Cowboy

Alice found these boots in a bag of hand-me-down shoes from her cousin, and put them on right away.  Then she went and found the cowboy hat, and went around the house saying she was a cowboy and singing "Yankee Doodle."

The Wiggly Ones on a Hay Ride

Yesterday we went to Iseley farms in Burlington with Zac's dad's family for our annual hayride and pumpkin selection.  The hay ride is kind of like a historical farm tour as well, since it takes about an hour and they stop frequently to talk about things, with the high point being seeing the baby cows out in a pasture down by the Haw River.  Under normal circumstances, this would be great.  But with the wiggly ones (ie-our children), it was a tough ride.  Every time we stopped, Alice asked, "Why are we stopping?" and she kept trying to get to the food they brought along for the cows.  But Simon was even worse.  He had taken his nap, then been in his highchair for lunch, then in the carseat for an hour and he was simply not going to sit calmly on our laps for another hour.  He wiggled and wormed and protested nearly the whole time.  He wanted to climb the sides of the trailer, he wanted to crawl around on the floor, he wanted to climb off the trailer and onto the tractor....he wanted everything but to be still.

We finally got back to the farm and he happily crawled around in the grass and through the pumpkins for a long time.  He finally got his wiggles out.

He kept crawling through the pumpkins.  Luckily he never impaled himself on the stems.

Then we went back to the Arcaro-Burbridge house and had a lovely dinner of chili.  Alice always enjoys going there, because there are so many toys.  Plus, Alice and Julian are getting better at playing with each other.

2nd Haircut

Simon had his second haircut tonight.  He screamed in terror for the first few minutes, despite my best attempts to distract him.  Eventually he realized he was going to survive the attack of the clippers, and calmed down.  By the time it was done, he was happy again.

After the haircut, it was time for a bath. Simon loves bathtime 

and we often have to keep him from climbing into the tub.

Bednight Snack

 Alice has been hungry this week - probably making up for not eating as much last week when she was sick.  Tonight for her bedtime snack she wanted peas (cold, right out of the fridge) instead of yogurt.  She followed this up with some cold leftover couscous.

New school!

Simon and Alice's daycare moved to a new building, and there was an open-house on Sunday for all the parents and kids to come check it out before school on Monday.  It was a great idea because we could let the kids get familiar with the place before dropping them off Monday morning.  I forgot to take pictures of the classrooms, but the kids had fun playing outside.

Simon LOVED digging in the mulch (although he got a mosquito bite on his cheek).

This new place has a wonderful deck where the little ones can play outside.  In the old building, I don't think they ever actually took the babies outside (although they are supposed to).

Milk mustache

HFM strikes again!

This past week was rough.  Sunday afternoon Alice came down with a fever.  The next morning, she didn't have a fever anymore but she said her mouth hurt.  I thought this was her way of saying she had a sore throat, but eventually it struck me that that was kind of odd, so I got a flashlight and peered in her mouth and noticed several sores.  I checked her feet--she had two blisters.  A brief reading on the internet confirmed that she had hand, foot, and mouth disease--again!  We never had them officially diagnosed by a doctor, but we're pretty sure this is what Alice had when we were in Ohio over the summer.  Apparently it can take all different forms, and after this week, I can say that I definitely prefer the fever-for-five-days version to the mouth-full-of-sores version.

The pain was so bad Alice would kick her legs and shriek.  The ibuprofen seemed to only a help a little, so to distract her from her pain, she watched videos for nearly three days straight.  To get her to drink we bought some juice.  We never have juice in the house, so this was a really special treat and it motivated her to drink a bit.  For food, we could only get a few bites in her, but then only with lots of bribery and threats while she sat on our lap and watched videos.  We formed so many bad habits in a week that she is now suffering TV and juice withdrawal.

Simon also caught the virus, two days after Alice.  His version progressed pretty much the same as Alice's, except he had more blisters on his hands and feet (which didn't appear to bother him much).  To feed him, we would hook him up to a video then try to put pureed food in his mouth.  He would open up the first time, then start crying in pain, and when he opened his mouth to cry, we'd put more food in.  It was terrible.

Luckily, for each of them, the worst of it only lasted about three days, followed by two days of medium-level agony. They both drooled like crazy because it hurt to swallow. At it's worst, it was so bad that Alice actually stopped talking for two days, just keeping her mouth closed and answering with mmhhhmm and uh-uh.  Both kids napped a lot, but would wake up crying frequently.  For Simon, this was particularly bad because he normally uses pacifiers to sooth himself, but with the sores in his mouth he did not want the pacifiers, so he would just cry until he fell back asleep again. The first night they took turns waking us up, about every hour or two.  The other nights they would cry a little bit, but were able to put themselves back to sleep. As parents, it was a tortuous week for us, not just because we had to miss so much work and the kids were so high maintenance.  The worst was that we could not alleviate their suffering.

