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.