously, put your hands together.

Riding his bike

My little man can ride a bike. Well, as long as we are going straight. If we are stopping, starting or turning he needs a little bit of help but all the important stuff he can do alone. Learning to ride a bike has been pretty difficult. Mostly because there is no one to hire to teach him how to ride a bike. Swimming was one of my first challenges but that is why they invented swimming teachers and now thanks to Lisa, Elias is an excellent swimmer. Biking is different. Parents teach kids to ride bikes and unfortuanetely Tristan is tall which leaves me running around the block every day with Elias who only recently decided he enjoyed the process. For several weeks Elias insisted that he was too young to ride a bike and he tried to reassure me that when he was ten he would be ready. This did not seem right to me so around and around the block we went. A few days ago it was like something clicked. I let go and I kept letting go. He was riding, admittedly it was some crazy curving erratic riding, but he was riding all by himself. He started going at a pretty good clip and I was running next to him weaving from the left to the right side of the road to be next to him in case he needed me to grab on. He turned right and I didn't hold on and he kept going faster and faster. So now I am sprinting to keep up and I am so excited and all this adrenalin is rushing through my body and what does Elias do? He turns his head and of course turns the handlebars at the same time to look at me. I grabbed the back of the bike and somehow managed to stop both of us without anybody landing on the cement. Instead of being terrified Elias said "I was riding by myself!!!!" And now, my little man likes to ride his bike.

lunch-gun

sophia likes horsey rides. piggybacks she can take or leave, but she loves a grown up crawling on all fours. she might like the falling off better than the riding. she is the slowest eater i've ever seen, and i've seen some slow ones. maybe she's allergic to hot food. maybe she's just making a statement about the extent to which she intends to let hedonism guide her young life, as in,
--why should i hurry, what else am i supposed to be doing right now?
but seriously, she takes hours for lunch. that is so un-american. she need to take that stuff to paris. sophia in paris sounds rather sensible, in fact.

A rock the size of me

My sister in law once told me a Turkish phrase that translates to something like "may a rock the size of you fall on your head one day". I am sure that I got it all wrong, but what it means is the ago old adage, you reap what you sow. Sophia is my rock and she is at least as mischievous as I was.

The other day I was in the backyard while our neighbors visited. The neighbors are a little bit older then Elias and Sophia and therefore they seem immensely cool. The neighbor who is closest in age to my kids is also named Aedan which earns him even more points for sharing their uncle's name. I listened and watched as the kids played and eventually had the joy of hearing Sophia say this:
"Ok Aedan you be the prince and I be the princess.....But we don't have to kiss...Unless you want to kiss"
I have a feeling this is only the beginning. She might be a boulder.

taste the happy

cybele has finally started to grow out of some of her clothes. i thought she never would. for a little while there she
was acting as if she would reject babyfood henceforth, makeing a clean break with it. then she decided that she still needed/wanted it, at least her favorite kinds. but she is also a generally adventurous eater of all fingerable foods. her profound delight in extending her arm fully and proudly dropping her foods on the floor attenuates the amount of food that she is allowed to feed to herself. she has developed some impressive climbing moves that even her unlce donaldmike would be pleased with, including maneuvers that could only be characterized as 'gambits', as in, if she doesnt get this hold, she will bite it, face first. but if she gets the hold, ooohhhh, can't you just taste the freedom? now she is rocking on the rocking horse...by standing up on the saddle.

