My little Mer-twerp

For those of you feeling jealous of our fabulous bed training skills (if sheer luck can be considered "skilled parenting") let me relate how Annika's first swimming lesson went today.

First of all, Saben has a lesson at 11am. At 11:15, Annika & I went to get our swimsuits on for our 11:30 class. As soon as Annika had her swim diaper on, she peed a ton, it leaked and I didn't notice till we were back out at the pool. (somehow her walking while grabbing her crotch did not clue me in) Luckily I had an extra swim diaper.

Saben's lesson ended & ours started 2 minutes later. I had to quickly get him dressed, whisk him to the gym's day care thing and then run back and jump in the pool with Annika, missing the introduction instructions.

As soon as we entered the pool, Annika started whining & gave a couple good screams as I gently splashed water on her. (as the teacher suggested we do) The next 30 minutes she pretty much whined and screamed the entire time. Sigh.

This is from a girl who absolutely loves water, runs through wading pools up to her chin in water and lays down with the back of her head wet in the bathtub.

My conclusion is that what she hated was me holding her & feeling powerless. I finally had her down in the water to her chin and I think she finally understood that she couldn't touch bottom and relaxed a teeny bit after that.

She did like chasing a ball in the water and did do some kicking and laying on her back. When I blew bubbles, she watched, then leaned down, stuck her face in and took in a huge swig of nasty pool water. Ugh.

But she would have none of the jumping in or even me lifting her up and down in the water. Of course her very favorite part was when I passed her through the water to the teacher and she had that split second of freedom where no one was holding her.

Big Girl Bed

Last night, Saben & Annika were laughing & screeching in their room after bedtime. They have some sort of game where they both stand up and then fall back down into their beds/cribs, dying of laughter. Then I heard Annika crying pretty hard. I ran in and she was walking around on the ground and Saben said "she fell when she was climbing out of her crib!"

So tonite we made the big move and brought in a matress we had upstairs for guests. Annika was sooooo excited. She was all grins and kept saying "Mine!" In fact, she wouldn't even let Kyle or I lay in it. So cute. And now she is asleep in her big girl bed. No crying at all and a big brother who kept telling her gently "stay in bed annika" We'll see how it goes from here, but I can't even imagine an easier, funner, sweeter first night.

lemonade millionaire

It all started four days before July 4th. I decided to draw the holiday out a bit and took Saben to a fireworks stand as a "reward" for some good behavior. While he was picking out his $3 pack of sparklers, he spied the BIG BOXES of fireworks. "Mommy! Woah! I want one of those HUGE boxes!" He was so excited because Fourth of July is his favorite holiday - well he starts asking about it in late spring and talks about it nonstop. He loves Christmas & his birthday too, but july 4th is right up there with them for sure.

Anyways, so he asks for a $60 box of fireworks and I say "wow, that's expensive Saben. You would have to earn money to be able to pay for that".

Saben: "How do I earn money"
Mom: "Oh, I don't know.... doing chores....or maybe selling lemonade in front of our house. Or selling some of our extra Raspberries? I don't know"

He latched onto the raspberry bit and next thing you knew, I had promised to help him with it on July 3rd so that he could buy his fireworks. Sigh.


Saben made this sign - I drew the letters, he colored them and added illustrations of Chitty (bottom), flowers and even a guy throwing a pop it. (top)

Lucky for us, lemonade/raspberry stand day was HOT. We prepped all morning and then opened the stand at 2pm when Annika took her nap. Amazingly, she slept till 5pm that day, so we just sat outside, enjoyed the sun, eachothers company & meeting all the neighbors who came by.

We have so many college renters in our neighborhood and they loved the lemonade stand. The raspberries sold ok, but everyone bought lemonade & even sold quite a bit of mint iced tea. College kids were coming and giving him $3 for a $1 cup of lemonade. Many just dumped a ton of change in his container. They were so sweet and almost every rental house on our block sent someone out to buy lemonade.

Grand total? Open from 2pm - 6pm and Saben made $50! I didn't charge him for the lemons this time around, so really it was only $40 profit. Still a lot of money for a four year old!

Fourth of July we headed out to the reservation to spend his hard earned cash and came back with tons of fireworks. I kept asking him "are you sure you want to spend all of it on fireworks?" and then I'd list other toys and stuff he could buy instead. But he was not tempted in the least, he just wanted the fireworks. So fun.

More Chitty Chitty

Whenever Saben is really focused on something like legos or drawing, he hums "chitty chitty bang bang" non-stop. NON-STOP. Over and over. For hours on end. Really - hours. I am dead serious and not exagerating.

If you think this occaisionally drives me batty, you are incorrect. It drives me always batty and I always find it running through my head even when he's not around. I shudder when i realize I am humming it to myself while weeding out in the yard. But how can you tell your son to quit humming happily while he plays? The only remedy I've discovered is turning on some music. Except then I get busy and we listen to the same CD 4-5 times in a row and that drives me batty too.

