Rollercoasters

Earlier this month we all took a trip to Holiday World for Cybele's birthday and proceeded to go on rides that she is not big enough to go on without her. Sophia is a little thrill seeker and was happy to oblige and luckily she was about 1/4" within the height minimums.

She screamed the whole way through every ride and then finished up by telling Cybele she was sure her head almost fell off and it was AWESOME.

Maybe next year we will try a real theme park and some upside down rides. I don't think Sophia will turn down anything.

We had our very first ever camping trip and I am proud to say it was basically a success. I was never a camper growing up and I decided a while back that it was something I wanted to do with my own children so I hoped that they were ok with that. The youngest kid always gets the status of being the one that is holding back the rest of the family from whatever next activity is desired but Cybele is not like most youngest children.

We decided to go to Turkey Run here in the good ol' state of Indiana. We didn't want to venture too far before figuring out all the details. Turkey Run state park is beautiful. It is like stepping into a different time (if you can get away from the throngs of other visitors). What we did not anticipate (why?) is that Cybele would not walk on our hikes. She may have touched the ground for about five minutes before she insisted on being carried the rest of the way on our four mile hike.

But its not so terrible carrying Cybele. She often sings for the entire duration and gives you little upper arm and shoulder massages. Kisses are also a frequent treat and if you are really lucky she tucks her head into your neck and drifts off to sleep.

i just wiggled

cybele is putting together more coherent sentences, with more comprehensible intentions and descriptions. but she won't use nominative pronouns. so when she wakes up and want to know if mary is home or at work, she says, "where is her?" when she sees a cluster of bugs, she asks, "what is them?" she is looking forward to her birthday, which she talks about a lot (which is probably due to sophia's preoccupation with talking about birthdays) and will be thrilled if nothing else happens on that day besides a cake and a teddy bear. we recently took her to 2 events requiring some self-control, elias' piano recital and UP. at both, she stayed quiet satisfactorily, but ohmigawd she is hyperkinetic. one non-stop wiggle-wander-flip-flop-squat-hop.

identification

elias isn't always right. he thinks he is. and that's good, cus he's almost always right. today we saw some slow low-flying planes, which were here because this is indy on memorial day weekend. he said, 'oh my gosh, those are osprey planes.' they were pretty far off, so i was thinking, sure they are, whatever you say. when we got home though, they were flying directly over our house, and there was no doubt, after we looked closer (and i did a little research), that they were indeed osprey planes. it's the same with flying things with feathers, the only difference being that when he asserts which of those he sees in the air, i don't do research to confirm: he is the reference book. when his school went on a field trip to the indiana history museum, his acuity in zoological identification stunned their tour guide into silence. i'm not trying to show him off or anything, i'm just telling it as it is.

6 more weeks

The end is near. After nearly one year of torturing my little man, the date has been set for removing his braces. Yesterday he said to me "I feel like I have had braces since I was born".

always cold

Sophia is always cold. I think its cause she is so skinny or maybe cause she is always under dressed but whatever the reason, she's always cold.

If you think that maybe this would force her to wear more clothes, you are mistaken. Sophia refuses to close her coat and when given the opportunity to choose she always chooses a sleeveless summer dress. Lake Tahoe was not a natural first choice for Sophia with its six feet of snow but it did not change her behaviors either.

A short skirt and tights was her favorite outfit during our most recent vacation and it was always worn with an open coat and followed by the claim "I'm freezing"!

come on

sophia has recently started a new habit. when she wants something and it's not forthcoming due to the non-compliance of her parents, she says, "come on". this phrase can take on many different intonations. sometimes it is cute and coaxing, as in "come on you know you really want to let me." others, it is much more impatient and intolerant, as in "come on, you don't really think you are going to get away with saying no to me, do you?" so, understandably, her deployment of the phrase is by turns amusing and a bit infuriating. it's hard to get a 5-year old to appreciate the subtle differences that make it ok to try to muscle it at this time but not that. i think she knows to say it in different ways at different times, but doesn't appreciate how much difference the setting makes...so we're gonna put the kibosh on it for now. no more "come on"s to the parents. yes, that might work. i suspect she just might devise some other innovative way to push, pry and pull for what she wants, because she is in the middle.

