Sophia can ride a two wheeler

My blogging has been so terrible lately and my Sophia is so wonderful that I don't know if I have appropriately given her credit for all her amazingness. Perhaps you will recall the long process involved in teaching Elias to ride his bike. Every day I went around the block over and over again and he gradually learned how to ride independently. Sophia on the other hand was a different story. We rode from our house to Nana's and back again without training wheels with a lot of independent riding and no major falls. The next day we tried again and on the way home Sophia says "If I just go fast I can do it by myself". The end. She can ride a bike. She never stops amazing me.

family fashions, le collezione, autumn '08

mary and i noticed a couple of times recently that we were dressed too similarly, like almost identically. she went on to observe that i tend to dress at least one of the kids as much like myself as possible on any given day. when i thought about it, it seemed to be fairly accurate. when i thought on it some more, i thought, 'well i should hope so, i'm quite the dandy, they should look so good'. let's see if we can provide photographic evidence...ehh, i'm not that convinced.

Trick or treating

This was Cybele's first halloween that she understood what was going on. She delighted in ringing doorbells too many times, taking more candy than she was supposed to, and falling off of every single person's porch that we visited.

It was a very motley bunch of trick or treaters this year too. We had Terry scaring the neighborhood children and "uncie" shaved his head into a mohawk and donned a vest that supported what my kids call the bad guys names on it (McCain and Palin). While my outfit was not by any means as good as Tina Fey's, my kids were wary of my Sarah Palin outfit. To top the whole thing off we pulled a wagon filled with beer on our adventure which made visiting our neighbors even more amusing. Cybele's preference was to ride in the beer wagon and eat lollipop after lollipop.

By the end of the night my kids were jacked up on sugar, Cybele was covered head to toe in lollipop juice and nobody wanted anything for dinner. A perfect halloween.

he can dance if he wants to

elias had a tune-up on his braces yesterday, and it caused quite a bit of discomfort and pain. he is a tough little trooper, and tries not to complain, so the fact that he has admitted to the pain tells us that it must be pretty bad. poor baby.
the day before, we went to the pumpkin patch, where he was flinging himself with reckless abandon off a nearly six foot high pyramid of hay bales. i am glad to see him showing such confidence in youthful indestructibility. he was also the only kid who didnt whine and try to quit when mary and i got us pretty good and lost in the maize maze. finally, elias' interest in Transformers, and especially the one called Bumblebee, has infected his sisters to such an extent that no kids in our family can see a yellow automobile without making some remark that sounds something like bumblebee, even if it's mumb-bee-bee.

more than meets the eye

This morning Elias woke up with me to eat breakfast at 5 am and watch transformers before I left for work. I have to admit that I have always enjoyed watching transformers and that I frequently watched it when I was way too old to be watching it. Now its different because its something I do with just Elias and its the sweetest admission of love and loyalty.

Every night when I put the kids to bed Elias asks if I work the next day and if I do he does two things. First he puts his watch bACK on his wrist before he goes to bed and then he insists that I wake him up when I wake up. The one time that I didn't wake him up he was devastated and he told Tristan that it was his fault that he didn't have breakfast with me because he didn't put his watch on before bed.
He started waking himself up in the middle of the night and then coming in to my room to ask how soon we were waking up so I gave in and settled on waking my poor little man every morning that I work. Maybe next Sophia will want to start waking up with us too.... oh wait, that would never happen!

she IS funny

sophia loooves gyoza. she likes pickles. she doesnt like bluberries anymore. she did when she was a littler person. she is becoming increasingly tolerant of having her hair brushed. when she picks out her own clothes for the day, her outfits tend to be outrageous. i think she is trying to wear as many different pretty patterns as she can manage. she likes the song 'you don't own me', by leslie gore. she likes to sing it with mary. she is very protective of cybele. she happily plays along with games in which elias quizzes her at length about animal statistics and trivia. she doesn't love it when people laugh in appreciation at what she does, and it doesn't help when we explain that it's because she is so funny. she says she's not. but she is.

The avant-garde

Yesterday when I picked Sophia up from school... oh yeah! Sophia is in school. Kindergarten all day five days a week and she LOVES it! Plus apparently she is smart! But anyway, when I picked Sophia up from school she was in the playroom with her two best friends (as of today) and they were getting ready to put on a play. The room had all these chairs arranged on one side of the room and the girls were wearing various costumes so I sat down next to their math teacher to watch the play. After some giggling, brief monologues and a lot of walking back and forth in front of the audience, we decided to let the girls practice some more before putting on their play.

