I saw this idea on the internet somewhere last winter: You fill water balloons with food coloring and water, then set them out to freeze. Once they're frozen, you take the balloon off and have some cool-looking colored frozen egg-shaped ice balls. Since NC was experiencing record lows, I thought it would be fun to try. Zac and Alice made them, and they came out pretty good, except we touched them before some were frozen solid, and they cracked a bit.
The schools were closed for a second day, due to the prevalence of ice on the roads. Zac went in to work though, so it was just the kids and I. The day started off a bit rough as Alice took two hours to eat her toast. I took this picture with the clock on the background to show that it is 11am and Alice is still at the breakfast table. The only breakfast Alice reliably eats is oatmeal, but sometimes she will ask for other things. I figured since we didn't have to rush off anywhere, toast would be fine. It turns out she likes the idea of toast much better than the reality.
We eventually made it out to play, but by then most of the snow had melted in the bright sunshine.
I told Alice if she took a good nap, we could make popcorn when she woke up and she could eat it while watching Dora. She took a good nap, had fun helping make the popcorn, and in true American fashion, did a great job eating while watching TV.
That evening, Alice went into the bathroom just as Simon was coming out of the bath. She wanted to style his hair, and it looked pretty cute when she was done with it.
Alice had been longing for snow since looking at all the Christmas videos and books, but it had not snowed yet this winter until last night. Today everything was closed, making it my 5th consecutive day home (since I'd stayed home with Simon on Friday, and Monday was a holiday). Despite the really low temperatures, it was a weird mixture of snow and sleet, leaving the ground covered with a small, but dense layer of snowy ice.
After breakfast, we all bundled up (it was 20 degrees out) and headed out into the yard.
Simon seemed more or less uninterested in the snow. If anything, he seemed annoyed that all the sticks he wanted to pick up where frozen into the ice. He only managed to get this little twig.
Pretty soon, Zac brought the sleds out from the shed. The weird consistency of the snow turned out to be perfect, because it did not dissolve or melt at all, and it was really slippery for the sleds but just grippy enough to walk or run on without sliding. I pulled Alice around the yard, then she pulled Simon.
After a few minutes, we decided to head to the park where there is a little hill. We pulled the kids down the sidewalk on the sleds, and the resistance was so little that it was effortless.
In fact, Alice could even pull Zac!
When we arrived at the park, Zac set Alice up for the first sled ride of her memory on the little hill by the tennis courts:
Luckily, Alice wasn't too traumatized by riding straight into a bush, and we proceeded on to the bigger hill, where I took Simon on his first ride:
He didn't seem to like it. He had been a bit fussy even in the house that morning, so we don't know if he was cold or just unhappy for other reasons.
I thought he might like being pulled around the basketball courts with Alice. He tolerated it, but didn't seem to be having fun.
Then I took Alice down the hill a few times.
Around this time, Simon made it clear he was not happy, so Zac took him home, while Alice and I stayed and played longer. It had been a bit disappointing walking to the park and not seeing a single kid outside playing in the snow. I thought the park would be packed with sledders, but there were only two boys there when we first arrived. I guess the roads were so bad the only people there were ones who lived nearby and could walk, but still. Later, some more people showed up, but no one stayed very long. Alice was pretty long-lasting, but even she eventually ran out of energy and started getting cold, so we headed home.
After lunch and naps, (although Alice didn't actually sleep) we played around the house. We got out the train tracks, which seemed like a good idea, but Simon just wanted to grab the trains and the train tracks the whole time. Alice did a pretty good job fixing the track for a while, but then we just gave up and packed it all away again.
It was fun to spend the day with the kids and not have to worry about laundry or chores. I just got word everything is closed again tomorrow too, so we'll have another fun day together.
Our spy cameras that we use as baby-monitors have the capability of recording video. Unbeknownst to me, while Alice and I were snuggling on the couch before bed, and having a typical nighttime conversation, Zac had set the camera to record it. I'm glad he did, because it is a pretty good representation of Alice's nighttime ramblings. I had a bad cold, and I was really tired, so I lacked the motivation to keep things moving along, and I indulged in her talking far longer than normal. For most of the conversation, I'm fighting off sleep. Notice how wiggly she is though. Also, our heads are chopped off because Zac didn't want to move the spy camera. A rough transcript of some of the things Alice says follows the video.