For the record, if I had a rapper name, I would want it to be "Chitty Chitty".

crazy neighbors

So last night, kyle is out cutting wood in our garage at 10:30 pm when he hears this banging outside. On the garage. He goes out into the alley and there are drunk kids there and a bunch of them are ON THE ROOF of our garage. It used to be a carport, so the roof is flat.

Seriously? Who gets drunk and then thinks it would be fun to climb onto the roof of someone else's garage? And why? Kyle was so mad at them.

Then another guy comes a minute or so later and tries to go into our garage to look for his friends. Kyle tells him to leave and then he tries to go in our gate to see if they are in our back yard. So I guess the next house project is sticking some barbed wire on top of our garage. Sheesh.

So today, Annika & I have all her dolls around our little kids table in the kitchen and are pretending to serve them lunch with her toy food, dishes, etc. After a while I realize its now time for our lunch. I get hummus & pita out for annika and set her at the table with all her dolls & their plastic food. Then I decide to really quickly call a glass company before I eat my lunch.

After about 5 minutes of phone conversation, i return to the kitchen to find hummus mashed all over the dolls faces, clothes, heads....Like someone had tried to murder them with a spoon full of hummus. "Eat the hummus dollys! Eat it! Don't make me shove it in your mouth, in your eyes, rub it on your head.... Come on, why aren't you eating this, its delicious!"

Its also in all of annika's tea cups, smeared like frosting on a plastic donut and is now all over the couch pillows we'd used to prop the dolls up to table height.

Will I ever learn? I just thought it'd be fun for her to have lunch with the dolls.

Just like Daddy

Saben: Mommy, will I be like Daddy?

Mom: Sure Saben, you'll probably be like him when you grow up. Do you think you'll be like Daddy?

Saben: Yes, I will.

*Pause*

Saben: I'll have really really long hairs all over my body, just like Daddy.

What I love about Saben

I am so completely in love with my sweet boy. I love his curiosity, the endless questions about absolutely everything. I love how he will one minute be struggling to understand the concept of adoption, asking deep questions about why some people aren't ready for babies and then, when he's had enough, suddenly switches to something mundane like "And...why is our rug brown?"

I love how he always tells me that papa Ken knows A LOT of things, he knows everything. "I'll ask papa Ken, he knows....you don't mom." I love that I can teach him absolutely anything and he'll be excited and into it. This morning we watched a youtube movie about how bees make honey and he watched the whole 7 minutes enthralled.

I love how Saben loves collecting bugs as much as he likes picking flowers. Lately he has spent hours outside, searching for potato bugs, beatles, "ear pinchers" and anything else creeping in our garden. He puts them in his cage and I love how he has such great pride in the fact that "I take really good care of my bugs mom". He always puts the cage carefully back in our closet (an outdoor one) so it doesn't get too hot in the sun, gives them spoonfuls of water & fresh leaves. But he also likes to step on ants or anything else I tell him to smoosh and giggled uncontrollably when he got two ladybugs to crawl on his arms simultaneously.

Saben is holding a hollow stick "tunnel for my ants to play in". They also have access to balance beams for their amusement.

Looking at Saben's bug collection

I love it when Saben makes bouquets for me. Most of them are dandelions & buttercups, but when I let him, he loves using flowers from our garden. The other day, we had picked one bunch of purple lilacs on a walk and Saben told me he wanted to go outside and pick a few more flowers from our garden to go with it. We have flowers of every color out there, but somehow he came back with this ridiculously beautiful combination. I couldn't believe it.

I love love love how much Saben loves to draw. For quite a while, he's been just drawing rockets with occasional family portraits, etc. Then suddenly he started busting out cars on his drawing board. These are a few of the first ones I took a few weeks ago, but they have gotten much more elaborate since then.

Race car number "101" with another car following it

Race car "21" with a driver and smoke billowing out the pipes in back.

More elaborate pipes with smoke. I have no idea where he got this idea of pipes with smoke on race cars but it is awesome.

I love Saben's attention span (what mom wouldn't) and how he can spend hours building with his "new" lego set. We recently pulled down Kyle's old legos, which just happen to be a bunch of space rocket/moon explorer themed kits. Him & kyle have built a ton of them. They make a mess, but he loves it.

I love Saben's hugs goodnight, his special nose kisses and the way he still loves to cuddle in my lap. I even love how he still insists on describing each and every bowel movement he takes to me. "Look mom, its in an "S" shape!" I love riding bikes with him and how excited he gets when he makes skid marks from braking fast. I love watching him workout how to get along with other kids, especially ones older than him who hurt his feelings. I love watching him be ridiculous with his preschool buddies, singing the "Daddy Pusher" song, pushing eachother and wrestling around .

Don't worry, plan to do Annika too. Might take a while, its been busy. Two weddings, an anniversary and a family reunion in May - we were gone 4 out of 5 weekends. We are also rolling on our basement again - working hard on getting everything ready for carpet by the end of the month. Well Kyle's working hard, I'm actually writing in my blog for once. (so much for taking a break till fall, the carpet went on sale, so we plunged ahead.)