Unfortunately I worked today and did not get to see the play because for some reason 12 hour shifts are the norm around here and school doesn't end at 8pm, but I made sure to ask about it as soon as I got the chance. Strangely enough, I didn't ask as soon as I got home from work because a couple of mormons were standing on my front porch offering up Jesus Christ, and my husband noticed that they looked a little too scrawny. This of course meant a strange dinner with two teenage boys in shirts and ties and a lot of talk about the difference between acting like Christ and prosteletizing your beliefs. But as soon as I could politely excuse myself from dinner I asked Sophia about her play.

Sophia told me that she did perform her play today and that it went really well. I asked her what it was about and she said "Kitties". This seemed a little strange to me cause the girls mostly wore tutus and one of the girls wore a black veil but whatever. Then I asked Sophia what she did in the play and she said I sang a song. What song. The song from star wars. Which one is that? Doo doo doo dooooo do, doo doo doo dooooo do, doo doo doo, doooooo, do dum dum da da. This of course had everything to do with kitties!

polysyllabicism.

in the middle of the week preceding her 2nd birfday, cybele decided to start speaking alot more. her ability to speak had been quite good before, but she lacked any desire or motivation to do so. suddenly she found it fun to repeat anything she felt like saying. always a good time to start watching what we say. so far, she loves to mimic sophia when the latter utters one of her favorite phrases, 'it's not fair!' the unexpected windfall from this phenomenon is that it disarms sophia and relieves her of her feelings of injustice and dissatisfaction, because it is so funny to hear cybele mush up and soften the sounds in the words and regurgitate them: 'ithnawfeeeaaahhh.' i have also succeeded in getting her to say 'i drive a car' but with less consistency and enjoyment.

Karate Kid

Cybele is now officially two years old. Behaviorally she has been two for about the last five or six months but she likes to do things ahead of the curve so my 18 month old was frequently greeted with the reassuring words from strangers "don't worry she's just going through the terrible twos". But she's not two! Well now she is and after spending her birthday with her getting shots at the doctor, having her blood drawn (mean!) and then finally braving the Indiana State Fair, I think I understand why she acts the way she does. We clearly do not know how to entertain this little monster. She did not want to have deep fried pepsi (I am serious about that one and I don't know how it is done) and she thought the barking sheep was a dog, the doctor was not any fun and then after all that we made her have a nap. We are seriously the meanest parents ever. The good thing is we finished the night off in our typical style with a big dinner and lots of adoring adults. We had mac and cheese and black eyed pees and Cybele killed her dinner with karate.

devotion

elias--who i have recently discovered is referred to at school, not always with proper or sufficient appreciation, as 'the bird genius kid' (they'll pay)-- is growing very quickly, it seems to me. i mean he's enormous. but he's still a little boy who adores his mommy. he'll follow her anywhere, probably even into oncoming traffic. he even gets up with mary at 5:30 a.m. on days when she has work, cus he doesnt want her to go, or at least doesnt want her to have to go off lonely. so he gets up with her and they sit around eating english muffins and watching transformers. it's barely even dawn. but mommy's there, so to elias, it's a party.

Elias X 3 Years

back when we were living in Richmond

afterwards bele came along

off to the keys for family vacation

returning to the swing

G(lobal) P(ositioning) S(ophia)

Sophia would probably be happy if she could go to school year-round. she seems disappointed on days when she doesn't go to her school-run summer camp. today at summer camp, they're going swimmin', and one of the teachers told me they were going to attach a g.p.s. chip to sophia so they could keep track of her. (i think it was a joke.) sophia is extremely spritely when she gets to be doing exactly what she wants, and so full of an overabundance of exuberance that it is a dizzying pleasure to watch her. it is also really hard to keep up with her. i only asked the teacher that, if they are to install such a chip on her, we be allowed to take it home with us for other extra-curricular uses.
unrelated: the other day sophia came up to me with a thoughtful look on her face and said, "papa, how does my nose breath smell?"

Farm swing

We took our kids to a wonderful farm wedding yesterday and it struck me yet again how quickly and easily kids can become best friends. The uniting factor was a simple piece of rope tied to a tree over a hill which the kids took turns holding onto and falling off of, until the mystery man who led this troupe of kids on their swinging adventures tied a seat to the rope. This kicked things up a notch and got my heart beating a little faster as I watched my kids (sophia especially) fly at least twenty feet up in the air.