Mama, why can't we have [spaghetti] right now?
And I just don't like to eat the sun.
Mama, I'm gonna do it backwards: Pluto, Mercury, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Mercury, Venus, Venus, Mercury.
Saturn's the most biggest because it has the rings.
I like it when it's fall, so I can have colored leaves.
Why do some trees keep their leaves in winter?
Why do bears like berries?
Do we have any more juice mangos?
Friday and Saturday are special days...because Friday is show and share and we get pizza and Saturday I get to go to the park.
Why do you watch me on the spy camera?
Mama, I don't go to sleep at nap time at school...
Mommy, you need to trim my nails...they're very pointy.
This is uncomfortable...
Blah blah mannequins lay like this...
If you have a dragon for a pet, you must train it.
I made a long stack, look, Mama.
But next morning it's going to be sunny...maybe it's gonna be still icy.
Mama, but, mama, I have a question: Why do you dragons breathe fire?
Simon has started doing this thing where if he hears the word "happy" he'll smile and do a funny little fake laugh. I wonder if they were teaching the kids this at school? We always forget to the check the note by the door of the classroom saying what they learned about that day, but I remember some of the themes from when Alice was in this class, and one of them was learning about emotions.
Alice's dancing takes many forms. I've shown her just a couple of ballet videos a while ago, and she'll sometimes try to imitate the moves. Simon, on the other hand, dances by running from one end of the living room to the other, or holding on to the table and kicking one leg, as he does briefly here.
Between the hand-me-downs from miscellaneous people and the dress-up box from her cousin, Alice has a lot of options. She doesn't like standing still to pose for pictures though.
We put Simon in time-out for the first time yesterday. His offense: touching the dishwasher. We first put Alice in time-out around the time she started walking, because she always wanted to play in the kitchen trash can. For Simon, it's the dishwasher that has the allure. Previously, the parent not in the process of loading the dishwasher had just picked him up and carried him back down to the living room, but this can get tedious when he does it five times during a loading, so we decided it was time he simply learned that he wasn't allowed to play with it.
Although the child wails a lot, I always think punishment is worse for the parents, because you always wonder if the kid understands the logic of it: you touch this forbidden thing, and you are removed and put all by yourself at the end of the hall. At any rate, after a few dozen times in time-out, Alice stopped playing with the trashcan, so we knew it would be effective, even although it was traumatic.
(Please pardon the faux pas of a vertical video.)
Alice, meanwhile, is very interested in the idea of someone going to time-out besides her. In fact, for Simon's first time out, she marched down the hall and shouted at him to stop crying (because she knows she's not allowed to wail during time-out.)
This morning Simon was put in time-out for hitting me in the face and playing with the wires on the back of the fish tank. He wailed like before, so I didn't have to leave him there long for him to get the message. The interesting thing is that he just sits there, until I come get him and say, "All done." When we first started time-out with Alice, she would always crawl back out right away. Granted, she was much younger than Simon is, and Simon has had the benefit of seeing Alice in time-out quite a lot.
Today, when I was loading the dishwasher, Simon came over, and I simply told him not to touch it, and he walked away. In fact, he evidently remembered the lesson from yesterday, because he walked to the end of the hall and put himself in time-out. He didn't cry though.
Alice was getting in the bath and was babbling about the bubbles. So I quoted the witches' scene from Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Alice, can you say, 'Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble'?"
Alice said, "I don't want to say that. That's dangerous!" See, Macbeth, even a child who is not yet four can tell that those witches are up to no good.
Then later, while she was wrapped in the purple blanket snuggling on my lap in her bedroom after the bath, she asked, "Mommy, why do you love me very much and don't want me to die?"