Riding the bus

The other day, Cybele and I chaperoned Sophia's class trip to see Winnie the Pooh at Clowes Hall. All the kids love Cybele and I am not sure if it is because they love babies or if there is something especially wonderful about Cybele. I am leaning towards Cybele being the baby of the world and therefore everyone loves her appropriately, but I am admittedly biased. The first thing about going on a class trip is riding the bus. The school bus is not yellow and big. It is small and green. It is awesome and it is what led us to the Children's House in the first place. Cybele of course loved it too. She got to ride in the front seat and she was way up high. Cybele could see everything and she frequently said woooow. Her sense of awe overshadowed my excitement of being in the bus for the first time, but only by a little. Once we reached the venue the excitement peaked. There were hundreds of kids and grownups in costumes. Cybele was interested for about a minute. As the program ran Cybele ran. Back and forth in front of the kids between me and Sophia's teacher. Laughing, falling and being adored with each lap.

sick-day

my poor boy-o has a sore eye, the conjunky-virus. he was disappointed to be told that there could be no school today. now we have the challenge of finding fun things to do instead. my preference is for connect 4. because i am a champion of connect 4.
i am rapidly transmitting my excellent knowledge and superiority to elias, so that he too may pursue the heights of quadrilineal connectedness. he is making fine progress.
so far it's been a little harry pottering around and a lot of hovercraft crafting and winged jetpack construction. elias has told me he wants night vision goggles. he did not know they actually existed, and it was like magic to him when i told him that he had not in fact made them up. i'm sure the u.s. military can spare a pair.
he has been working on his skills in the kitchen recently, particularly his knife skills, under close supervision.
his claw technique coming along quite nicely. i shall build der uber-chef.

Dairy Queen, Dairy Queen, Dairy Queen!

Soccer is almost over and it has been a good season. Elias is on Team Austria and he plays games every Wednesday against Team Brazil. Tristan thought it was a done deal that Brazil would win every game because apparently Brazil always wins. Brazil has won every game, but we're not going to worry about that. Soccer when you are six is basically a whole bunch of kids running around with the ball somewhere in the middle of all of them. Someone always gets knocked over and sometimes the ball goes in the wrong goal, but they all seem to like it. Maybe its just the shin guards. Elias has been pretty good at running after the ball with the rest of his team and even helped score a goal (I think it was for his team). Recently the coaches started having the kids block the goal. Elias learned this trick from his Papa.

After the games we tend to go to La Maragarita for Elias' favorite dinner of tacos with a side of chicken fingers. Elias calls the restaraunt Lo Margaritas and I am not about to correct him. Then we finish off our Wednesday night with the classic post soccer treat. Dairy Queen, Dairy Queen, Dairy Queen!

too hot too cold just right.

oddly, even at this precocious age, sophia understands the adage, 'absence makes the heart grow fonnder'.
the less we see of each other, even though it's only slightly less (due to school), the more readily affectionate she is. i guess she just has a very low threshold for overexposure to me. ohh, girls. i suppose i must share blame. anyway, the number of hugs heading my way has gone up by an order of magnitude since school started for us. i am still amazed by how intrepid and confident she is at and about school. yet she still cant have her hair brused without crying and needing consolation afterwards.
at least the way i do it.
i think the next blog-poll will have to be whether sophia is a)rail-thin, or b)stick-skinny.

Its a big big race

The weather in Indiana has been wonderful. Except the last couple of days. The last couple of days have been global warmingly hot and then finally it rained today so disregard all that. But really, the weather, fantastic. It is the perfect bike riding weather which is good because there has been a lot of bike riding going on.

Sophia has a shorter day at school then Elias. She either comes home at 1130 and has lunch with me and Tristan or she comes home at 1230 and pretends that she ate lunch at school. Either way, Sophia eats lunch and then promptly says to me, I'm ready to go for a bike ride! We started out going around the block. Sophia on her purple bike with sparkles and fringe coming off the handlebars and me on foot. Now I have to limit her to two miles because Tristan has to get to his Latin class and I think Sophia would ride her bike forever. Sometimes Sophia will get going pretty fast, which is good exercise, but I may actually need to start jogging for a little while to keep up with her. And everytime this happens I say to Sophia, It's not a race to which she responds. "Yes it is, its a big big race".

