Still here, barely, and fully in flux

Where Have We Been?

Eating Cupcakes, Nearly Naked

Because it is HOT and we like cupcakes.


We've been watching these people do stuff like this:

To be fair, Lord Honey found Hannah on the climbing wall after she disappeared at the door of the day care, with two feet and her good hand on the wall, so he told her to use Righty too and she did and she stayed up.  Stroke victim?  I don't think so. 

We've been going through a rough patch, a busy patch, a heat wave, and a period of extreme change and growth.  I had dental surgery to pull a tooth, implant some bone sand (that has an irritating way of coming up from the depths when I am not expecting it, and place an implant.  Claire had one of her crowns become uncomfortable necessitating a trip to the emergency dentist who prescribed antibiotics that have Claire living on the potty and jamming up the works with toilet paper (and now I know why parents count out squares of paper - and it is not about saving money as they always claimed, but preventing the need for plunger use).  Hannah has become an actual chatterbox, and Claire is about to start kindergarten.  I fired our hippotherapy provider and Hannah ages out of Early Intervention in about two weeks.  I think she is ready, but am I?

and in the midst of all that other stuff

Claire is eerily like me.  She asked for her treat after dinner tonight.  Daddy asked what she wanted and she told him to pick something.  He presented something (a nice something) and she said "Good try, but take that back. Bring me the other one."  She is still planning to rule the world.

Hannah is in love with the bus.  Her group is not really in full summer camp but they get to do water play two days a week at school and they have 8 field trips spread throughout the summer where they get to join the older kids, and they ride the school's bus to get there.  From the first step on the bus, Hannah has been over the moon.  The morning after her first trip, her first words of the day, spoken with her face up close and set to max intensity and her eyes locked to mine, were "go bus."  She has said it every day since then, innumerable times.  If she is introduced to someone, she says "go bus."  If I offer her the phone she says "go bus."  I am pretty sure she is dreaming of the bus. "Hannah go bus.  Car-car go bus.  Mommy go bus.  Daddy go bus."  Sometimes she gets hit with a wave of glee and jumps in the air while her arms flap about as she squeals "B bus!"

The girls tackled Mars.

I am, despite my new haircut, which is indeed cute,

absolutely capable of making a fool of myself in public, such as tossing toilet paper at a basket at the day care summer picnic to try to win $100 off my tuition,  I didn't win, but look at that Charmin fly!  I am a natural when it comes to tossing toilet paper.  The statute of limitations has long since run on all those spitball incidents in grade school.  Really, I am a lawyer, I know these things.

Hello, is that you?

Are you still here?  God help me I don't know why you are here, I haven't been.  Maybe you are still here because you heard that I've gotten a little cuter lately?  I can tell because the Jiffy Lube man touched my bare leg today (he pretended he was removing the paper protecting my car's interior from greasy boots) and he left a grease streak across my very white knee, as he smiled his toothless smile at me and told me how much he enjoyed giving great customer service.  His gums do the talking while his fingers do the walking - I was just so impressed.  It is rare that I need to use Goop to clean my legs after I run errands, but some days you just know fortune favors you.  Really, I got a sassy new summer haircut, bought a couple of floral summer dresses at Target and I am CUTE!  I know the man without teeth thought so because he was so willing to share his stories with me, impressing me with how-to tips on getting small animal body parts off engines (milk and tomato juice) and other things too powerful to share here in such a public forum.  Well OK, he did (conspiratorially) sneak two coffee packets off the free drinks cart and tell me the secret to solving corrosion on battery terminals using only black coffee.  But that is all I am going to say about that.  I bet he could get those teeth back if he wanted to.  And his grease looked so . . . dark . . . on my knee.  Ah well, perhaps I'll just stick with the husband I have.   He also thinks I am cute.  I know because he pinched my derriere.   And he didn't leave a stain on my new dress when he did it. 

How did I get here? Letting the days go by, you say?

And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? Letting the days go by . . .

