kids Archives | Page 8 of 9

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Friday, November 07, 2003

pictures of the boa

We just got a CD from my FIL of pictures from his birthday. Here are a couple of C with the infamous feather boa.

Close-up, with just the boa and the tiara




The whole ensemble. The pink blur to her left is the wand, which was being waved in a wandish sort of way.

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Monday, November 03, 2003

lego-mania

We just got back from an impromptu trip to the toy store (oh, and a whole bunch of other places too, but really, what else matters?). So now, not only is the floor behind my chair strewn with Lego creations awaiting the big Daddy Vs. Son Lego Battle tomorrow morning, but the table also the site of much Lego-mania. Both "boys" (one age 7, the other 33) got new kits tonight. T got one with his hero and alter ego, Darth Vader. They're discussing how they're going to destroy each other in the battle tomorrow. I think half the reason T wanted a son first (which he got) was so that he would have less time to wait before he'd have an excuse to play with Legos. And we haven't even made the trip up to his mother's yet, to get the much-discussed ICE CHEST FULL OF LEGOS which was T's when he was a boy (we did, however, get about a bushel of them -- that's a small laundry basket worth, people -- at a flea market last summer for $3. Yes, $3. T gloated about that one for at least a month). I foresee a thousand-mile-each-way trip in our near future.

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inundated by punk flamingo feathers

Yesterday we went to my father-in-law's house to celebrate his birthday; my brother-in-law and his wife were also there, and they brought presents for my kids since they had missed their birthday parties this year. C got a dress-up set -- shiny pink shoes with fuzzy feather trim, a beaded, beribboned, glittery wand, likewise with feather trim, a tiara (with beads and "jewels", but alas, no feathers), a frilly little skirt, and the pièce de résistance -- a 4-foot-long vivid pink feather boa. This is C's newest Princess Outfit, and periodically she puts it all on and parades around in a princess-like manner, gathering accolades left and right, posing for pictures, you name it (gotta teach her that wave, her public would love that). The one drawback of this get-up, aside from the fact that C's head is getting so inflated that she'll soon have to give up passing through doorways, is that the feather boa sheds feathers in a really most magnificent manner. Everywhere you look in this house, you see bright-pink-with-magenta-tips feathers. Adhered to the carpet, floating through the air, skidding gracefully across the hardwood, collecting in corners -- they're everywhere. It's like a troop of punk flamingoes took up residence for a few days and then left in a hurry. Minus the really stinky droppings.


* * * * * *

feather update: I think they're surreptitiously breeding. Surely there are more of them loose than can possibly have been part of the boa -- and the boa is still just as poofy and full as ever. At this rate, by this evening we'll be buried in feathers, like Pat Boone and James Mason in that eiderdown warehouse in "Journey to the Center of the Earth".

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Thursday, September 25, 2003

mostly about children

Yesterday my 3-year-old daughter (I have to use that phrase as often as I can this week, since next Tuesday she will leave 3 behind forever and be 4, leaving me to NEVER AGAIN HAVE A THREE-YEAR-OLD, which I won't dwell on lest I dissolve into tears) came down with my sinus whatever. Fortunately for her, it doesn't seem to be causing her any pain, just a really really runny nose, and the cutest symptom of any childhood illness: that croaky, squeaky voice. I swear if I had the capability to do so I would upload a .wav file of it here, and you all could listen.


OK, I couldn't resist. Here it is. (I told her to think of something she had memorized and just recite it. This is her own unrehearsed performance).


As soon as she started talking like that yesterday, I began preparing mentally for a croup attack in the middle of the night. This has always been a sure warning before. Thankfully, however, it would appear that as well as being on the very brink of no longer having a three-year-old, I have also passed the threshold into a world where neither of my children is young enough to have croup. That is definitely a plus. Now if people could just grow out of the need to have their noses tended to every thirty-five seconds or so.



