My Son's Teacher

One of the things we've been most thankful for this year is Toby's Kindergarten teacher. She is warm and caring, and always greets us with a smile. She makes Toby feel right at home in his classroom and has such a welcoming attitude and excitement about learning. We are so grateful for her presence in Toby's life, and I definitely don't mind that he calls me Mrs. Young from time to time!
Last Friday all the kids got to make gingerbread houses so I went in to help. There were several parents and family members that also came (I left Norah at home to "help" BJ grade, but I've brought her with me before and his teacher is so welcoming to Norah too). We all got covered in frosting, ate way too much candy, and each student was able to bring home a wonderful gingerbread house. Somehow Mrs. Young found the time to take pictures of each student and then she emailed this one to me at the end of the day. He's so proud of his house, and I'm so proud of him!

My Advent

Yesterday BJ and I spent time at a retreat/prayer house in a little town by the sea called Madison.  It was originally a school for nuns and they now hold retreats and classes and days like yesterday--a little prayer, a little contemplation, a simple shared meal, and quiet time to reflect.
We walked along the beach (it was pretty chilly--we took just long enough to pick out shells for the kids and marvel at how calm the water was before the cold pushed us back inside).  We sat by the windows and watched the clouds roll in from the ocean.  We read a beautiful poem by Madeleine L'Engle.  We had lunch with a small group of people from all walks of life who were all there to take time out from a busy season to anticipate Christmas.
It was a beautiful afternoon for us to reflect back on a wonderful year and to calm down enough to really enjoy the last few weeks of it.

My Contemplation Leads to a Serious Question

Our Christmas shopping is done--a week early!
I was thinking about this on our way to the library this afternoon, which led me to the obvious conclusion that there are only two weeks left in the year.  I said something like this out loud (more to myself than anything) and I hear Toby say from the back seat, "No, there's only one week left."  I told him that there's one week left until Christmas (clearly this is what he's concerned with) but there's another week after that and then the year ends.  I was totally unprepared for his return question: "And then we all die?"
I couldn't believe where his five-year-old mind went!  We haven't ever mentioned the concept of the calendar changing the year and date, so he was caught off guard by the idea of the year ending.
I quickly reassured him that we weren't going to die--it just meant a new year was starting.  I apologized to him for scaring him with my out-of-context thoughts.  He seemed to be okay, but I think we'll have to do a little at-home mini lesson on what calendars mean.

On the way home from the library the calendar conversation was completely forgotten.  While listening to a Frank Sinatra song Norah asked, "Who is this?"  I told her who it was and she said "He's singing about jingle bells!  Can I sing with him?"  Of course I agreed, and for the last 5 minutes of the ride home we sang along (to Frank Sinatra's Christmas Dreams)--but the Christmas songs my kids know turned into a mish-mash of "Jingle bells coming to town on Frosty the reindeer in a silent night."

Here's a sideways video of Norah saying Merry Christmas and then showing off her lunch.  Enjoy.

My Submarine Santa

Santa arrived by submarine this year.
We've been waiting for this boat to arrive for a while, and the kids were very excited to watch it come in. We waited on the banks of the Thames this morning and got to cheer the sub as it came up the river. We happen to know someone on this boat in particular, but with the naval sub base right down the road these types of arrivals happen pretty frequently.  This one was doubly special: our friend is coming home after a long time away, and he brought Santa with him!

My Temporary Pet

 We're pet sitting for the holidays.  We have a tiny hamster named Peppy in our living room for the next three weeks.  The kids are overjoyed, although they've only seen her come out twice since she arrived.  I told Toby that it's a dwarf hamster, so it's smaller than other typical hamsters, that it doesn't eat very much, and usually will only come out at night.  So Toby's taken to calling it an elf hamster; he told his class all about her.

Yesterday we fed her lettuce, so she came out of hiding long enough to nibble some leaves.  The kids both said "We love lettuce too!"  Maybe this will be a good way to get them to eat salads.  I can't help but think of all the ways that a hamster can be a good tool for teaching lessons about things in their life.  See, kids, she eats her lettuce so you should eat your salad.  See, Norah, she goes potty in the sand box, so you should go potty in your potty.  OK, maybe using the hamster to get Norah interested in potty training is a bit far-fetched.

But I think that the kids are going to do a great job being responsible for this little pet, and thankfully so, because for the next 1/18th of her life she'll be spending it with us.  (They apparently only live about 18-24 months, so here's to hoping that it doesn't die of old age in our care, even though she's only 7 months old!)  However, I figure that 3 weeks is just long enough for them to be interested in the new pet without realizing that mommy's not going to get them one of their own--because guess who will be the one emptying the sand box?

