Snowy Day Play

Here's Francesca eating lettuce, just after licking the brownie batter.  My good little bunnies.

Happiness is licking the mixing utensils.

Nursing her baby, Happy Birthday Baby, is how Cecilia spends a good deal of the day, everyday.  She can also be heard saying, "I'm pregnant!" all the time.  We went out to dinner last night and the second the waiter came to the table, Cecilia informs him, "I'm pegnant!"

We woke up to about three inches of dry-ish snow and 20 degree temperatures this morning.  Two Fridays ago, we were playing in the river and the girls were in their underwear.  Looks like Old Man Winter isn't done with us yet.  The apricots are frozen out and I would bet that the cherries and  peaches don't stand much more of a chance.    Like Leah says - That's what California and Florida are for! 

  
My snow angel.

I was yakking away on the phone, while the girls got dressed . . . low and behold, matching outfits!  How adorable!  THEY NEVER GET DRESSED THEMSELVES, so this was a big deal.  They got dressed without me harping myself to death AND they're cute AND they match!  If only it would snow everyday, they would be so motivated to get dressed.

We ride bikes in the house . . . hey, what?  Why not?

Francesca taking her "kid" for a stroll around the house.

More pictures of Cecilia nursing her babe.

 

We've been doing "preschool day" once a week.  Here are the girls and their friends enjoying Popsicles on Granny's deck, after our walk through the orchards to look at the blossoms.  "This is actually pretty fun!" says Anna.

Anna showing off her blossom.  

Heather and her family are moving to N. Carolina next week . . . we're so sad!!!

Francesca showing off her apricot and peach blooms.

The Ever Evolving Candle-Walk

I have to get this on video, but for now, picture this:

Francesca and Cecilia's candle-walk has evolved into starting with horsey rides to the kitchen, where their candles are lit and they grab them and go.  They mumble a song down the hall that I think I've mentioned before.  Tonight it was, "Candleflame . . . candleflame . . . " but sometimes its, "Candle daddy . . . candle daddy," or "candle Cecilia . . . candle Cecilia," or "Candle cat . . . " or "candle toot," or whatever comes to mind the moment Francesca puts her hands around her candle.  This is the part I LOVE right now:  once they reach their bedroom (which isn't far from the kitchen) they place their candles on the dresser and engage themselves in their own form of creative expression . . . 

For Cecilia, this involves getting down on her hands and doing one or two donkey kicks and then quickly blowing out her candle, and her sisters candle, which without fail, elicits a blood curdling scream from said sister.  My job is to be close by as she blows out her candle, then back her to the rocking chair before she gets that second blow out of her mouth.

For Francesca, her creative expression involves dancing and singing or one or the other.  Tonight it was singing, which went something like, "There once was an owl . . . in France . . . ah sha ca jcha dolarooni, donadoni, jcha cjaa ji . . . " which is French for something I don't understand.  She takes her foreign languages very seriously.  Sometimes she sings a song we know, but other times its a made up song.

Then we say, "Lights out little sprout," and turn out the lamp.  We take turns telling a story, but lately, Cecilia will interrupt with her own story.  Yesterday, her story was, "One day . . . (and you have to imagine giant voice inflections within each word) there was a princess.  And what happened is, the princess . . . was in a room . . . and then she went out to do the candle-walk again."  We loved that story because it reminded us of Francesca doing her candle-walk over-again because her sister blew her candle out.  Tonight, Cecilia's story went like this, "One day . . . Granny's dogs . . . toot, toot, tooted . . . all the way to Moab."  

I know I should be hardcore squashing this toot/poop phase, but sometimes I enjoy it way too much!  We get some big, big laughs from Cecilia's primal humor.  When Cecilia toots, she doesn't say, "I tooted," anymore, but, "I'm Toots MaGoo."  

Bringin' You Up To Speed

I feel like I have been completely ignoring my blog.  I want to get pictures up in here again, but I'm too lazy to get my camera just now.

Spring has Sprung!  The apricots are blooming in front of Mom and Dad's house on EOM and it is a more beautiful sight every year I see them.  When I sit on their deck and look out at the orchard of trees, covered in snowy white blooms, buzzing with bees, I can't believe I grew up in such a place.  You can get a peach or apricot just about anywhere in the summer, but where else can you get a whole orchard in bloom like that?  It is heavenly.  And the farmers are busy, busy, busy getting their irrigation pipes ready, their wind machines tuned up, pruning, pruning, pruning and praying that the spring freeze doesn't freeze.

The girls and I spent the day at our lovely Palisade Beach, playing in the sand, in the river, and stripping down to their underwear with friends.  I can't say enough times how much I love Riverbend Park.  Its become my place to run in the mornings and every time we go down there (which is at least once a week) I tell myself that we need to come down MORE, like everyday!  When the girls are ready to get up and go, instead of get up and play for hours, I want to go down to Riverbend every morning for our morning walk.  I think that running through the cottonwoods and cattails would be a magical way for a child to start the day.  I know its been good for me!  I've seen an eagle down there a number of occasions, a family of foxes (mom, dad and 2 kits) and signs of the beaver, which we've since learned is nocturnal, so if we want to see him, we're going to have to go on a moonlight beaver walk.

