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.