This is one of those school days that doesn't feel particularly stressful, but it is taking way, way longer than ordinary. LT is just dawdling along, taking about three hours to do about an hour's worth of work. Hey, if he wants to be at the kitchen table doing school all day, I suppose that's up to him... at least that's my current mood. However, if he continues squeaking his chair I may send him to someone else's kitchen table to do it. ahem. He has just asked me to turn off my music (goodbye, Roxette) because it is "a great distraction." "Great" as in "large," as in some Regency-era novel. Good heavens, this is really real; my son talks like a homeschooler.

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Friday, September 19, 2003

3:00 a.m., can't sleep

This won't be a long entry; I remember with shame how I used to plague my friends by writing letters to them when I couldn't sleep which were so boring they could have been used as a form of torture. So I won't duplicate that here if I can help it. :)


I hate 2:30 a.m. That's always the hour when I wake up and have to pee and can't find a comfortable position to go back to sleep afterward; then C will wake from a bad dream or fall out of bed or both, and she'll want a drink of water along with a comforting. Tonight, to add to the general mood, LT came tottering out of his room and into the bathroom just as I was again trying to get back to sleep after tending to C. Now, he is NOT a night time person; he doesn't wake well and usually sleeps all night, although in his sleep, he generally looks like he's had a wrestling match with his blankets before beating them into submission. Anyway, his 2:30 wake-up call this morning was a bloody nose. He gets these with some frequency but they're never severe. So after I tended to him and got him back to bed, I decided to give up for the time being on going to sleep, and I turned on the computer. [g] The accursed 2:30 was redeemed -- the first thing I saw in my email was a notify-list notification from a friend of mine, and I read her journal to discover that she is expecting baby #2. Great news! And to add to it, another mutual friend of ours had left a comment with the URL to her journal; I haven't been in regular contact with this person and I've missed her, and I got to read all about her wedding last month which was another treat.


Now if only I had some chocolate. As I was trying to go to sleep, I calculated my calories yesterday and unless I'm mistaken, I was about 100 calories under my minimum yesterday. I'd love to be making up for that now with part of a Dairy Milk bar. mmm. Somehow a nice practical glass of nonfat milk doesn't have the same effect...

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Thursday, September 18, 2003

my driver's license speaks the truth

Well, when I weighed myself this morning the scale said 175 (actually the needle was hovering juuust to the left of the 175 mark, can't let those two ounces or so go unrecognized ;-). That's a net loss of 19 pounds in about 8 weeks. This is a banner day because now, for the first time since I was in high school, my driver's license is not lying about my weight. I last renewed it in December of 1998, and I weighed more than 175 at the time but I did NOT want to put down my true weight, no sirree. Hopefully before long my license will be lying again; this is well-timed since I have to renew it in three months.


The odd thing about having lost is that I don't feel like I lost, I feel like I just gained back all 19 pounds I've lost so far (cripes, what a nightmare!). I'm wearing jeans that were tight when I started this whole thing, and they're loose when I stand up, but sitting down, well, maybe they're not exactly tight, but they don't feel loose. I'm sure that Bloat Week is altering my perception a bit. I was never so aware of the in-between times of my menstrual cycle before. I've never been prone to the over-emotional aspects of PMS -- maybe one day right beforehand where I get crabby more easily than ordinarily, but none of the sobby b!+¢hy cross-made-of-fingers-backing-away stuff that men like to joke about (I was a really pleasant pregnant person too). And before I lost weight, I never noticed the physical aspects either, but I am noticing them now. Yuck.



LT is having what I jokingly refer to as a Ritalin day. He's a very active, wired little boy, and I'm sure if he were in a public school environment he'd be bringing home a lot of teacher notes about getting him checked for ATD. Fortunately, in our homeschool, we can lovingly harness his energy, refocus him, and of course send him outside to run back and forth around the yard for a while to get rid of some of the excess energy before going on with schoolwork (when he's older he'll split wood). We are about to reach that point. He's practically vibrating. We could power our small town with his little dynamo of a body, I think, if we could just figure out how. And he hasn't even had any caffeine today.

