First Two Days of Summer

I won't be giving a day by day account of our summer, but I thought I'd at least start well.  I'm counting yesterday and today as our first days of summer, since Monday was Memorial Day and Tuesday I was still babysitting a friend's daughter during the day.  Wednesday was our first day of no-obligation summer fun.

So Wednesday I woke up looking forward to some rest and relaxation, super excited that we had nothing on the schedule.  The kids, however, were immediately bored and were whining and fussy.  We ended up heading out to the grocery store and library after lunch, just to give us something to do.

Huston has been begging for a "rainbow snack" ever since we made one last summer, and I was finally able to get all the colors of fruit on sale and at the same time, so we made a rainbow snack.  He was so excited, he kept saying, "Thank you for making us a rainbow snack, Mommy!  I love rainbow snacks!"  Well, I kind of love them, too, buddy, considering that it's all fruit.

Of course, with his amazing memory, he wanted to sit at our big dining room table, since that's where we made our rainbow snack last year.  I convinced him to sit in the kitchen.  He also had to get over his expectation that our red color would be strawberries (since that's how we did it last time), but he was finally won over by the watermelon.  Arden had to be cajoled into eating the grapes - and I couldn't convince her to eat the rest of it.  I have the hardest time getting her to eat fruits and veggies!

Here's last year's rainbow snack, just for comparison:

In the afternoon, we went outside to blow bubbles.  Arden was thoroughly engaged for the full 45 minutes, and threw a big fit when it was time to come inside:  "No, I still blowing bubbles!  I just want to blow bubbles all day!"

This morning we woke up to a big rainstorm.  After I put the kids in the car to go to Starbucks for a toffee mocha latte (can you blame me?), we came back and played in the water streaming down our street.  In case you're wondering, I did take them out with Huston still in his pajamas, no shoes on either, and Arden with her hair unfixed.  But it was just a drive-thru, okay?  

Arden looks like Cousin It in all these pictures, but she wouldn't let me pull her hair out of her face.

We had the best time walking up and down the street, making footprints and handprints, finding worms, and just splashing around in the water.  Every time we found a worm, Huston would touch it, and when it would start squirming frantically, he would laugh hysterically and say, "I don't know why it's freaking out!"

Here's to more lazy summer fun ahead!

School's Out for Summer!

Huston had his preschool performance this past Wednesday, followed by the annual Scoopy Doo Ice Cream Social and picnic outside on the preschool lawn.

He did a-maz-ing at his performance.  And by that, I mean he didn't scream or cry.  Clarke and I sat so far in the back of the church that we could barely see him and I promised him I wouldn't invite anyone else and that I would take any pictures or video.  I told him his only choices were to sing, or to stand there quietly, but that absolutely no screaming and crying was allowed.  And he did a great job!  He looked happy, even though he wasn't singing or doing hand motions, and he only occasionally stuck his hands out in front of his face like he was trying to block someone from looking at him.

Later in the week he told me that Dinah and Blankie were supposed to sing, but instead they just stood there and pretended to be statues.  I guess that's what he was doing, too!

His music teacher, Ms. Beth, gave me a cd of all of the songs they sang this year, and Huston has been so happy singing and dancing to them in his room.  So I still feel like I've gotten to see a performance, even if he didn't sing at school.

Our last day of school was Friday.  This was the best picture I could get of him with Ms. Kate and Ms. Larissa.  They have been his sweet, patient teachers for two years now (since I held him back in the three year old room).  I know he'll miss being in their class.

He was not in the mood to pose for pictures, but I got a few of him playing outside at recess.  These are two of his best buddies from his class - Jacob, on the left, and Morton, on the right.  Aren't they cute?

Can't believe how big he looks!  On to the Pre-K class next year!

Arden: 2 years, 6 months

I meant to do an update on Arden right after I did the one on Huston, but somehow several weeks have passed and I'm just now getting around to it.  Here's a snapshot of my little girl at 2 and a half.

Sweet Arden, you are an absolute JOY to our family.  You love reading more than anything in the world, and bring us books all day long, saying "I want you to read me this."  It's hard to resist your sweet look, so you get read a lot of books.  You can read the entire book of Olivia almost verbatim and with good inflection.  It's adorable.  You always pick one book to sleep with every night.

You have an imaginary friend named Baby Junior.  I don't know how you came up with that name.  Baby Junior lives somewhere on your leg - usually your knee, but sometimes your foot.  Baby Junior's Mom also lives there.  One day in the car you said, "I have to pee!" and I turned around and asked urgently, "Arden, do you need to go potty?"  and you said, "No, Baby Junior just said 'I have to pee!'"  Sometimes I'll see you leaning over and gently touching your leg, talking to Baby Junior.

It's getting harder and harder to get you to take a nap.  If I want you to sleep, I have to go in your room after you've been in bed for awhile and rock you to sleep.  You fight it so much and always want to read more books in your bed.

You love to play games with Daddy where you take away his hat or belt and make him chase you.  Especially when Daddy comes home from work, you love to grab his belt and run off, saying, "I got your belt!"

Your favorite place to play is behind the cushions on the couch.  You burrow behind them, shove your blankies and Lambie down in the crevice, along with whatever other toy you're playing with at the moment, and snuggle in to pretend or read.  It drives me crazy because I'm always fixing the cushions, but it's also pretty cute.

Since you've been potty trained, you've regressed slightly on the peeing.  You hardly ever tell me when you need to go, and often get your panties a little bit (or a lot) wet, if I forget to take you.  You just can't stand leaving what you're doing to go to the bathroom, but you drink a lot of water.  Not the best combination.  You have gotten better about pooping, thank heaven, and will tell me when you need to go and usually do it without crying.

For a long time after Easter when I would tell you, "I love you," you would say, "Jesus died on the cross for our sins for he loves us."

You have lots of little boy admirers already.  One little boy in your Sunday school class, Riggs, makes it a point to stand by you and hold your hand, and misses you when you don't come to class.

I love the way you talk.  You still say "flone" and "microflone" instead of phone and microphone.  You say, "marshpillows" for marshmallows and "Fri-turday" a mixture of Friday and Saturday.

You're a sensitive soul (or dramatic?) and often burst into tears if we tell you we can't read you a book, or if you get reprimanded for something.  Sometimes you throw your head down to the floor and weep dramatically in a puddle.  Lately you've been crying, "My Mommy!  My Mommy!" when you're sad.  If you get in trouble and start crying, sometimes you try to pretend like you have a boo boo and ask for a bandaid.

You have gotten so independent, and insist on putting your shoes on yourself.  So different from your brother, who still often asks me to do it for him.  You're getting really good at it.  You also like to take off your clothes by yourself, and buckle and unbuckle your car seat, which can be tricky.  You cry a lot over that car seat because you either can't do it, or I don't have time to wait for you to do it.

You and Huston play well together, but you can also fight with the best of them.  One day you were both acting out an episode of Little Einstein's where Saturn loses one of its rings, and you would yell, "Arden on the rescue!" as you went in search of the lost ring.  I love listening to the two of you pretend together.  I hope you're always good friends.

And that, my girl, is you in nutshell at 2 and a half.  I wish I could freeze you in time right now, but as you love to tell me, "I just keep growing and growing."

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.