I can't stay awake anymore to blog my every thought . . . what happened to those days last year when I posted three or four times a week? Not that there are no things to post about, oh no, not here. Big stuff happens here. Ahem. Are you sitting up and taking notice? A certain toddler made a poo-poo in the potty. And this just in: farts are funny to little girls! Claire farts and then laughs maniacally, saying "I'm just a tootin' machine!" Hannah toots and says "toot" quite softly with a big smile on her face. Both know how to say excuse me, they just don't choose to. This is how I'll get them back for the flatulence of pregnancy - by memorializing their gas for all time on the internet! But more than the simple fun of farting we are seeing exponential growth in communication and understanding with Hannah and depth of analysis in Claire. I don't quite get how Hannah learned to copy her sister pretending to be asleep while she gets taken out of a car seat, but just like her sister, only the smile gives her away.  How could a child whose body works unevenly learn to falsely hold all her limbs slack until I have her tucked onto my shoulder to carry her in and then she giggles to tell me the game is over. We seem to be in one of those spells where the whole world changes moment by moment, each little girl learning something new about every 15 minutes. Frankly, I am a bit dizzy with all this activity.

In the last few days I have had to explain super heroes, plumbers, super hero plumbers, people who beg for money, homelessness, why brothers kill brothers (we watched the Lion King) and I've spent quite some time on how to pronounce S.  No wonder I am so tired!  We found ourselves sort of narrating the Lion King movie to explain things to Claire and to help Hannah keep any attention on it (actually it is OK if she is attending to other things, but I know she is tracking some of what she sees because she frequently mentions "bad guys" and I have to assume this comes from the movies.  I hope so, anyhow.)

. . . brothers don't always kill their brothers.  It's just that particular brother who is bad.  No, that is not why I don't talk to your uncle much.  No, I don't think either of your brothers will do anything like that to each other.

. . . it was a misunderstanding.  He didn't mean to break his Mama's heart and go away.


. . . and here the rains are coming so now the plants come back, and then the animals that eat plants.  See, now the prey have come back and the lions can eat their friends . . . well, the lions can eat.  Pass the popcorn, honey!

. . .

I am unnerved by many rather grownup behaviors that keep turning up around here . . .

Hannah took her first turn through the house in her big sister's toy high heels without crashing to the ground.  Her skinny little legs looked rather adult and Lord Honey took note that the shoes were high enough to tighten her calf muscles.  I am not entirely certain this is what her physical therapist meant when he said he preferred it if Hannah used a variety of types of footwear.

Claire keeps putting scantily clad Barbies on top of the toy piano. 

In two months Claire starts kindergarten. 

How did I get here? 

Haiku Friday: Home Ec. Dropout Blues

The matching dresses
so dainty and fresh last month
now have unmatched stains

crushing discontent
inverse of those ladies on
TV commercials

I do not smile when
laundry soap makes things sparkle
instead I just sigh

and hope that one day
I'll not dress the girls in silk
when they eat chocolate.

And I'll never know
the secrets of the happy
laundress who loves soap

WTF Wednesday: The boys in the band

Ah now, Hannah, let's sit down and read this Touch and Feel book, HIgh Five, with Julius and his Friends. You can read and do OT at the same time, wheeeeee.

Whoa WTF is that guy?

A bad guy you say? I think so too.

H, a fan of A, B, and C and a nice B-A-T-H

This post made it into the drafts folder about six weeks ago and never got further out than that. See what I mean about being a blogger who doesn't blog?

Doesn't she look all fresh and dewy? And yes, she is the same color as the bathtub, I can't really deny that. OK, there is a drool driblet on her chin. There often is. My husband is in denial. I tell him it is no longer age appropriate to drool, this means something else other than baby-ish-ness. She is two years, nine months and three weeks of age, roughly. We'll talk about this later, along with the lisp she has developed when she says "s" sounds. However, I don't think there is another child in her day care class who has complete mastery of the alphabet - upper and lower case, as she has for three months. So bite me, stroke, drool, and the horse you rode in on because we are here to kick your whoseewhatsee (this is a family blog, except when I feel like saying something more colorful). Please get some popcorn and enjoy the show.