My Little Scholars

I wish I could have had someone with me on my drive with Norah today.  Or at least a black box-type device to record what she was doing.  And believe me when I say not all drives are as pleasant as today's.
I was taking her out to do some errands, and I was listening quietly to the news on NPR.  I notice that she's saying letters.  Not in ABC order, but just letters.  I listen more closely.
"a...n....d...e.....r....s...o...n...."
"Norah! You're spelling the letters on that truck!"
"o...i...l....c...o."
While I was zoning out to the radio my daughter was displaying the ability to read the letters painted onto the oil truck in front of us.  She continued to read letters and numbers on other trucks when we got on the highway.  Although she said "truck!" whenever she finished saying a stream of letters and/or numbers, she was reading them with about 90% accuracy.  (Not that I was taking a running record or anything!)

And on that note, yesterday we went to our friends' house for dinner, after which Toby and their oldest (a first grader) disappeared upstairs.  BJ went to check on them and delivered this news: "They are... doing math.  We knew this day would come, but we didn't expect it so soon."


And lastly, a little thing that Norah does that has nothing to do with scholarly activities, but rather more to do with the season of shopping: she plans our errands around the color of the cart that she rides in or the color of the sign on the building.  Target is the "red cart" store, for example.  There's a blue store, a green store, and a grey store.  You can just see her little brain trying to work it out when we go into a store that has no carts. The buildings are sometimes named according to a characteristic toy: there's a train library and a giraffe library.  We ran into the librarian from the "train library" in line at the post office today.  She knew Norah's name (I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember hers) and said hello.  I told Norah to say hi to the librarian from the train library.  The librarian looked confused, but when I explained that we differentiated between locales by their toys she understood perfectly (and the other library has a 10-foot-tall giraffe in the children's section that's been there since I was a kid, so everyone calls it the giraffe library.).

My Christmas Tree

We are setting up a Christmas tree for the first time since we moved here. Our fake tree from our old house is 7.5 feet tall, and is therefore too tall for our ceilings here. Thank goodness for Target. We picked up a 6 foot tree for $20 over Thanksgiving weekend and then took two days to light it and decorate it. The kids have really taken ownership in the tree and are having so much fun checking out the ornaments and other Christmas decorations we've set out. In addition to the long weekend of decorating, every day we open our advent calendar and read a short story about Christmas. They have fun with this, too, but Norah keeps wanting to skip right to the 24th, since it's the biggest.
'Tis the season for happy memories!

My Delay

I simply refuse to believe that it's already December (despite the fact that our house is decorated for Christmas and has been for a week).  I haven't even uploaded pictures of the family from OCTOBER yet.
So here are a few videos to distract you from my procrastination.  (By way of explanation, Norah is being literal, and Toby knows football plays but not teams, exactly.)

 

(Edit: October pictures are scrolling at the top of the blog.  Don't forget--click on the pictures to see them bigger!)

My Memories of Fluff

Some unknown power caused me to buy Fluff last week at the grocery store.  I had it in my head to make a new dessert recipe for Thanksgiving, and the one I chose required Fluff.  This is where I diverged from common sense.
For those of you who have never tried Fluff, or even seen it, you might want to take a peek at it the next time you're in the peanut butter aisle at the grocery store.  It's basically marshmallows and sugar congealed into this spreadable consistency.  It's something that I remember being in my house growing up, but I don't recall anyone except my little sister eating it (in what's referred to cutely as a "fluffer-nutter" sandwich: peanut butter and Fluff).  Sometime around high school the jar stopped appearing in our pantry.  (Note: this could have been the result of the cross-country move where no store in Colorado stocks Fluff, it could have been that the taste buds matured, or it could have been because my parents finally decided to stop buying the junk.)
Fast forward twenty years, and I find myself at the grocery store last week with Norah buying a 16 ounce tub of Fluff.  I head home, break open the seal, and prepare Norah and Toby for the "joy" of fluffer-nutters for lunch.  Toby, game for any combination involving peanut butter, ate one bite and said "No thank you."  Now, I'm not kidding here, this kid actually ate a peanut butter and pepperoni sandwich one time.  And he said no to the combo.  That speaks volumes.  Norah watched Toby eat his bite, get his mouth unstuck long enough to decline any other bites, and then wouldn't even touch her plate for the rest of the meal.  I promptly made the kids alternate sandwiches, and we settled our experiences with Fluff for the next decade (or until they have kids and decide to expose them to the delights of marshmallow fluff smeared on bread).
Needless to say, the recipe was not a hit and would not become a repeat guest at future Thanksgivings.  Now I've got an almost-full jar of Fluff sitting in my pantry that I can't even send off to a soup kitchen.  I've noticed two things about the stuff (which I am going to throw away after I publish this post, despite my guilt over wastefulness--all $1.69 of it).  First, I used about 1/2 of a cup of the stuff in the recipe, but I think it expands once you open the tub; it doesn't look like I've used any of it.  And second, I'm almost positive that the stuff that walks off John Cusack's plate in the 80's movie Better off Dead was made of green Fluff.  This stuff has a life of its own.

