The loves and hates of Huston: 4 years, 8 months

This is an update on my quirky Huston, who is, as I type this, taking a nap for the first time in MONTHS.  Just thought that should be acknowledged.

For the past few months, Huston has really loved coloring.  This is quite a change for a boy who used to ask me in an annoyed voice, "Why do they just like me to color so much at Women in the Word?"  Now he'll happily pick up colors and draw for long periods of time.  He especially loves making "treasure maps" and rainbows, but he's also drawn guns and a few faces (with lots of teeth and freckles).

He's getting really good at building with legos also.  I took this picture in his classroom at school before they went on a field trip a few weeks ago.  I asked him one day what his favorite thing he did in school that day was, and he said nonchalantly, "Uh, playing with legos."



He likes to make guns with legos (of course) and houses with chimneys and shower curtains (like the movie Up!, which had shower curtains for sails to help it fly).  It's fun to see his creations, but not so fun to step into his room.  After he's made something, he insists on leaving it on the floor and won't clean it up because he might need it later.  This is true, not just of legos, but in fact of all of his toys.  He freaks out when I want to clean his room, "Oh, Mommy, don't move my Halo book!  Not my Up house!  Just don't clean up my Halo guns!" (the guns are actually sticks that he finds and brings inside because he thinks they look like guns).

He is such a quirky kid. On the field trip I just mentioned, the moms were trying to get a group picture of all the kids and Huston flipped out and ran out of the picture, straight to me, screaming.  He had a similar reaction when he was supposed to get his soccer picture taken.  The guy assured me, "I got one of him - you can't even tell he's crying."  Well, let me assure you - You can definitely tell he's crying.

I know I mentioned in the last post that Huston loves flowers, but I don't think I conveyed how much he loves them.  Every time we go for a walk, he runs over to our next door neighbor's house just to feel her flowers (she has a nice garden, unlike us).  He points out petunias, pansies, roses, irises, buttercups, daffodils, and more by name.  On our walks, he's always yelling, "Look at those purple irises!  Look at those roses!"  He LOVES them.  One night when Melinda was babysitting, she had the brilliant idea to bring flowers to let the kids plant in our backyard.  Huston was in HEAVEN.

Speaking of heaven, since Papaw passed away, Huston has been processing it all.  One day he told me that his dinosaur Dinah's Papaw, Mom, and Mimi had all died and Dinah was feeling sad.  He's also been really worried about where we're going to live in heaven.  A couple of times he's gotten super worked up and cried that he doesn't want Jesus to come back and go to heaven, he just wants to live in our house when Jesus comes back.  I've tried to explain that heaven is awesome and we don't need houses there, but he can't seem to understand that.  He really wants us to keep living in our house.

Huston's been playing soccer this spring - but it hasn't been going that well.  This smiling picture was taken before his first game, and before the soccer picture taking meltdown.

His smiles quickly faded when he saw all the parents yelling and clapping on the sidelines, and he has yet to step on the field during a game.  We have just been focusing on getting him to stand on the sidelines without crying, and that's where we are now.  During practices, he'll play and listen to his coaches, but not during the games.  I must admit that I find every game experience extremely trying.  I find myself getting frustrated with him.  I don't even care if he plays in the game, but something in me just wants him to be "Normal" during those moments.  And he's not like most other kids and most of the time I think that's wonderful and amazing.  But sometimes it's not.

In addition to flowers, Huston is also really interested in cactus lately.  I think cactus made an appearance on Sesame Street, and he's been a fan ever since.  We see three big cactuses (I'm going to say that, instead of cacti, if that's okay with you) on our way to school, and it's always so exciting.  One day he told me, "If Jesus touched a cactus after he made it, it would hurt him."  I loved that.  I love how, in his way and without really knowing it,  he was acknowledging Jesus as God and Creator of the cactus, but also as man.  He's so theologically advanced.  Well, except for the heaven thing.

He still loves the planets and outer space.  I can't remember if I've mentioned that on the blog yet.  His favorite planet is Saturn and he can name and recognize all the planets, and tell you all kinds of things about them, like Jupiter's the biggest and has a red spot, and Mars is red, and Venus is the hottest, and Saturn has more than a thousand rings, and on and on.  I love this fascination of his and quest for more knowledge about the things that interest him.  It reminds me of his daddy.

And do I even need to mention that he loves Halo?  It's his favorite thing and Clarke says he's been getting pretty good at it.  He likes to smack talk the aliens (like Clarke does, of course), but he says the silliest things, like, "I'll show you the way to my house!"  It's hilarious.


He spelled his name with dominoes today.  I thought that was awesome.  The end.

Easter Recap

So, it's Sunday evening a week after Easter. Arden threw up twice today, completely out of nowhere. She looked a little sick in the car on the way home from church, but I had no idea she was feeling that bad. Hopefully she'll sleep it off. Since my last post, she's had a few potty relapses, including one day where she peed in her underwear twice, and then I told her she didn't get any more clean underwear and made her sit on a towel and she then peed all over me and the towel. I think that was just an exceptionally bad day, though. She also hasn't successfully pooped in the potty for more than a week, but let's not talk about that right now.

Anyway, none of that has anything to do with this Easter recap.