Sophia loves to swing and always has. Of all my kids she was the only one content in a baby swing for more than a couple of minutes. Even as a toddler I used to be able to garden with Phia sitting in the baby swing and Elias, Tristan and I would take turns walking over and pushing her really high only to let her swing herself back to a stop and wait for the next passersby. So I suppose I should not be surprised that the consensus is that Sophia loved swinging the most last night, she always has.

red-stained shirt

cybele is up and down, hot and cold, all or nothing, infuriating or lose-your-pants charming. for instance, i want her to enjoy a bowl of strawberries with me. we drop off the bigkids at camp and head downtown to the a-farmer's a-market. we get a couple-a quarts of the last berries of the season. among other things. we get home and i wash them, and she looks interested, maybe even enthusiastic. but i dont let her run around with the bowl, and i dont give her my coffee spoon to eat them with. so she scoffs and sneers at them. fine with me, whatever. i drink my coffee and absently eat a berry now and then. but when i set my spoon on the side of the bowl, she zooms to the table, convinced i have kowtowed to her demands, and commences to house every last berry, hand over fist, breathing only thru her nose, juice dribbling down her perfect chin, onto her hand-me-down pirate shirt from captain james via 'phia, and she glares at me when i try to take one to eat myself. then they are gone and we are both pleased.

Baby Bear

It has been close to forever since I last blogged. Since then, Elias turned 7, Sophia turned 5 and we bought a house. So it's not like we are just sitting here twiddling our thumbs. We have been busy, I swear.

Cybele is continuing to be a maniac child. Recently she was heard screaming and I found her covered in blood. She somehow managed to smash her little face, right by her eye, into the new slate hearth at our shiny new house. She had blood pouring down her face and I was certain that we were going to be taking our first emergency trip to the hospital. Ultimately, I calmed down applied pressure and bandaged her up. Good as new, except now we get those looks when we are out in public from all the self righteous people implying that we are either beating our toddler or neglecting her.

We are doing neither one of course and Cybele really is a darling she is just younger than she thinks she is. She wants so badly to be seven or even five like her big siblings. She hates her diaper and is trying to potty train herself and is able to escape all things baby, i.e. cribs, high chairs, sippy cups. It is endearing and exhausting but mostly it makes me sad that she is so eager to grow when I am so eager to keep her young.

Elias, National Science Correspondent

elias has become an extremely proficient cyclist, and in the process, has developed fine scouting skills. yesterday, he curbed his bike by our new house in time to spot the frog before it hopped into the ditch. then, he lead us around the corner, where he prudently noted the location of the greatest small-bird-racket, and fixed his perspicacious gaze there, until he saw the thing we were there to see: the Cooper's Hawk who lives there with his old lady. he uses deductive reasoning and environmental clues to locate what he seeks to find. come on, that's hot.

My sweet little bunny

Some of you may know that Elias inherited my teeth. He has teeth in now that shouldn't be in for another six years or so and while this doesn't sound so terrible to be advanced, the fact is, that there isn't enough space for the teeth that should be coming in the next year or so. So he is getting braces and in case you forgot, he is six. SIX! Who gets braces when there six?

So Elias needs something on the top of his mouth to push his teeth out wider and then later he needs traditional braces on six teeth to try to push his teeth back, therefore making the most room possible for the teeth that currently have no where to live. Also, as you might see in this picture and in pictures from earlier in the blog Elias inherited a really cute trait from Tristan, a little gap in the front teeth. Hee hee. I think that is what sealed the deal for me when it came to Tristan. I just love that gap. Even Madonna has one and she has been hip for almost half a century. But I learned at Elias' orthodontist appointment that he is not such a big fan of gaps in the front teeth. Elias was able to pick out the impressions from several lying around that belonged to him. When I asked him how he knew they were his he said "because they have bucked teeth". WHAT?!? I informed Elias that he does not have bucked teeth and he said "my teeth are totally oversized... they are way out of proportion with the rest of my head... they are like rabbit teeth". What kind of six year old has these sorts of insights about his body and appearance. I guess the kind that gets braces of course.

beef and cheese.

i took the little girls to get chili for lunch, & as we start eating, sophia turns to me and says, 'ya know papa, it's important to have a healthy colon.' i say to her, yes it is important, to which she replies, 'because if your colon is healthy, you'll be healthy, and that's good to be healthy.' and i agree, then ask her where she heard such a thing. she said either Fairly Oddparents, or Jimmy Neutron, i cant recall which exactly. then i ask, 'sophia, do you know what a colon is?'
'Nope', sophia says, unsurprisingly.
i tell her she can ask mommy when she gets home from work, and that for now we should just eat our food. but she spent the rest of our chili lunch declaiming the benefits of colon health, while feasting on beef and cheese.