My Tidbits

There are some long work days when BJ will go all day without seeing the kids, or he'll say goodbye to them in the morning and then won't be back until after they're in bed.  On these days I try to remember a few funny or cute things that the kids do in order to share a bit of our day with him.  Here are a few highlights.
--So for example, the other night Norah was distributing some play money to each of us from her cash register to buy some things from her food store.  Toby, while playing with Legos, misplaced his money and could be heard shouting throughout the house "Where's my cash money???!!!!"  (We later found the money under his Lego box.)
--And yesterday I spent all day on the couch with a stomach bug and nurse Norah at my side.  We played Go Fish over and over and over again.  The only thing that got me through it was Norah's mannerisms while she played.  She called the periwinkle flower a "pinkwy fower."  So cute.
--After Toby got home from school today we printed off some mazes and he sat right in the middle of the living room to do them.  He looked up at me from his first maze and said, "Mom, you're the best maze-printer-outer ever."
--Speaking of computers, one time I asked Toby if he new his address and he said, "Sure!  It's 930 Shennecossett dot com!"  (Toby does not surf the web, but he does know all about pbskids.com, which is where he got the idea that addresses end in dot com.)

My AF Cheering Crew

BJ and I met up with his parents and some extended family friends at the Army-Air Force game the first weekend in November. We drove to the West Point area in time for dinner on Friday night, played in the hotel pool before bedtime, and crashed into bed at 10:30 pm! Then we drove to West Point Saturday morning for the game. The traffic and parking was unbelievably bad, but the campus is really pretty. The game was very crowded, and for almost the entire first quarter Toby claimed he was bored and wanted to go home. He even said "I'm so bored I want to go sit in traffic!" at one point. Man, he couldn't have been more clear about just how bored he was! But we learned that when the kids get bored the parents (and grandparents) hit the snack bar. We consumed mass amounts of hot dogs, popcorn, pretzels, and sodas. That kept us busy through halftime. By the third quarter the kids were getting interested in watching the people and the players, so mom and dad even got to watch some of the game too! And then both kids slept through the fourth quarter!  (Edit: in case you were wondering, the Falcons won.)
After the game we met up with everyone for a very fun dinner out. Everyone told great stories and had lots of good food and time to catch up among friends.  Toby and Norah played with Legos and colored throughout the dinner (I actually don't think they even ate anything), and were tucked snug into their beds at 10 that night.  
Sunday morning (after a little bit of pool time and a last lunch with Oma and Opa) we packed up and headed home.  The visit just seemed to fly by, but it was a great time for us to build memories of family football games with the kids!

The bus ride to the stadium.

Checking out the crowd.

Each kid got to hug the Falcon.

Warming up (with Little Dog) back in the hotel room.

My New Name

Toby called me "Mrs. Young" yesterday while recounting a story about school.  And last week he told me that he called his teacher "Mom."

My Assignment

My assignment for each outing with the kids: take a ton of pictures and maybe we'll get one that we can use for a Christmas card this year.
The results:















































Norah, apparently, hasn't gotten the memo that a good picture of the kids takes time and patience....  So we'll see what ends up in your mailboxes next month.  Maybe we'll get lucky and find a picture of all 4 of us that looks decent.  Or, perhaps we'll err on the side of reality and send you a picture with at least one kid in tears or everyone out of focus?

My Lasers

Toby and I are playing Lego battle while Norah naps this afternoon.  I'm enjoying having him home today--it's Veteran's Day, no school--but I've noticed that our battles are significantly different than they were in the rainy days of spring.  Star Wars is totally to blame for this.  Now, every battle is won with lasers.  Toby has set up my crew with 6 guys and a horse: an alien, a storm trooper, and 4 knights complete with bows and arrows.  I think the storm trooper has a spear.  Oh, and I have a ship, but when I tried to make it do a fly over Toby said "No! That ship doesn't fly.  It just sits there." That's helpful.
Toby's side has over 12 people, a fortress, and several high-powered shooting objects.  And apparently his side has Luke Skywalker and everyone has "the force."  So they don't die.  And their lasers go through all my shields.  My role seems simply to cry out "oh no!" and make my Lego guys fall over when his guys shoot mine.
What else do you expect in a battle of lasers versus arrows and spears?

