Doggie

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After one too many nights spent wandering the house looking for doggie, I made a new rule that Eve’s doggie stays in her bed.  She’s been having a really hard time with this.  She tends to tuck it places, like in the toy kitchen microwave, under pillows, in the bathroom, etc. and it takes me forever to find the toy each night.  Now doggie stays in bed and Eve stands down stairs (often!) crying that she loves her doggie and needs her doggie. Sweet, but sad.  She even goes upstairs sometimes just to hug the dog :)  On daycare days she gets super excited when I let her have doggie in the car (doggie goes to daycare for naptime), but then cries again when I put it  in the bag when we get there.  She’s so sweet.

She’s really an emotional mess lately.  Not sure why.  She cries a lot, for no good reason, and often comes over and asks for hugs.  I think she needs more attention and one-on-one time.  Tomorrow, while Lex is in school, we will be having some serious mommy and Eve time.  The daycare teacher even commented on how much she cries lately.  She used to love daycare and now I leave her in tears, often twice a day if I can’t sneak in and out while dropping Lex off after school.  Poor girl.  She is cutting all four of her 2yr molars, so maybe that’s the problem.  Or maybe just because she’s two?  Or do the female hormones kick in this young?  Whatever it is, she’s so sweet but the crying is draining!  For all of us!  Hope that passes soon!

Fall fun!

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We finally started raking the leaves today, upon Lex’s request.  He worked very hard to make a big pile, big enough to jump in!  He even tried to make it big enough for me to jump in!  How thoughtful!

Leaf collage

Workbook pages

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The daycare gave me a few of the workbook pages that Lex did there recently and this one caught my eye. What I first noticed is that he wrote his last name, something I hadn’t seen before. Then the note at the bottom made me laugh. I’m pretty sure Eve would have no trouble with this assignment.

Lex's daycare assignment

Lex's daycare assignment

Along those same lines, they are doing “color days” at preschool and we got a letter home asking that he wear specific colors on specific days. I presume this is to help them learn colors. Sounds like fun, right? I got down Lex’s calendar to write the colors on the days and he sat next to me and read the letter to me. This struck me as funny, I was writing down the days they will be learning “red” and he was reading the whole letter to me, days, dates, colors, etc.

I think we will be experiencing this for much of Lex’s academic career. :)

Make more cookies!

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My friend’s family owns Ann Clark, Ltd, the cookie cutter people of Vermont :)  Her mom is actually Ann Clark!  I bought some of their cookie cutters at King Arthur Flour the other day and we (me, Lex, Eve, Dylan and Caitlin) had fun making and decorating fall cookies.  The fun part though is that they let me post on their blog!!  Check it out:  www.makemorecookies.com

Roar!

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Roar!
A Halloween costume everyone can enjoy!  A roaring thanks to Joshua for passing along his lion costume to Lex.  Everyone played with it last night (Eve loves it!) and Lex even tried it on today.  He was talking about getting candy and trick-or-treating and I said, “Oh, are you going trick-or-treating?”  His plan until today has been to send Eve out trick-or-treating and then just share her candy!  I asked what he was going to wear (he also has a Spiderman costume) and he said “The lion costume from Joshua.”  I questioned whether or not it fit him and he decided to try it on to make sure it would be ok!  :)  It fits and all is good.  I took lots of photos in case he changes his mind and doesn’t put it on again.

Recipes

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I made a recipe binder to help organize the random recipes I have kicking around (given to me, found in magazines, printed off the Internet, etc.) Today I treated myself to a little design time while the kiddies napped. Picasa is pretty cool, but still very limiting in some areas. Free and works on my computer though, which can’t be said for Photoshop!

Like the cover I made for the binder?

Recipe binder cover

A Free-Range moment

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Have you heard of this book, “Free-Range Kids” by Lenore Skenazy? She is the one who let her kid (9yr old, I think) ride the NYC subway system alone. The book and the idea have gotten a lot of attention lately. Awhile ago I read a book called “Protecting the Gift” (I think I mentioned it here) and it totally freaked me out and now I want to read Free-Range Kids to balance it out :)

Anyway, the point of this is that I had a Free-Range moment last night. We went to visit friends for dinner and they live on a farm with horses and chickens. When we got out of the car Lex really wanted to look at the horses. We spent some time in their yard but I wouldn’t let him get too close because I didn’t know if the electric fence was on and the pasture was super muddy. We eventually made it inside and a few minutes later the 5yr old son and a 9yr old guest wanted to go see the horses. Lex went with them and then Eve wanted to go too, so of course I followed along. The boys made a bee-line for the back pasture, down a long hill, around a corner, and through a ton of mud. Eve followed for a bit but I made her stop because neither of us really had appropriate footwear for the situation (neither did Lex, but he was long gone!)
When I stopped with her I found myself standing there for several minutes wondering if I should let Lex take off with these kids. Nothing wrong with the kids, of course, they are all friends, but they went around the corner and seemed to head off into the woods and that made me nervous. I watched Lex’s little blue hat bob through the trees and listened to their voices fade away and the whole thing made me so nervous! I picked up Eve and started to make my way through the mud, but then they came back into the main pasture area (still around the corner so I could only see them through the trees) and started just running around there.