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Thursday, September 11, 2003

Ducky and Tinkertoys and an ouchy

This afternoon was a big financial day for us. We "borrowed" from T's retirement to pay off a lot of various debts we'd had sitting around. We are paying much less interest, and the interest we're paying is to ourselves, and unless my T's boss doesn't know what he's talking about, this makes our credit report look better because the retirement account loan doesn't show up on it. Who knows. It can't make it look any worse, at any rate. Now we will accomplish a few things we've been needing to do (like get new glasses for me, and fix T's truck), and by Christmas we'll be socking away a substantial amount into a savings account to pay loan origination fees etc. when we buy a house next spring or summer. We've had debt to one degree or another for the entire nine and a half years we've been married. We've been working hard to pay it down for the past five years, and it feels good to finish it off.


I still managed to have a pretty stressful afternoon sorting out all the paperwork and details involved. I wanted nothing more than just to lay in bed and vege all evening but families, you know, darnit, they need to be FED, can you believe that? They all stand around like baby birds with their beaks wide open, cheeping, looking so pitiful and helpless. So I made dinner, and then I went for a long hard fast walk. I actually had an aerobic heart rate for at least 25 continuous minutes of this 45-minute walk, and I wasn't shuffling along for the other 20 either, it just wasn't uphill all the way like the second part. I am all gleeful thinking about my body going, "calories! calories! where ARE you, calories?" and finally resorting to burning up some nasty old fat cells that have been sitting around in my thighs since before my first pregnancy. ha! gotcha! However, I'm not as thrilled about how sore my legs will be tomorrow. Oh well, it's a good trade-off. :)


Speaking of baby birds (well, I was, up there ^ ), I must show you what my daughter made out of Tinkertoys today. I must preface this by explaining that since around the beginning of our engagement ten years ago, T has called me "Ducky" and variations thereon. This explains, by the way, the fuzzy duckling in the layout, in addition to the fact that it's just plain adorable). Don't ask me why the heck he thought of that one (I have always said that it was because I had a short little haircut at the time and my unruly hair wanted to flip up in the back like a little duck tail, but he says it wasn't that). We were just out for a walk, holding hands and being all cute and lovey-dovey, and he blurted it out: "Duck-y!" in this cute little voice. Nobody who knows my husband only, say, at work, or at the VFW, would believe that he can be this silly. But he is. This led to my being called Ducky, and Coin (pronounced "Kwaa" with that nasaly French n at the end; it's what the French claim ducks say), and Quacky, and every other duck-related name you can think of, and some you can't. It never wore off and consequently my children have been exposed to this for years and probably think that everyone's mom is named after poultry. Anyway. Today my daughter made me a ducky out of Tinkertoys. Generally her Tinkertoy creations to date have been the kind of thing where you believe it's what it is supposed to be, only because she says it's what it's supposed to be. This is her first really recognizable item. Here it is:

Is that not the cutest? Can't you hear it quacking?

I think we'll see if we can make it last all year and enter it in the fair next year. LT has also made some really neat creations, like his interlocking angled gear drive:

I've no idea what is up with the green lines on the picture. My snappy unit is very old but why it should choose to freak out in the space of about five minutes between the last picture and this one is anyone's guess. At any rate, if you turn the crank on the horizontal wheel, its spines interlock with the vertical one and cause it to spin. He hasn't figured out a use for it yet -- just give him time. :)

OK, I was just going to talk about how happy I am that the weather is beginning to cool down enough that the cooler is too cold at night, but as I stood up to turn it off, I stepped on a toy train that was lurking in the shadows and tore the bottom of my foot. Um, OUCH. There are a few things that make me wish I could just let loose with a string of profanity, and injuring the bottom of my foot is one of them. OUCH. Good thing I had just taken a shower, and it was after my walk. I asked LT to bring me the bandaids (after I told him as calmly as I could, which wasn't very calmly, what I thought of his train), and C hovered over me -- "Is it a bleed? Oh, let me see. Oh dear. Oh honey. Just hold still, honey." -- as I was doctoring myself. That is why I don't let loose with the string of profanity -- because the very next time my little 3-year-old mimic damaged herself, she'd do the very same thing. She has an amazing memory capacity for speech, and gets the inflections the same and everything. It's cute (and a little amazing) when it's whole scenes from Bambi or Monsters Inc. Wouldn't be so cute if it was the aforementioned string of profanity. :-/


While I wait for T to get finished working on his buddy's truck and get his shower, I'm going to work on ivillage's book list, another idea I'm stealing from Jenn and Emily. And I'm going to moan quietly about the pain in my foot, too. OUCH.