wet onesie

cybele has started responding to "no" with some consistency. she's always been a little better at understanding it than others, grownups and infants alike, for all the long term good it will do her to obey the word. right now, i.e. this instant, she is walking around, having un-napped herself before the big kids, and drinking from someone else's sippy cup, either sophia's or mary's, and then letting the contents cascade down her chin and chest. she seems to think this deeply clever and profoundly hilarious. she could work in naughty gentlemen's club for dim-witted harvard MBA's (sorry for the redundancy) and other toddlers. help us find one: BAM, more money! she does the act, shakes the cup, and nods in delighted self-approbation. i outfitted all three in American Apparel clothes this week and the truth is that cybele wears them best. the kara-te pants are just so right-on on her short, bowed, fat legs.

House Ape

Blogging about the Bele is always so much fun because she is bound to be doing something new and exciting after another three weeks. In the last couple of days, Cybele has started climbing. Everything. We find her on chairs, couches and yesterday at Uncle Aedan's house, a papasan. She has a couple of tricks that I have seen her using and they are as follows. Climbing up by swinging her leg all the way up because she is made of rubber, pushing something over so that she has a stairstep and then using her rubber legs, and lastly, grabbing on to the fabric on the couch/chair/bed/papasan/etc. to pull her self up with her upper body strength. I think the latter is my favorite because she appears to do it against all laws of gravity. It must be fun to be proportioned like a baby and have the relative strength of a body builder.

his sister's keeper

elias' popularity with cybele abides. when he gets home from school, if she's awake, she dashes for him, lunges for him, shreiks with delight. they maul each other with great affection. he has an amazing instinctive capacity to know what she likes and what kinds of things she enjoys, how rough he can be. she likes to rough house as much as anyone, but only elias can sustain the play without doing anything too rowdy.

Summers out for school

It is hard for me to imagine that one of my children might actually prefer school over summer. Elias told me at the beginning of the summer that he wished that school would be all year long, but I assumed that he would eventually enjoy sleeping in and playing all day. This does not seem to be the case. School is Elias' element. He enjoys reading and art and most of all science. Today Elias came home and told me that in science he learned about sorting. I am not sure what sorting is about, but Elias was excited about it and he volunteered information about it. I could not ask for more than that. Elias is also continuing to read up a storm. I was worried that he would have fallen behind in his reading over the summer because he didn't do much independent reading. We continued to faithfully read him a book at nap time and a book at bedtime every day, but he rarely sat down with one of us and read through a book on his own. Lucky for us, Elias is a natural at reading too and he still rocks his reading teacher's world. Tonight Elias read Sophia a bedtime story. He is a good big brother too.

starting school, again.

sophia is a good little runner. she trots along, in perfect asymmetry, one arm somewhat straightened.
her teachers are extraordinarily enthusiastic to have her at school. that's due in part to the fact that they have been observing her as elias' little sister who will soon be at school here for a full year, and so have had time to build anticipation, and in part to enrollment being a little down (and who should be surprised, what with the no student left behind program making the average public school such a paragon of elite academic acheivement). but it's mostly due to the fact that she is infectiously delightful. i heard a rumor about an exclusive clique in her social circle at school...she was on the outside of it. (4 yr olds, believe it) i assume sophia can navigate this herself, she is wily and irresistible, but if she can't, for some reason, I MUST CRUSH THEM.

Four years

I was looking at pictures in my photo library and I realized that Sophia's appearance has changed significantly throughout her life. I decided that I would do a Sophia throughout the years photo spread for the blog. This first picture is probably Sophia's first digital picture. We call it hippie Sophia and I just love it. She was ten months old in this photo.

This next photo is when Sophia was two years and four months old. I call it her chubby phase. She had a round face and a round body and she was just so deliciously squeezable.

This next photo is from right after Cybele was born. She was three years and two months old. We were at Eagle Creek and Sophia already knew how to roll her eyes. I think she is trying to explain to me that I am dreadfully wrong about everything, including the need for such trivial things as lunch and nutrition.