$40 haircut

Sophia came with me to get a $40 haircut. I almost sh*t my pants when I realized I was paying that much for the haircut but Tristan has complained about every haircut we have gotten at cookie cutters thus far, so I went to a grown up salon. I think they may have charged me for the inconvenience of cutting a child's hair because it was clearly not something they do often and I think they may have felt that they were too good for it. Oh well, she was a sport. She had to sit on her feet on a thick pad to reach her head back into the sink for the shampoo. She has never had that experience and she loved it. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head and I think she might have drooled. Then later she was getting the actual cut and Sophia surprised me. She scowled the entire time. She didn't participate in the hair stylist banter (i.e. seeing anyone new, and what sort of work do you do), she didn't smile and she didn't look away from herself in the mirror for one second. She also didn't complain that it hurt to have her hair brushed or dried so I just chalked up the scowling to Sophia being a diva. Well what do you think... Is she a diva?

adaptation

cybele is so mercurial. last night at dinner, with 8 people there, she is a monstrous thing. today, i impulsively take all three kids, by myself with no backup, to "ted's montana grill", yes that's correct, "right said ted" has their own restaurant now (it's surpisingly masculine and clubby...no, not that kinda club); and all 3 kids were great, we had fun, no outrageous demands to treat the place like a jungle gym or a coloring book. it's like cybele flips a switch to one parent mode. i've noted all of our kids have done this, and it defies my understanding, or at least expectations. maybe children just get really pacified by severed bison heads on the walls and gingham napkins (based on the "right said ted" videos i've seen, i was expecting a mirror ball and probably leather napkins); or maybe it was just exceptionally good mac and cheese.

Sleeping on the floor

Cybele looks a lot like this these days. She is going through a difficult phase and it means that she is frequently in time out and she is always pissed. She is a straight-up monster. And she thinks she's big. She quit her crib. I am so not ready for her to quit her crib but the thud I heard yesterday and the bruise on her poor little head all speak to the fact that the crib sleeps Cybele no longer. Our plan was to teach Cybele how to sleep in a bed this summer before she started climbing out of the crib but she beat us to it. So now we have a mattress on the ground in her room and we are letting her work it out. She seems to do ok with it, but I wonder what she does in there with a room to herself. Maybe she is serene, with all her new responsibilities and freedoms. Kind of like this...

to the rescue

elias is still a great older brother. cybele invariably asks for him within the 1st 3 minutes of waking. there are two pictures, at least, of him taking good doting care of his baby cousin grady. yesterday he rescued cybele just in time from falling off the jungle gym ladder on which she gotten in over her head. he keeps a good lookout. he is also handier every day in the kitchen and good with a shredder (tax season). yesterday he asked me if he could have cuddly-time, after cybele had hers. he's still a darling baby boy inside, and he doesn't mind it one bit.

Surfin' USA

Elias wants to move to San Diego. This seems to be a general theme within my extended family and it has been voiced very strongly within my immediate family. I think Sophia is ok with not moving to San Diego as long as we visit there frequently (i.e. tomorrow), but Elias and Papa have some big plans to move. Cybele as usual adds "Nan" to every conversation and lately I get the feeling that her "Nans" are tinged with salt water and sunshine.

The interesting thing is that Elias was pretty sure that he was going to surf in California. He told me several times before the trip that Captain James was going to teach him to surf. I did not discourage him of this idea because some part of me thought that some version of this might be possible. James used to boogie board. Boogie boards are kind of like surf boards. Well, at least they both have the word board in them. But, after we arrived and we saw the waves, and the cliffs and the bare-footed surfers I had to tell Elias that he was not going to be learning how to surf with Captain James. And you know what he said. "I know, it's ok". He was not phased by it one bit because he was in a new state of mind, the California state of mind.

courting

sophia comes home from school and says that a boy from her class told her that he thinks they should spend more time together,
and that she could come be with him at his house in the jungle, and that he is gonna ask her father if that's okay. it's good by me. now sophia is giving cybele horsey rides on her back. i am amazed that sophia has developed the capacity to recast herself as a beast of burden. things i never thought i'd see.

Planes, trains and automobiles

Sophia is very excited for our vacation to San Diego. She is so excited that tonight she could not go to sleep and she came up with about one hundred reasons why should she be out of bed. Finally, she just admitted that she didn't want to go to sleep and I let her come watch some tv and stay up late. Sophia doesn't seem to understand what staying up late really means and is happy to stay up for fifteen minutes longer than Elias. No matter how much time seems to pass she always says the same thing. "I am going to stay up all night long". Staying up all night long used to be a frequent request from Sophia and I was grateful to hear her ask again if she could do it.

