The Blame Game. And Other Fun Games

Everything is Drew's fault. At least according to Owen. Ask him just about anything and he'll say, "Drew did it." Drew threw the toys all over the room. Drew colored on the wall. Drew even peed Owen's pants. While Owen was wearing them.

This morning, Owen asked me to fix his Lightning McQueen car for him. I noticed the tires on the wheels were askew, so I asked Owen if he'd tried to take them off. He said, "No. Drew took them off." I straightened the tires, but still nothing. I had seen Owen drop the car a few minutes earlier, so I told him, "Maybe it broke when you dropped it. You need to be more careful with your toys." Owen said, "Drew dropped it." I fiddled around with it for a minute and couldn't get it to work. I told Owen, "I think the batteries are dead." He replied, "No. Drew's batteries are dead."

Last night, the boys and I played hide and seek with Vito. This game involves telling Vito to sit at the top of the stairs and stay there 'til I whistle. Then he comes running down the stairs sounding like a heard of elephants and runs around the room trying to find us. Generally we hide in very obvious places--like under the pool table in the middle of the room, or between the couch and the TV. It cracks me up to hide from Vito because I can never tell if he actually knows where we are and is just pretending to not know, or if he really can't find us. I got the idea that he just pretends that he doesn't know where we are because when we were playing with Drew and Owen, they kept yelling at him from our hiding spot and he just stood there two feet away from us looking around like, "Which way did they go, George? Which way did they go?" Then I whistled and he looked over at us all surprised and came bounding over. The boys have never had so much interaction with Vito (he usually stays as far away from them as possible while remaining in the same room), and they loved it. When we were all tired out from running around and hiding (Vito and I got tired long before Drew and Owen did), the boys jumped up and down yelling, "We'll play again tomorrow! We'll play again tomorrow!" I guess they had fun, too.

Feelin' Spoiled

The view outside our window Christmas morning; snow, snow, snow! And lots of it

piled on our screens, too. It practically dwarfed my homemade snowflakes...

We had a low-key Christmas celebration this year, which was nice. The in-laws came over Christmas morning, after digging themselves out of a couple feet of snow drifts. The kids woke up at their usual time between 8:30 and 9:00, and we kept them downstairs until the in-laws got here so they could see the kids' faces when they saw all the loot under the tree. Drew and Owen were pretty excited. They ran around for a couple minutes yelling, "Presents! Presents!!" before they even thought to sit down and see which presents were for them. Samantha was interested in pretty much every present Drew and Owen got, particularly the trikes that we got for them. Whenever we handed her a present and helped her unwrap it, she promptly threw the contents of said present on the floor and toddled over to play with whatever car or truck her brothers were playing with.

Santa brought the kids a Thomas the Train set, and expansion kit (it's sorta visible in the bottom of the phot0). David and I got them a trike and Grandma and Grandpa C. got them another trike.

I got so much good loot this year. I wasn't expecting much because whenever David asked me what I wanted and I told him, (take new frying pans for example) he said, "Why would you want pans? You've already got pans, and they work just fine." (Except that they don't, because they're warped, because a certain husband loves to hear the sizzle of a hot pan under cold tap water.) I also asked for a drill, to which he replied, "Why don't you just borrow my dad's?" (Because I never know when I'm going to need to fix something or put a new hole in the wall real quick, and it's kind of a pain to be borrowing stuff from people all the time.) Finally I got sick of trying to justify my wish list, so I told him to get me some textbooks.

After all that, I was pretty surprised when there was an electric griddle and a cordless drill under the tree with my name on them. And my father in law loves to get people tools, so I've got a gazillion piece drill bit set, three tool boxes to put stuff in, an electric screwdriver (not sure how that's entirely different than a drill fitted with a Philips bit, except that it has thirty different sizes), a leveler, and a new tape measure.

It seems like Christmas is still going on; I'm still finding bits of wrapping paper here and there, and I haven't even started sorting through old toys to figure out which ones to donate (and where to donate them), which ones to keep and which ones to put in the trash. I'll have to do all that when my boys aren't looking, though, because they seem to think everything is a toy, even if it's missing the majority of its parts. A beloved favorite of Drew's is a red truck that has no wheels, no bed, only one door. I don't know why I haven't thrown it away yet; at clean up time we just throw it in the toy box with everything else. Drew digs it out from the depths of the toy box on a regular basis to play with it, and it's one of his preferred toys to take to bed with him. So tomorrow I've got that big project to do, as well as pretty much scour the house and get it all fresh and clean so I can try to keep on top of things (it's one of my New Year's goals, and I figure I might as well start right away, before school starts--only two more weeks!).

So much snow! We went out and shoveled a couple times on Christmas day, just to stay on top of it all. We got even more snow Christmas night, so the next day David went around the neighborhood with a few of the neighbors and various plows, snow blowers and shovels to dig people out. Then of course the good ol' Idaho wind picked up (not that it ever really stopped) and blew all our carefully shoveled snow every which way. Happily, though, it didn't cause too much trouble.

Weenies and Junglemints

I mopped my kitchen floor today (yep, it's that time of year again...I almost put it off 'til spring because of all the dirty snow that gets tracked in these days, but all that dirty snow made mopping mandatory). I piled all the kitchen chairs into the living room, putting one of them on the stair landing. Drew and Owen were very good to stay in that general area and not tromp all over the wet floor in the kitchen. As I was mopping along, I heard Owen yelling the strangest phrase over and over. I could tell he thought he wasn't pronouncing it like he knew it should be pronounced, because the words changed each time he said it:

Weenies and Junglemints!