This last photo is from last Saturday. We went to the zoo and had a great time. I snuck onto the merry-go-round by insisting that my kids needed my help getting onto the animals. WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

buddies

Cybele pretty much delivers the quintessence of the 'parent to an infant" experience. it is rather surprising how extraordinary it is to behold a perfectly 'typical' baby. you could say she is amazing, but from a different point of view, she simply does every single little thing you expect a baby to do. verbally, manually, physically, behaviorially.
normally, when it is time to nap her and we are not at home, i find a safe place for her to sleep and lie down with her and hold her while she squirms and protests her little protestations, cries/whines and then falls to sleep. i discovered yesterday that she does the exact same thing, in the exact same way whether i am holding her or not. i just have to lie there next to her and watch. because she knows what she's doing.

The letter D

Cybele is by far the funniest baby I have ever pro-created. She talks incessantly as long as the word starts with "d'. Dog'n, duck, dad, down, and done. Technically down and done are parts of the phrases "get down" and "all done" which I swear I have heard her say. Nana recently heard her say "owia" and believes that she was trying to say Sophia, but that was a one time thing. I am surprised that Elias has not been one of her words because she is quite fond of him. Elias makes her squeal with delight and scream with excitement. You may not think these noises are too different, but the squeal is easier to listen to as the scream tends to get the big kids excited.

Cybele is also amazingly capable. She walks, runs, crawls, climbs and manipulates toys. She has an hilarious determination with toys that has finally convinced Tristan that toys do indeed teach the kids something and therefore deserve a place in our home. Cybele's favorite toy right now is a baby ipod that plays 20 second long children's songs. She carries it around with the same fascination that she used to reserve for non-baby toys, i.e. the remote control, cell phones, keys and wallets. Fortunately, the baby ipod, unlike Tristan's cellphone, still works after being immersed in baby spit.

While we are discussing toys I should probably mention that Cybele's current favorite non-baby toy is our treadmill. Recently we had to enlarge Cybele's play area because she was able to climb the wall and escape our smaller area with such speed that it didn't even make sense having it there. Also, I started worrying that she might be hitting her head everytime she escaped which I have heard is not a good thing for kids. So now the treadmill is part of her playground and she is on it constantly. It goes like this: stand near the treadmill and hit it with something; the baby ipod, drumsticks, a sippy cup, whatever, drop the item used for hitting and climb onto the treadmill via the smallest entry, get onto the treadmil belt and beam around at all of the admirers, dance, stop dancing and start running as quickly as possible to the end of the treadmill and finally climb/fall off the back of the treadmill and start over. It provides minutes of entertainment.

Pudding

elias starts the american soccer today. he looks right spiffy in his practice costume. i hope he learns that the keys to soccer are to runrunrunrunrunrunrun and to control space and the arrangement of players on the field. or at least to runrunrunrunrunrun. he hasnt learned to love running for its own sake yet, for the shear thrill of remembering that you have functioning lungs and legs. it's ok, i was slow in learning that too. thus, i never excelled at soccer. my older brother learned the thrill of running for its own sake early, and so he did excel at soccer. elias' first practice will be in 93 degree heat. that's abt as sensible as swimming in pudding. mmmm, pudding. the important thing is that he looks spiffy, though.

My Boy-O

I fancy myself a cool mom, mostly because I am on the younger side and therefore more likely to be hip. This does not necessarily translate well to children and I have noticed that very often my coolness is entirely overlooked. For example. Last year at my birthday Sophia asked how old I was and then quickly guessed that I was turning 45 years old. She also stated that I am older than her ballet teacher who is well past fifty. Elias has always been kinder about my age but I am sure does not think I am the hip young mom that I picture myself to be.