After tonight's turn at staying up late I was putting Phia to bed when she brought up a topic that has not been discussed in a long time. Tookies. She is proud of the fact that she doesn't use tookies anymore because she is a big girl now, but she was considering them as a possibility for making the ear discomfort on the plane more tolerable. We concluded that tookies are useful for some people on the plane but for Sophia gum is a better option now that she is a big girl. Maybe I will pack one just to make sure she really is a big girl now.

timeout chair

cybele's aforementioned struggles with acceptable modes of behavior have precipitated the introduction of 'time-out' techniques in order to reinforce more pleasantness. her initial outrage with this technique quickly yielded to significant comprehension of the process, such that within a week or so, she knew when she was in line for a t.o., and indeed even initiated one herself. it has already been co-opted into game-land, but she was still happier to get out of than to go into the timeout chair. the best part is watching her climb in and out of the chair itself. she's nimble for such a rotund mammal.

The midwest ninja

Nothing could have prepared me for the degree to which Cybele can be impossible. The flight to NY was impossible. I have never seen so many people glare at my family at the same time until I took my wee one on a plane. We made the mistake of flying with Cybele on our laps. This is the same mistake that I will make in about two weeks on our flight to San Diego but it is too late to change that. She hated flying but mostly she hated being pinned down. You see, Cybele is THE baby which means, no one says no and she always gets what she wants. Cybele wanted off the plane, off my lap and back to Indiana.

After the disaster that was our flight we headed out over the hills and through the woods to our comfy accommodations at the Grandparents house only to have Cybele wake up painfully early and repeat her plane performance on the LIRR. Lucky for us, Cybele was a dream at the party for Lore and Hugues

I think she must like dancing to the eighties and eating lots and lots of Italian food cause she was definitely in her element. But now that we are home it is all too clear that Cybele just likes to be home. She is back to sleeping 10 hours straight at night, taking three hour naps and dressing like a ninja.

Finally!

Now I want you all to know that my recent absence from the blog scene is not because I don't love you and not because I am not proud of my kids, but because this web site never wants to upload my photos. It is infuriating, and although I am witty and charming (and modest), the blog does not work without photos of my adorable kiddos so I haven't bothered to type anything cause I don't even know if you guys even read what I write.

But really look at my little man. I don't really think he is little anymore. He loves to go on bike rides with me which is the best feeling in the world. We have started venturing out in colder and colder weather and most recently, even when there is still patches of ice on the ground. I was a little worried about the ice but he was not phased. We even went over a patch of ice about 15 feet long while we were passing a car driving down our block. My heart was beating pretty fast but Elias was calm and cool. I guess he is a bit of a pro on the ice after a month and a half of ice skating though. Now that ice skating is over we are trying to decide on a new activity. Here are the options: Baseball, Soccer, Dance, Tae Kwon Do. Tristan is leaning towards dance and my vote is for either soccer of tae kwon do. If we can find it, my vote is going to be for the Robo-boogie. I think Elias would be an awesome Robot.

schoolboy

i realized after substituting at elias' school for a week that not all my assumptions about him as a student are correct. i thought he was still raucous and full of unbridled energy. in fact, although he's not always the most focused and industrious student, he's developed good self-control. he doesnt run around wildly like some kids do, he doesnt complain or have to always fight against his baser emotions, like many kids do, and he isnt that loud. he is quite well self-contained and -directed. i am also amazed to see how physically well-rooted he is at his school. he knows where things are, where to go, what he should be doing. he knows where he belongs, and how to get what he needs. it relieves me and makes me proud of him.

child safety lock

sophia does things her own way. she can't be bothered to exert much energy on closing her car door when she gets in, so it doesnt get securely latched. it just is not a priority. but the days of her trying to open the door while the car is moving are still a sufficiently vivid memory to keep the child safety lock on. so she can't fix the poorly shut door problem herself, which means someone else has to unbuckle, get out and re-shut it for her. the remarkable thing is that she has so much upside that this ostensibly exasperating experience, as many times as it's repeated, still mostly just makes me laugh at the truly idiosyncratic and strangely enjoyable sophia-ness imposed on my world. i remember being little and doing things that made people laugh and not having intended to be be funny, and finding that quite unpleasant and confusing. i see this happen to sophia all the time. we're only laughing at her delightfulness, but she's not convinced.