Babies and Winnamence!

Lalees and Ambience!

Wallees and Jellamence!

I peeked around the corner to see what the yelling was all about. Owen was standing on the chair on the landing, with his arms outstretched, making declarations to the people (which people included Drew, Samantha [held captive in her booster seat] and Vito): Weedies and Mimamints!

I cracked up! It took me a few minutes to figure out he was trying to say "Ladies and Gentlemen." It reminded me of a favorite poem that I heard when I was about four or five that I've always tried to remember and finally thought to look up online. There are lots of versions of it and no one can seem to agree on who wrote it, but here's my favorite version:

Ladles and Jellyspoons:

I come before you

to stand behind you,

and tell you something

I know nothing about:

As next Thursday is Good Friday,

there will be a Fathers' meeting for Mothers only.

Wear your best clothes if you don't have any,

and please stay at home, if you can be there.

Admission is free, pay at the door,

have a seat on me; please sit on the floor.

No matter where you manage to sit,

the man in the balcony will certainly spit.

I thank you for your unkind attention,

and now present the next act:

The Four Corners of the Round Table.

Holiday Sap

I find myself thinking in third person a lot lately. It's all because of Facebook. For those of you who don't know anything about Facebook (where have you been?), it's a networking site basically. For me, it allows me to keep up with people I wouldn't normally be in contact with since life gets busy and crazy and people tend to drift in and out of my life. But with Facebook, I know where these people are, or at least how to send them a message. Some of the people I haven't seen in a decade or more, so it's nice to see what they're up to. I don't mean to turn this post into an advertisement for Facebook, I just wanted to explain that a little bit.

Another part of Facebook, that has a little more to do with the point of my post, is the Status; there's a text bar next to my name on my front page that asks, What are you doing right now? I can write whatever I want in there, but it has to be in third person because after I click post, it will read something like the following: Heather is tired. Or, Heather thinks snow is pretty. Or whatever I type in there.

I only update my status every couple days or so, but throughout the day almost every day, I find myself thinking of things to write in the status bar. Last night as I was doing dishes, a bunch of different things floated around in my brain:

Heather owns the loudest cat in the world. Her cat is the epitome of [whatever the antonym for stealth is].

Heather's knuckles have taken a beating from dishes, household chores and winter in general.

Heather had a lot of fun making snowflakes with her boys this evening.

Heather is tired of thinking in the third person.

Heather thinks housework should be included somewhere in the definition of insanity (you know, the one that says 'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results').

Heather hates the feeling of being overdue for a really good cry.

That last one is the main reason for the post. It bugs me because there is no logic or reason to crying at this point in my life; things are going well. I'm all sorts of blessed (and that makes me want to cry). It's such a happy time of year for us (that makes me want to cry), but not for others (that makes me want to cry, too).

Yesterday was the Christmas program at church. A gal and her five year old daughter sang a beautiful song about the story of Christ's life (it made me want to cry).

My friend Marissa had a beautiful baby boy last week. I read all about him on her blog. He's so sweet. (And, of course, it made me want to cry.)

Drew and Owen have been watching Christmas episodes of their favorite cartoons. Wubbzy helps Santa deliver the Christmas presents for everyone in Wuzzleburg and Santa give Wubbzy a special gift that turns out to be the exact thing Wubbzy had been looking for to give to his friend Daizy. (I got all teary-eyed). Little Bill's great grandma was stuck at the airport on Christmas Eve so Little Bill and his siblings wrote a letter to Santa asking him to bring her back for Christmas. She shows up Christmas morning having "gotten a ride with someone who was headed her way." (Teared up some more.)

And has anyone seen the Pampers commercial? The lady singing "Silent Night" and the pictures of all the little babies sleeping almost sends me over the edge every time.

Last night as I was doing dishes, I felt like I wanted to cry again. This to me makes more sense; housework is like having teeth pulled without anesthetics.

I felt quite a bit better this morning, so I'm attributing most of my emotional distress to fatigue. And I'll probably blame some of it on hormones, just because, as a female, I can do that.

Drew's Magic Trick

Samantha is 15 months! We took her to the doc for a checkup yesterday. As is our style, we were running a little late for the appointment, even though we started getting ready a little early. We finally got every one's coats on and were headed out the door when I noticed something around Drew's shoe. It was his favorite striped underpants! I thought, "Oh, maybe they were just on the floor in his room and he stepped on them and they got stuck..." but then I thought, "I'm pretty sure those are the ones he was wearing earlier today..." So I peeked in his britches and sure enough, he was going commando. I'm not sure how he did it; as far as I remembered, he had nothing around his ankle when I put his shoes on, and nothing around his shoes when I put his jacket on. I guess he's just magic!

Samantha is healthy and doing well. The doc asked all the development questions and she's right on track, except I had to rack my brain to think of four words that she says. He told me names count, so she's got more than four. They are: kee-ee (kitty), a-dah (lay down; this she says to Vito and points her little fist at him. It's so cute), Ooooo-weeeeeen (Owen), hi, 'aye ('bye), mum (some), muh (more; she also signs this one, and does the sign for milk, too). She babbles quite a bit, but not as much as she used to it seems.

Samantha's height, weight and head circumference are on a steady upward curve, and she's on the 25th percentile for all of them. She weighs 21 lbs, 14 oz. She's 30 inches long and her head is 18 inches. So far she's following the same pattern as her brothers: she eats a ton, but she's still a little shrimpy. I love it.