The first school that Elias went to was the Richmond Friends' School. It was a nice little quaker school in the capital of heaven and Elias was there for three hours every morning of the week. At noon, Tristan and I would come to pick him up and if it was my turn to walk in and get him I would call in a sing-songy voice "Time to go Boy-O". This was definitely not cool. It wasn't too long before the whole class would say "Boy-O" with me and I worried that I was possibly setting Elias up for some unnecessary teasing. The Friends' school did not have much teasing (It did have a bully, though) so it ended up not being a problem. Elias' friends called him Boy-O and they called him Elias, whichever they decided to use at that moment. Luckily for me, Elias is still my Boy-O and I can still find people (not my kids) who think I am cool.

She kills her dinner with Kara-te.

Sophia, who, as i have previously mentioned, has what could be regarded as an indominabale spirit, has decided to take tae-kwon do. i think this is a very fortuitous decision, since, a), she already does random imitations of martial arts moves she has learned from tv with aplomb, and b) one of the 5 tenets of tae-kwon do is "indominable spirit". ( the others include integrity, which we will take to mean being in oneness and at peace with one's own naughtiness, rather than the more rigid definition with the strictly virtuous connotation.) her indominable spirit didnt preclude her from having a little nap on the way back from the field trip yesterday and getting left on and then locked on the bus. she woke up promptly however, and that spirit figured out how to get her off the bus. most kids woulda screamed their way off, wasting oxygen and energy. not sophia: just pull all the levers and push all the buttons till you either get off the bus or drive yourself home. for this is the way of the Sophia-murai.

Walk so good

Sophia starts school next week. I can't believe it, she is growing up. Sophia is going to love lots of things about school. Buying a backpack, having her own one school and playing with friends. I am not so sure that she is going to love the academic part of school, but she may still surprise me. This week Elias was signed up for camp and I was a little bit worried that Sophia would be sad and miss Elias while he was away. I need not have worried though because Sophia signed her self up for camp. We got to the school to drop Elias off and Sophia was off and running. She was not scared to be left alone or upset about leaving me for the day, she just ran off into the playroom to make friends. I warned the teachers that they have not seen the likes of Sophia pass through their doors. I was reassured (slightly) that Sophia would be fine and that children often behave different for teachers and parents. Since I was not prepared for Sophia to go to camp, I had to run home and get a lunch, bathing suit, towel and a second pair of shoes because Sophia is often very far from her first pair of shoes. I returned in less than 30 minutes and told the teachers what all I had brought. I got around to the part about the shoes and learned that Sophia had already come inside barefoot after leaving her first shoes in the sandbox. This time they told me that they like "spunky" girls. The first day went well and Sophia and Elias agreed that they would both really like to go back to camp again. It was great having the leverage of camp to use against them, i.e. "if you don't eat your breakfast, you can't go to camp" or "if you don't stop fighting, you can't go to camp", etc. etc... After the second day I was talking to the teachers about the kiddos and I learned that on the day's field trip, Sophia became so very tired that she was unable to walk. This is an old trick to which Tristan and I are well accustomed but, the teachers had not, as a said ealier, met a child quite like Sophia yet. As we were getting ready to leave I noticed that Sophia had not cleaned up after herself. I asked one of the teachers if Sophia needed to clean up her mess or if they didn't have the preschoolers do that and she told me normally they are expected to clean up, but Sophia was so tired after her trip that she couldn't possibly clean up that mess too. I smiled to myself and bit my tounge, Sophia is good at what she does.

as blueberries are to 'B', 'bele is to me.

Cybele is really the most well-tempered infant i have ever seen. went golfing this morning with her maternal grandfather in the 99 degree indiana heat. that means i didn't see here for abt 7 hrs. this is unacceptable. not that golf wasn't fun, it was, but she seems to have been made anew when i don't see her for that long, it drives me crazy. i just adore her and can't take my hands off her. and the amazing thing is, she tolerates this. she has added 'uh-oh' to bird and dog'n in her vocabulary. she is mad at me right now cus i'm not actively doting on her, and i must rectify that. i think i detected that she missed me, but as i said, she's so delightful so consistently that it is hard to be certain. i will now go eat her up.