On the bright side, we did get to spend lots of time with the kids, and they would have some bursts of energy where they could play for a while.  By Monday, they were healthy and ready to go back to school, and it just seemed wrong: I'd rather stay home with my healthy happy kids!

By Friday, the kids were feeling a lot better, and sick days home with dad can actually be a lot of fun!

Simon relaxes and watches videos after another mildly traumatic feeding session.

Just when things were looking up, Alice woke up Saturday night and said she was hungry.  She ate some food, then vomited all over the kitchen floor.

And here she is refusing to eat because she is all better now and we won't let her sit on our laps during meals anymore.

This time of life

Weekends would be so fun if all we had to do was play with the kids all day. That was the best part of staying home with them this summer--the relaxed pace and the ability to just enjoy hanging out with them, and watching them play.  On the weekends now we try to do it all: go places to have fun, run some errands, play around the house, do all the laundry, cook some big meals to have leftovers.  This is in addition to the normal maintenance of our children such as feeding them and cleaning up.  The result is that every weekend is packed full of fun moments, but we're just going from one thing to the next: either playing with the kids or working on some chore.  I always feel like I need a separate weekend day just to be myself and do my own thing that is not the kids or my job.  I tell myself that's what retirement is for, and so when I feel things are too hectic, I just try to imagine myself bored out of my skull at some old folks home and how much I would love to come back to this time of life.

Simon is getting better at cruising and is doing more of the reaching stage.

Simon and I played outside in the playhouse, while Zac took Alice for a car ride and to the park.

Bug Fest

We went to the science museum downtown for their annual bug festival.  Outside and throughout the museum there were lots of tables set up with insects and little crafts for the kids.  It's always a gamble to go to these things, because they are usually really crowded and we're not sure how much Alice gets out of the special tables vs. just going to the museum on a less crowded normal day.  Plus, we never know how much to intervene in directing her attention away from the normal stuff that she can see any time and towards the things that are special for that day.  It's like when we go to Marbles and she just wants to paint, which she can do at home and at school.  Anyway, we generally try to direct her towards the special things without really enforcing it if she is interested in something else.

These pictures are all of her and Simon doing stuff they could have done at the museum anytime.  Alice did look at a lot of the bug exhibits though, but usually briefly.  She had no interest in touching anything, and given that we often show her bugs outside (and we usually have plenty inside our house too) it's understandable that she was more interested in the dinosaurs and other fun stuff.

Simon loves fish!

Alice had a lot of fun looking out the second story window with binoculars.

She got to dress up as a T-Rex!  I should note that they had lots of costumes of things like lady bugs, bumble bees, frogs, etc, but she went straight for the Tyrannosaurus.

And then, to her delight, she discovered a pile of dinosaurs on the floor!  That was not acceptable --they had to be sorted according to size and put into a line.  The one on the far right swims in the ocean, so she had to separate it from the rest.

We had a snack outside around lunch time and Simon had great fun walking back and forth along this wall.

While Zac was taking this picture (actually it was several) Alice wandered off.  We found her downstairs on the ground level, where we had started.  This is the second time she's wandered off (the first was at Target last weekend).  I think part of it is because she is so used to being on her own at school, and also because at these places everyone talks to her and is so friendly, so she feels like she's at school.  Or she just assumes we're keeping track of her and that she is not in fact lost. At any rate, she has no sense of people as being dangerous yet.  The only thing she's afraid of is people dressed up.  There was someone wearing a costume of a water drop and she was absolutely terrified.  So we need to do a better job of teaching her to not wander off.  Although in both cases I didn't feel she was in any danger (vs. wandering off outside near a busy street), the other people nearby (who had noticed an unaccompanied 3-year old, or in the case of Target, a girl shouting "Mommy" throughout the store) sure seemed to glare at us as if we were the worst parents ever.  In a way though, it's probably good that she has these little experiences in relatively safe environments so that she learns how to deal with the situation if she is lost.  But we're still going to teach her not to wander off. 

Where's Simon?

We played this peek-a-boo game for a few minutes before I started to record it.  Then, twenty seconds in, he started pooping.  Seems like that always happens.

The Beard

Don was in town for the night doing a job at the PNC Arena, so he dropped by.  Alice always talks about how afraid she is of Don's beard, but when she saw an opportunity to have someone read her dinosaur books, she quickly overcame her fear.  By the end, she had gone to the bathroom to get her comb and was alternatively petting and trying to comb Don's beard.

Belly laugh

Sticks

Alice can never pass by a good stick without picking it up.

Simon at the park

I keep saying that I can't wait for Simon to learn how to walk.  It's hard to find outings that are going to work for both kids. He's getting too big to carry around and too active to just sit in the stroller, but yet he can't walk on his own.  But one of the things we normally do works pretty well: We go to one park that has a greenway connecting to another park. Alice gets to ride her bike, and I push Simon in the stroller, but he gets to get out and play at both ends.