Alice often has non sequiturs like this, so you have to kind of trace it back to know what she's talking about. In this case, my best guess is that when she got out of the bath, and I told her to be careful, she had an imaginary dialogue in her head where she asked why and that was the answer I gave. I have imaginary conversations in my head all the time, and I think she does too because sometimes she thinks out loud and it will be little dialogues. So although she didn't actually ask why she had to be careful this time, she has asked dozens of times before, and one of our frequent answers is because we love her very much and don't want her to die (particularly when it comes to not wanting her to get squished by a car). So when she didn't ask why out loud this time, it was probably because she had heard the answer enough that she could fill it in herself. But the thing about why questions is that each answer can be followed by another why.
So now I had to answer the question about why I loved her very much. I said it was because she was my daughter and one of the people I loved most in the whole world. Then she said, "Is that because I was in your belly?" I said yes. "And Simon was in your belly?" I said yes. She thought for a minute. "Who was in daddy's belly?" I said no one. Then she asked whose belly daddy was in. I said he was in Grandma Cam's belly, and that everyone alive came from someone's belly. Just when I was getting worried that tonight was the night she would ask THE question, she said, "Mommy why do monkeys like swinging?" I chuckled, relieved, and I asked her why she asked that. She said, "It's because I like swinging." I told her that I think she came from a monkey's belly.
No one can expect to relax on this couch while Alice is around, not even the cat. Alice surrounded the cat with stuffed animals, then started jumping on the cushions.
Because daycare was going to be closed on Monday, and we're anticipating a snow day on Tuesday, we decided to go somewhere on Sunday also, just to get the kids out of the house. It was too cold to go to a park, so we went to Marbles. Unfortunately, every other parent in the triangle came to the same conclusion, and Marbles was really crowded.
We usually split up with the kids, since they do very different things. I started with Alice, and we went to the exercise area. She was so happy because she could pull herself up using this pulley system.
She enjoyed bouncing on the trampoline.
She did a good job waiting in line to use the rings.
Simon, meanwhile, demonstrated he is not afraid of heights.
It was exciting because this was Simon's first time at Marbles since he has been able to walk, so he wasn't confined to just the baby areas anymore.
He loved playing with the trains, and I'm pretty sure I heard him making vehicle noises.
Alice could have played at the water table all day long.
You're supposed to use the tongs to put blocks in the ice-cube trays. Simon just grabbed all the pincers.
Simon used to take a nap in the stroller after being at Marbles for an hour. This time, we just gave him his pacifier for a while and he kept on playing.
Simon loved this wall painted with lady bugs on the grass. He walked along it pointing at each lady bug.
The farm animals and pig trough provided endless entertainment for both kids. Alice rode on all the animals, and spent a lot of time rearranging the stuffed animals. Simon liked playing with the balls and even got in the trough.
How you know it's time to go home:
Side note: Alice is the one who put all the baby stuff pigs under the big pig so they could suckle.
Saturday was also Darwin Day at the science museum. We had all planned to go, but Simon was still coughing a lot and I was still feeling sick and achy, so we stayed home and just Zac and Alice went. These special events at the museum are so fun because they always have lots of children's activities and booths set up throughout the museum.
Zac reports that although Alice was afraid of the assembled skeleton (probably due to its resemblance to a mannequin), she was not the least bit timid when presented with a table full of bones.
She even took a bony hand and started crawling it up him.
Alice had been looking forward to Valentine's Day before the Christmas season was even over. It's a little unclear why, other than she kept saying, "That's when hearts come out." So I got the kids each a heart-shaped box. Alice's has gummies inside, and Simon's has chocolates. The blue shark on the front is for his blue fish obsession, although he didn't seem to notice.
This picture above is included just to show how atrocious Alice's fake smile is. She looks like a demented rat. Luckily, her real smile is pretty cute.
********
In the afternoon, Zac taught Alice how to make cut-out cookies and we decorated them after supper.
Alice pretty much just licks the frosting off the cookie and has no interest in eating it.
She is always upset by the fact that she only gets one, but at least she didn't have breakdown like last year. Here, she lovingly gazes out over the frosted cookies, envisioning which one she will lick next.