my soupee!

because cybele is the baby, that is, because she's our third, we let her get away with murder. in part that's cus we're too experienced (worn down) as parents to sweat the little stuff with her like we have in the past. hence, we don't worry if she pees her pants, for example, and as a consequence of being allowed to 'fly without a net' so much, she is virtually completely potty trained and she's not yet 2 1/2, which seems pretty precocious to me. we also let her make a complete mess of her food when she eats, meaning that she should be competent at feeding herself sooner too. still waiting on that gambit to pay off. it wouldn't be so bad, but cybele LOVES SOUP. i think it kinda started as a 'sauce' fascination, begun at a Bob Evan's somewhere in Appalachia this past summer, when mary lent cybele some gravy, which the baby put on her macaroni and cheese. and, uhh, she loved it. now she loves anything she can identify as "my soupee", and will eat pretty much any kind of soup, as long as it not too 'picey. she expects there to be some at every meal besides breakfast. such a little peasant. if there is broccoli around, she likes to soak it in her soup and then suck the soup liquid out of the floret. i think it's a little gross. but she pulls it off.

Boss of the bananas

Cybele is such a maniac, but I wouldn't want her any other way. She is the most independent and stubborn person I have ever met except for maybe her father. It seems strange that finally we have met Tristan's match and she only weighs 27 lbs.

It was really funny to see Cybele run the house a couple of weeks ago while her cousins were here. Actually she always runs the house but when there were three under three running around it had a slightly more chaotic feel to it. Forts were built and destroyed. Lunches dragged on until nap time and nap time was a battle to be fought and won by tiny little people and their wills. Cybele remains imperious now that our visitors are long gone. She seems only to have gained power and self assurance from their visit and does not doubt that she will be obeyed when she demands that you sit down, watch caillou, run errands, bath-time, shower-time, read book, or any of the other million two word commands that she has.

them talk pretty someday.

as longtime followers of the blog may remember (or not), i am ambivalent about our childrens learning how to say things properly. as long as they say things in their own idiosyncratic crypto-language, they are still innocent, and, moreover, still belong more to us than to the world, and i don't want to share them just yet. so i view their malapropisms as little perfections. they gradually fade away, of course, like baby teeth and diapers. but even elias still has his: askited, not excited. sophia still has several, including, in addition to the one above that she shares with elias, breafixed, not breakfast. actually sophia has a lot. she won't say 'as', it is 'has', has if she has a jamaican patois for one word. she also has been singing a christmas song recently: "deck the walls with lots of pollys..." sometimes elias will correct her--i'll try to stop him from doing so--but she doesn't care at all, confident as she is in herself and her ways of doing things. and she has taught cybele to sing twinkle twinkle little star, 'how i wonder what you are, uhbuh-buh-buh weird so high...'

role modeling

A few weeks ago Elias expressed a wish for a brother, an older brother. Whew that got me off the hook but it got me to thinking about the family dynamics and all the estrogen in the house. Elias has two sisters and I think that he has a great time with them but its just not the same as having a brother. Luckily, his cousins came in to town before Christmas and Elias had a chance to run around and play brother.

It was great to see Elias with Atticus and I think suddenly Elias was rethinking his wish for an OLDER brother. A younger brother adores you and thinks you do no wrong. Atticus may just be Elias' biggest fan and in the spotlight is a great place to be. That visit may have been the best behaved I have seen Elias in months. He was gentle and generous and kind. He was a perfect role model which is all I ever ask of Elias. I admit is must be confusing to Elias when we ask him to be a role model for the girls and their wily ways. Maybe he does need a brother...
Ha ha just kidding

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.