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Tuesday, September 09, 2003

SpaceCamp

My kids are watching SpaceCamp. (note: from reading my diary you'd conclude that my children watch videos non stop since they seem to always be watching one while I type. Really, though, it's not like that -- it's just that the only times I can sit and relax and write up an entry are when they're settled quietly, and one way to do that is with a video). Until they borrowed this movie from my grandmother a few months ago (they have since returned it and re-borrowed it, by the way, must clarify lest you think I let them keep borrowed movies for years ;-), I hadn't seen it since I think 1986, on New Year's Eve. I must confess that I was totally convinced that "Daedalus" as portrayed in the movie was a real actual space station. When we watched it as a family, I told T that a boy in junior high had done a History Day project about Daedalus, but that he'd spelled the name wrong. T very diplomatically said that he was 99.9% sure, having been a space buff since grade school (which was longer ago than my grade school, let's just say that), that Daedalus was invented solely for that movie. I was not as diplomatic; I insisted, I'm afraid, that it had to be a real thing since Richard had done his project about it. Whoops. I did a lot of research online, and finally found out for sure on an astronomy newsgroup that T was right and I was wrong. I do not remember what the stakes were of our silly little bet on that topic, but I was utterly demoralized and felt like a buffoon. Not as much of a buffoon as Richard, though. He got a lot more than the spelling of the name wrong. What I have to wonder is where the heck he did any research for that project. Granted, it was eighth grade, but we had to have at least some sources.


Not, by the way, that I can claim much superiority in the area of History Day projects. I was in seventh grade that year, and my school friend and I decided to work together on a project. She would do the art, and she was really into drawing with perspective at the time, and wanted to do some kind of interior of a cathedral or something for the background art for our project. The only problem was that the topic of the project had to have something to do with "frontiers". So how to incorporate a cathedral with that? Simple, you title your display "Frontiers In Christianity." ACK. We did a good job -- we wrote a lot about the changes in religious culture from Biblical times to the present, and typed up blurbs of text and put them on little scrolls which we glued to the background. And of course the cathedral interior looked just great. :) But what a stupid idiotic name for a project. I'm surprised we didn't overhear the judges laughing about it. Maybe they were still in shock from "Deadelos."



C's doctor appointment went fine, by the way. The doctor says that the pigment loss on the side of her neck isn't anything to worry about, and that it's really common (which went along with the research I'd done online). She was more puzzled by the discoloration above her mouth, and finally concluded that it looked most like a bruise of some kind, like she was sucking a glass down over her mouth, but if it's still there next week I'm to bring her back in. C loves going to the doctor. She's been asking me at least once an hour to check the white spot on her neck, in a very serious little 3-year-old voice. She likes taking medicine too, little booger. She gets that from her dad, who used to try to drink Triaminic recreationally when he was a little boy. I, on the other hand, will generally suffer with a headache for hours before I finally give in to T's cajoling and take two aspirin. I tell him it's my anti-addictive personality -- unlike some people, I don't need to seek chemical solutions to my problems, physical or otherwise. ;-)



I was just getting a good laugh reading California's voter guide for the special election in October. Here's a quote from Larry Flynt's blurb: "California is the most progressive state in the union and I'm sure its citizens would welcome having a smut peddler who cares as their Governor." That's really funny, except that it's also true. This election is making South Florida look like a think tank in comparison. Dave Barry had a really great column about this a few weeks ago.