We had a lot of great Easter celebrations, starting with an egg hunt with our friends at a park in Arlington. I was so excited that Huston was actually very excited about hunting Easter eggs. The first year ever that he hasn't had to be cajoled and bribed into picking up the eggs. It was awesome!

Saturday we had a small family celebration at Clarke's parent's house. Truitt took some family pictures of us in the bluebonnets by their house that I can.not.wait. to get my hands on! Here's a few of the ones I took:

Huston is absolutely in love with flowers these days, and he had a blast looking at them and picking them.

Bubble fun with Grandpa on the front porch.

At lunch before the egg hunt, we saw a little bunny outside of the dining room window. Someone said, "Look, it's the Easter bunny!" and Huston seemed to really believe it. He looked out with an excited face and said, "But where are the eggs?"

During the egg hunts, Huston, ever our quirky one, kept leaving certain eggs behind - both at Mimi's house and at my parent's house on Sunday. I asked him, "Don't you want to pick up those eggs?" and he said, "No, I just don't want those - they're wet." He objected to the ones with too much dew on them. He was doing the same thing at my parent's house and when I asked him about it, he said, "I just don't like the ones with the tag on them." He meant the eggs that were connected by a hinge. Who else but Huston would find those objectionable? He would pick them up, put them back down, and call out to his cousins, "Hey, guys, here's some over here!"

Saturday afternoon following our celebration with Clarke's family, I went to my friend Ashlee's pedicure baby shower (so relaxing and fun) and then we went to the Easter service at church that evening.

Melinda has a tradition of reading the Easter story with the kids and releasing a white balloon to remind us that Jesus went up to heaven, which she had done that afternoon after hunting eggs. We had no idea if Arden was really understanding it, but in her class at church when they were telling the kids about Jesus rising from the dead, one of the teachers said, "He is risen!" and Arden told her, "At Mimi's house the balloon went up and Jesus is alive!" I thought it was so cool that she had connected those things on her own.

Sunday morning Huston was exhausted and sleeping late, but it was approaching 8 and Arden wanted breakfast. I wanted to make resurrection rolls with the kids, but didn't want to start without Huston, so I thought I would go ahead and wake him up. That was a terrible idea. I ended up making the rolls and telling the story of Jesus' resurrection to Arden while Huston threw himself on the floor whining and crying and refusing to participate.

I'm still glad we did them, though. It was so fun to cut the resurrection rolls, or "tombs," open and say "Jesus is alive!" I think we'll keep that tradition going.

After breakfast the kids played with their bubble guns from their baskets and Clarke built Huston his Lego "Halo" set that the Easter bunny brought. Yes, Halo is a continued obsession with Huston and the "Easter bunny" (Clarke - NOT me) likes to feed that obsession.

I made the kids take this picture before we went to my parents' house, and they actually were really good sports about it.

The Easter bunny had to hide the eggs inside my parents' house because of all the rain we got on Easter, but Huston got a real kick out of that and thought it was hilarious. Unfortunately, I don't have a ton of great picks of them hunting eggs, because those kids ran fast! Huston and Arden had a great time playing with their cousins and did not want to leave when it was time to go home.

Huston told us in the car, "I wish we just lived at Grandma's house. I wish we bought that house when I was in Mommy's tummy." We asked why, and he seemed to think that Grandma's house automatically came with all the fun toys and his awesome cousins, and if we lived there instead of our house, it would be fun, fun, fun all the time.

Whew! That's our Easter in a nutshell. Hope you all had a great one, too!

Big Girl Panties

I'm happy and relieved to announce that Arden is potty trained! I know you've all been waiting for this day.

I had been putting it off for so long because Huston was not the easiest child to potty train (to say the least) and the experience left me emotionally scarred and wary of repeating the whole ordeal. Potty training him (at least the pooping part) was probably one of the hardest things I've done so far as a mother. But Arden had been showing lots of signs that she was ready, so finally the Monday after spring break (March 19th), I pulled out her big girl panties and told her we were going to start going pee pee on the potty.

I took her a lot that morning and she had one accident (where she pulled the covers over her head and peed on our bed), but other than that she did really great. Over the next few days she only had one other real accident, and a few times where she peed a little bit in her panties, but then told me she had to go potty and did the rest there.

Now a few weeks into it, she is doing so great and telling me when she has to go and it has seemed mostly effortless.

Pooping, however, is something my kids struggle with, for some reason. She tries to hold her poop in (like someone else I know) and has been screaming and crying and telling me she doesn't have to poop. The first week of potty training Huston had soccer practice on Wednesday and she pooped in her panties at the park. It was a mess. She has pooped a little bit in them a few other times, but if we're home I usually notice the signs (namely, that she's grabbing her bottom and running around) and make her sit on the potty.

Unfortunately, sometimes it takes 17 times of running to the potty and making her sit on it (while she screams and cries and says she's all done and fakes me out by saying that she did it, when she really didn't) before she'll finally go. But praise the Lord, she usually does finally go and hasn't been holding it in for a week at a time like Huston did.

I'm hoping that after awhile she'll mellow out about it - she's already doing a little better than before.

Whew! I'm so proud of my little big girl. And, can I just say, I love the way she says "paaan-ties" with her southern twang.