I took Eve and we made our way back to the house. I told the other mom’s (the host and a friend) what was going on and the host said her son (5yr old) knows not to leave the pasture and the guest said her 9yr old is scared of the woods and would never enter them, with or without a grownup. This was mostly reassuring. I was just picturing the three of them wondering through the woods and Lex getting distracted by something and getting left behind. Eeek! Lex has little to no “forest safety” skills. Five minutes later they boys were all rambunctious and running back to the house and yard where we could see them.

It was such a weird and mildly scary feeling because I know they are all good kids and I know kids need to be free to roam and explore, but I can so easily imagine Lex lost in the woods and the older boys not even noticing he wasn’t behind them. And that idea scares me to no end!! I used to be a country girl, but I guess now I’m a suburban mom (is that possible in this area?!). Our big milestone this summer is that I started letting Lex play outside in the front yard by himself. Whee!!

I’m sure someday I’ll be eagerly kicking him out of the house, but for now he just seems to young. Can I use that excuse for at least another year or two? Please?! :)

Two questions

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1. What should I call this blog? “Family blog” and “Lex & Eve” are pretty uncreative. Wilder Johnsons? Who can give me a great, creative title?

2. What should I be when I grow up? Something that is fun, interesting, and flexible. Good pay would be nice too :)

Since I’m unable to write a post without mentioning the kids (I just can’t do it!) I’ll add that Eve went apple picking today with her daycare group. Isn’t that cute?! I’m excited to pick her up and see if she had fun :) I started getting newsletters from the daycare (they always do them but I don’t always get them since we only go part-time) and it’s amazing how much they do with the kids, in terms of both activities and education. I’m really impressed!

New camera

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Our camera took an unfortunate tumble down the basement stairs this weekend so we bought a new one. I’m never happy when we buy new cameras. They’re always smaller and sleeker, with bigger, more impressive numbers, but I think the picture quality looks worse and worse :( I’m going to have to see if I can fine-tune the settings or something. It’s SUPPOSED to be superior to the old one (and it is, in a sense, because it functions!) but I’m not impressed so far. The subjects in the below photos are top quality, of course!

An apple-a-rific day

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Lex went on his first field trip today! To the apple orchard! He was so excited. I was so excited for him. I was also a little (just a little) but sad because it’s a milestone that I wasn’t really able to join him in (and take pictures of!) Together with the kindergarten class, they took the bus to a local apple orchard, picked apples, had a snack there (apples, of course!) and came home.

At breakfast this morning I told Lex that I wanted to go over some bus safety rules with him since it would be the first time he’s even ridden on a bus. He started the conversation with all of the things his teacher had already told him! Which pretty much covered what I had in mind and then some! Sit still, wear a seatbelt if it’s available (apparently not all of the buses have them), don’t stand up until the teacher or bus driver says it’s ok, etc. I was happy to hear that they had already reviewed that in class, probably more than once because Lex had them memorized. When I picked him up after school he told me that when the bus went down a big hill he slid out of his seat, but he got back in quickly when his teacher told him to. Visualizing that made me giggle :)

Lex came home with 10 apples and said he ate one for snack. He told me at breakfast that he was going to have an apple-a-rific snack at the orchard. Silly boy. He doesn’t eat apples often these days, but he told me all about the one he ate today and what he did with the apple core (there was a lady standing there with big red bag and we put our apple cores in the big red bag) so I’m inclined to believe him. Any day that he eats an apple is a good day.

Then he said he wanted to make an apple pie with his apples (a boy after his daddy’s heart!) so we spent the afternoon (between not napping and visits from family) making apple pie. I didn’t have any handy-dandy Pillsbury crust on hand so I did it the old fashioned way. The final pie looks beautiful and Alan says it tastes amazing! I’m pretty sure I’ll be having a piece in just a few minutes :)

An apple-a-rific day!

An apple-a-rific day!