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kid stuff

I'm taking C to the pediatrician today. She has some odd skin discolorations, one on her face, and one on her neck. Her neck has a pale splotch, and her upper lip has a brownish area where it looks like her blood vessels have come to the surface. Not like a bruise, and not like a rash. I've looked online and there are a couple things that it looks like it could be, and neither are a hazard, but I would like to take her to the doctor to get it checked just to be sure. Of course with our sucky insurance (one definite drawback of living in a rural area is that all the good HMOs pulled out of our county, which was not profitable enough for them once they started chasing the doctors away by lowering and lowering their contracted rates, and left us with a bunch of cruddy and expensive PPOs and FFSs) this will cost way more than we're used to paying for healthcare. Man, I miss the good old golden days of Pacificare. sigh. Before, we would have a $10 copay for the office visit and that was it. Now we have $20 for the office visit and about five different bills ranging from $20 to $40, for copayments for lab stuff and who knows what all. And half the bills get contested and we have to fight tooth and nail to get them paid by the insurance at all. T broke his ankle last Thanksgiving and it has been totally depressing, calculating the difference between what we paid and what we would have paid under the insurance we had for the first eight years of our marriage. But I'll stop whining now. Must remind myself that even with all the hassles I like it better than I would some socialized 40%-of-your-income providing-insurance-for-everyone-whether-they-can-afford-it-on-their-own-or-not nationalized health care system. To each his own, right? [grin]



Anyway. School went OK today. LT is writing a play. He wants to put on a puppet show, put up signs, charge admission, that kind of thing. What the heck am I supposed to DO about this kind of stuff? He wants to do it all on his own and he's convinced it will be something that people would pay to see. But his materials are paper bags and crayons, and he's only seven years old. I hate having to give him these painful little lessons in reality, but I have to figure out a way to break it to him eventually. sigh. Maybe I'll offer a compromise -- I'll help him make the puppets with some of that construction foam stuff, he can write the story all on his own, and we'll invite friends, family, and neighbors to come and watch. Admission can be free but he could sell lemonade and brownies, or something. (taking a cue from movie theaters, who actually pretty much only profit from the concession stands :).



Well, I just received a call from the neighbor ladies, who want me to get their mail before we leave for the doctor's office. This has just shortened our get-ready time to almost nothing, so I have to get a move on.

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Tuesday, September 02, 2003

Grapes for sale

LT has set up a "grape stand" on our porch. We have some grapevines that just kind of grow wild among some lilac bushes and a flowering quince bush alongside our driveway. He has picked several bunches of grapes, washed them, and is selling them for a penny apiece (that's a penny per grape, not a penny a bunch). He also has ice water, at a dollar a glass. So of course T and I have patronized his business. It is so sweet and funny to see him set up these little ventures. Last fall he gathered two paper lunch sacks full of really big acorns when we were cutting wood. He didn't quite know what he would do with them when he got them, but soon after getting home, I went out on the front porch to find him assiduously painting a sign -- "ACORNS 98¢". He set the sign by our driveway, and sat back down in his chair on the porch with his bags of acorns and a cash box. I asked him if the price was per bag, and he was shocked that I would think so -- no, it was per acorn! I managed to talk him into making it 5 for that price, and bought 5 acorns. We had some friends over and they also bought 5 acorns apiece. That was going to be the end of his sale except that T figured out that he could use some PVC from an old laundry hamper of mine, and hook it up to his compressor's air hose, and we could launch acorns from it. My dad found out about this and bought many, many acorns to launch. This was the beginning of LT's entrepreneurial streak -- he began making plans for machines to make him money. First was an acorn-shelling machine which used two spinning gears to break the shells, and a fan to blow the shells away from the nuts; then a can squisher machine which would have filled our living room (he informed us that we had better ask our landlord's permission before he built it in the backyard since it might be too big to move when we move out of this house). We had a lot of discussions about supply and demand and the free market economy and how nobody would pay to use a machine to shell acorns since nobody has a use for acorns in our modern world. And people would rather squish their own cans than pay someone else to do so. Imagine our surprise when a few months later we were in an "ag museum" near here and saw a couple of Rube Goldberg contraptions which someone had made, one to squish cans, and one which used two gears to crack walnuts! At any rate, undaunted by the logical failure of his first two ideas, he continued coming up with more and more plans, and more and more money-making schemes. He has contented himself for the past six months or so with being the one to handle our recycling, and getting the money for that, but now that I've paid a $1.05 for a glass of ice water and a small handful of seedy grapes, I wonder if he's going to start coming up with more hare-brained seven-year-old ideas. :)

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