My Annual Complaint

It's that time of year again.

Wait for it....

Wait...

I hate raking leaves.

But two things are going to help me through this season's drudgery.  Well, four things, but two of them (though undeniably cute) are spotty help at best.  This year I've got Stephen Tobolowsky's stories to keep me company, and I've got a calorie counter.  Did you know that raking leaves can burn somewhere between 240 and 300 calories an hour?  I'm sure you also know that raking leaves can be incredibly boring?  So I'm making a boring chore more enjoyable: listening to Tobolowsky podcasts and thinking about all the extra treats I get to enjoy with my caloric deficit.

My Aquarium Activities

Last month we went to the aquarium again. We had the place to ourselves and the animals put on quite a show for us, despite the cooler temperatures.
Norah did more exploring this time than our last visit, and they still think that petting the sting rays is the best.

Here's Nemo!

Let I see, Toby!

Hi, Mr. Turtle.

I see lots of frogs, Mom.

Nice trees.

Hey, kids, pose by these flowers.

Try to count the penguins, Toby.

My Quiet Weekend

There are a lot of things that I could tell you about last weekend, when BJ took the kids to his parents' house for Halloween. But it can all be summed up in one word: quiet. I can't even tell you how nice it was to be on my own for 48 hours. It didn't hit me until Sunday morning, almost 24 hours into my solitude, which started after I dropped my sister and neice off at the airport on Saturday morning. I did a lot of window shopping near Hartford, and (since I was still hacking and coughing from a cold) a lot of reading and watching movies. But on Sunday I went to church (arriving a full 45 minutes late but not really caring) and then decided to run by Borders to do some Christmas shopping. Before I left for church I started to look up what time the store opened so that I could time my morning just right--it's a habit I do because I don't want to run an errand just to have the store be closed. But it hit me--it doesn't matter what time the store opens! I can sit in my car and wait. I can go to Panera Bread and have some coffee while I wait. I can go at 1:30 in the afternoon--normally a dreaded time to be running errands because certain young ones should be sleeping at that time. Oh, the joys of having a day to travel and shop and read and run (which I did that afternoon, at 1:30, actually) on no one's schedule but my own.

The jury is still out on whether or not it was worth it for BJ.... He spent almost 10 hours driving down to Baltimore on Friday night. A drive that should have taken 6 to 7 hours, with many stops.  The kids had a fabulous time with Oma and Opa, I hear.  It think that's always worth the trip!

My Discoveries

I picked up a photo CD at Walmart today of all the pictures that were on my old camera before it broke (in September). There are a few things I haven't blogged about because the proof was sitting on the photo card of the broken camera.

So here they are, for your viewing pleasure:

1) The last picture from our old camera. Taken by Toby, right before I said "Toby, please don't use my camera to take pictures."













2) The praying mantis we found in the yard. The first of three we discovered living in our yard over the last few days of summer into early fall.

3) My older sister, her two boys, and my mom flew out in the middle of September for a visit, and to celebrate my grandparents' 90th birthdays. A great big family gathering, like only the Fales clan can do.



















4) A dinner, in that same weekend, for some friends visiting from out of town. The starter was 3 towers--all delicious. (And all completely done by BJ--my only contribution to the dinner was the place settings, of which I forgot the spoons, and the dessert: cookies.)

My Soccer Saturdays

We're done with soccer for the season.  Amazingly, Toby and I spent 6 Saturdays in a row at the park playing soccer.  And it didn't rain on a single one of those days.  The colors last Saturday were brilliant, the sky was bright blue, and the temp hovered around 40 for the whole hour.  But it was his last practice, and it included a lot of game-playing time, so I brought BJ and Norah along to watch Toby play.  He's come a long way in 6 weeks, and BJ was able to grab a video of him scoring a goal.  If you ask Toby how soccer was he'll say, "I scored six goals.  No, wait, I scored 12 goals!"  His math is a little off, but we haven't taken the energy to keep score because the other two kids on his team (they split up and rotated through and played 3-on-3 games for 30 minutes) barely touched the ball.  One kid sat out almost the entire time (and hadn't been there the last 2 sessions), and the other kid just stood around asking any nearby adult, "When are we going to be done?"
Toby has a very strong sense of fairness and I kind of felt for him when he started to throw tantrums after the other teams would score goal after goal on his team.  I would have felt the same way playing one-on-three soccer.  (Actually, the other teams usually had one other kid not wanting to play, but Toby's team had two kids not interested, so it ended up being 1-on-2.)  We tried to convince him that everyone just wanted to have fun and no one was keeping score, and that he should look to other kids that were being good sports.