I completed teacher training for the Music Together children's music program at the beginning of the month and that was a fab experience.  It is a rare chance in life when something so sweet and true brings equally wonderful people together for a common purpose.  The program was great, the teacher was great all twelve of the other people in my class were inspiring and sweet.  I'm so glad I did it.  Now I have to do the work of starting my own business and opening the two centers that I want to open.  I've been getting distracted though, with the Birthfest business.

My pal Leah has so graciously laid down the framework for a birth information fair to take place in September.  I'm heading up the play committee and have typically procrastinated my work until the DAY BEFORE our meeting.  I guess that I've been conditioned to believe that procrastinating worked in the past, so why wouldn't it work now, right?  I'm excited about this group and the women that it has brought together.  

I'm tired so I'm hitting the hay.  After pulling the girls in the bike trailer (Firefly) down to Riverbend Park, I hauled them up the EOM hill to Granny's house.  That hill is a killer WITHOUT pulling 75+ pounds of children, trailer, sand toys, snacks and blankets behind me.  When we started up the hill, they asked, "Why are we going so slow?"  And I'm like, "Because this is hard!"  While I'm pumping away in my clogs (not my bike shoes) they're back there enjoying the view and a popsicle and telling me to go faster.  Oh, the things we do for love. 

We're Not Perfect in Palisade

So I've been dying to blog about this - but have also been a bit hesitate because its so self deprecating, but I guess that this blog has a bit of a vein in that nature so here goes.

On Wednesdays, my friend Heather and I have been taking turns having 'preschool' at each other's houses.  Our group of two families has grown to a group of four families and is still growing.  Three weeks ago, we had our first day of four families convene at my house.  After a bit of pre-school stuff, the kids were playing and having a great time.  At one point, they decided to play lifeguard, which consists of taking off their clothes, putting on swimming suits and putting their kid chairs on the coffee table.  Then they sit in the chairs on top of the coffee table.  That's playing lifeguard.  Hudson put on Francesca's black ballet leotard, backwards.  It was a sweet look, but didn't look too comfortable on the buns.  Reya had on a white sparkly number, handed down from Francesca and Cecilia's cousin Ava.  Francesca had on her tropical swimming suit, backwards, also and Cecilia had on her diaper.  So at some point in the day, some or all of the kids were running about naked, choosing their costume, etc.  It was big fun.

Later that night, the girls were climbing into bed and Andrew said, "What's this wet spot on the rug?"  Everyone including me said, "I dunno."  

"Is it pee?" he asked.

Why would he ask such a ridiculous question?  Is it pee?  Who would pee on the bedroom rug?  I scoffed at him, "NO - it isn't pee?" as I bent down to smell it . . . I discovered that it WAS in fact pee.

"Maybe its cat pee."  he said.

"Nope.  Its people pee." I answered, in disbelief and disgust.

Then the interrogation started, and of course, because we began the questioning with, "Who peed on the floor?  Did one of your friends do it?"  The first answer was from Cecilia who said, "Reya did!"

So, of course, refusing to even consider for one second that it could be one of MY children to pee on the floor, I went with it.  REYA PEED ON MY FLOOR!  That little sh*t!  And my internal dialogue really went overboard at this point, as I'm sure you can imagine and I think I even went so far as to banish her from my house, in my mind.  (I'm sorry Amy.  I suck.  I just totally went overboard in my mind . . . luckily, I didn't ACT on any of these falsely channeled impulses.)  At this point, I had failed to see the humor in the situation and only saw myself, scrubbing pee and washing rugs.  BOTHER!

The next day, I was getting ready to put Cecilia down for a nap, Francesca had just started a book on tape in her room, when I went back into her room to get something, only to find Francesca, naked from the waist down, squatting in her closet, finishing off a nice long pee.  I know what you're thinking, because I thought the same thing . . . man - that kid is f*cked up.  I know you're thinking that because when Sarah Shrader told me about a friend of hers that caught her boys pooping in her closet, my first thought was, "man, those are some f*cked up kids."

In Francesca's defense, she was grinning from ear to ear when I caught her.  Obviously, this was something that she thought was funny, or just didn't think much of at all.  At first I thought that this was a copycat incident and that she was only COPYING whoever peed the original pee, but soon enough I came to my senses and had to come to the harsh realization that it was MY kid that peed on MY floor.  D*mn it!

My mom reminded me that I hawked loogies on the heater next to my bunk bed (for a long time, as I recall) in my early youth.  When I think back to doing it, I seem to recall a sense of giddiness in the pure naughtiness of it . . . until I was caught and had to scrub all those loogies off myself.  All giddiness was lost at that point.  But up until that point, it was pretty fun.  And all in all, I don't think I was a monumentally f*cked up kid . . . just a little ornery sometimes.  Which isn't the end of the world.  

I wasn't going to share this story on my blog, but over the weekend, I told Amy and Patricia the story and I thought Amy was going to pee right there on the floor from laughing so hard, so hopefully some of you are laughing, too.  And for the record, there haven't been any more mystery wet spots . . . and believe me . . . I'm checking.  The lesson I learned is that just when I thought that my child WOULDN'T DARE do something, its almost like ASKING them to do it . . . the moment I judged my dear, dear friend's sweet, adorable child and thought - AWK! What the? - - - the Karma Police came right into Francesca's bedroom closet and presented me with a good healthy dose of reality!  Thanks for that - - - ice cold water in the face is so refreshing (and humbling!)