It was an interesting introduction to organized sports and (I think) we're looking forward to many more seasons of sports to come!

My Translation

I've spent enough time around the little ones to have become their general dictionary and their primary translator with other adults.  This becomes dangerous when I lose track of which words we've taken to pronouncing incorrectly in the house just because we think our kids are cute.
For example, this conversation took place between Norah and Toby when Toby came home from school yesterday.

Me: Norah, tell Toby what we found outside today.
N: We found watipillar, Toby!
T (to me): Does she mean calipitter?
Me:  Um, yes.
N: But it went way.
T: Did it turn into a butterfly?
Me: No, it just went away.

My Kids and Bugs

My kids love all things buggy.  I have worked hard to instill in them the fear of spiders which they have adopted, thankfully, but all other bugs seem to be fair game for handling, collecting, and eventually squishing.
Two weeks ago we were doing some projects in the yard and garden and came across two praying mantises (or is it mantii?).  While disassembling the wood pile we found many large unmentionable bugs along with pill bugs, huge black crickets, and their forever favorite, caterpillars.  There was a week or two where we couldn't stand at the bus stop (next to our mailbox) without a caterpillar dropping by.  We've found little fuzzy gray and black ones and others that are brown and black.
Yesterday when Norah and I found a brown and black caterpillar (we used to call them fuzzy-wuzzies--I don't know what they actually are) I encouraged her to make a little home for it in some leaves, and she went off to dig in the garden.  I went back to clearing some wood but a few minutes later Norah came up crying saying she couldn't find her worm.  I asked her if it crawled away and she put her hand in her jacket pocket and said, "No, I put it in here."  Ut-oh.  Worms in the pockets.  Yuck.  We spent the next few minutes digging through her jacket pockets to clear out all the dirt, and didn't find any worms.  I don't know if it's a good sign that we never found the worm, or a very bad sign.

My Singer

Norah is a big fan of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" at bedtime. Occasionally we can get her to sing it for a crowd.  (Although she knows the first and second verses she sometimes gets a little stuck on the first verse...)

At the end of the video you can hear her say, "Now let I see."  Almost all our videos end this way because she's so excited to see the play-back.  She says it after you take her picture, too.  Every time.

My Happy Meal

We don't take the kids to get fast food very often.  (And I should note, in the interest of full disclosure, that we don't consider Chick-Fil-A to be fast food.)  But last week our kids visited McDonald's twice.  In one day.
It came about on a Friday when I had a sitter over for Norah so I could get a hair cut.  The sitter took Norah on some errands and then got her a Happy Meal.  This month McDonald's has plastic pails with stickers (seen here) as their Happy Meal containers.  When Toby came home from school he was clearly upset that he didn't get a Halloween pail too.  What's a mom to do?  Especially when faced with a Friday night without a cook in the house (BJ was working until late) and long hours until bedtime, with potential fights over the stupid Happy Meal tub to boot?
Well, we went back to McDonald's on our way to another store so Toby could get a Halloween pail too.  I had filled Norah's tub with snacks from home so I handed hers over and gave Toby his while I paid the person at the window.  As I drive away Toby squeals from the back seat (after having just peeled away the sticker-cover from the tub): "HEY!  There's FOOD in here!"
Apparently I had forgotten to mention that when we visit the drive-thru for a Happy Meal Halloween pail that it would come with food, too.  We pulled onto the street and I hear Toby talking to himself, "I don't even believe it.  I don't know what to eat first!"

My P's and Q's

My kids have forgotten to say please or thank you several times this week, especially when manners should be shown off the most: among company! So after one particularly rude demand from Norah (something along the lines of "I want juice Mom" shouted at the top of her lungs) I knelt down and asked "Norah, where are your 'please and thank-you's'?" To which she replied, "In my mouth."

A few weeks ago we went to the Groton Family Farm so the kids could feed the chicken. Lately this kind of trip would be accompanied by a lot of whining and a general lack of sharing, and of course no "please" or "thank you" to be heard. We're working on it...