Happy Cast-Off Day!

If there is such a thing as a perfect day, today was it. For no particular reason other than lots of great family time, beautiful weather, and our super adorable kids. Clarke took the day off from work and we all went with Huston for his 9:30 appointment to get his cast removed. He had cried every time we mentioned getting his cast off, and just truly seemed to have grown fond of it and did NOT want it taken off. I don't know if he was really worried about it hurting, but all he would say was that he was going to miss it. Thankfully, though, he woke up excited this morning and didn't utter so much as a word of complaint - just bounded up cheerfully to the doctor's office, immediately recognizing which door it was, and going right inside.

I love the picture below of the nurse showing Huston how the saw used to remove the cast actually kind of tickles. Huston giggled about it. He wore those silly pink sunglasses (and another pair of Arden's purple flower shaped sunglasses) all day. They were his "thing" of the day and he threw such a fit when I dared to tell him that they were actually Arden's glasses, not his. He said, "They are my glasses! They're real! They're my glasses, they're not Arden's!"

Sweet, silly boy.

Getting the cast off took no time, and Huston was super brave and awesome the whole time. We had contemplated going to the zoo, but when we saw the spring break traffic, we decided to skip the zoo in favor of the little train that runs outside the zoo. Huston suddenly became not so brave at the site of the train and kept crying and saying he didn't want to go on it. Then he ran away and Clarke had to chase him down and pull him up out of the dirt that he dove into in his attempted escape. Somehow Clarke managed to convince him to get on, and of course Huston immediately loved it. On the ride, we went behind a bunch of buildings - one of which is the kids' pediatrician's office. Huston immediately recognized it, even from our weird perspective and location, and said, "Isn't that the doctor's office?!" It never fails to surprise me how good he is at remembering places and locations. He's like a GPS with photographic memory.

Arden loved it too, despite the serious look on her face in this picture. She kept pointing and saying "Duck! Duck!" every time we passed ducks in the water. It actually was a really fun train ride, and just the right length.

After the train ride, we headed to Gloria's for lunch and ate outside to enjoy the gorgeous day. While we were eating, Huston said, out of the blue, "Isn't that just so great that I got my cast off? Now I have two hands!"

Arden had a blast running around after lunch through the gate that Huston kept opening and closing. He still has such a love for opening gates. And Arden has such a love for running away and trying to escape. Especially if she knows you want her for something, like to put her shoes on or to change her diaper. She gets this impish look of glee in her eyes as she prepares to run away, and never fails to squeal with delight.

I was trying to get Clarke to take a self-portrait of all of us in our Saint Patricks' Day green after lunch, when a nice lady passed and offered to do it for us. I can't believe that it actually didn't turn out too bad.

After nap time, we took the kids out to the park by our house for some more playtime because Huston was anxious to use both arms while playing. Then we came back home and Huston begged to watch "Up!" again. He's obsessed with this movie lately and watches the entire thing pretty much every day. A few weeks ago his favorite movie was Monsters Inc. No telling what it will be next.

And that was pretty much our day. Wonderful and relaxing and fun. I'm so grateful for my family, for spring break, and for a healed arm on my sunglasses-wearing, gate-opening, inimitable boy.

Recently

This is Arden on Sunday. She sat in her chair forever, surrounded by her books, just talking and reading and pointing at the pictures. I got some sweet video of it, too. She has quite the vocabulary now, with one of her first and favorite and most frequently used words being "up." She also says and signs "please" (leeease) and "thank you" (dant youuuuu). She can say "I love you," dada, doggie, and no no (this one cracks me up because she'll just bust it out randomly like when I try to feed her something she doesn't want she'll all of a sudden look up at me and say "nooo, noooo" and shake her head at me). She loves to say "yuck!" (a favorite learned from her big brother) and can say diaper, poo poo, and burp. All wonderful words, I know. She loves this book that we got for Huston when he was potty training about a little boy named Joshua and his potty. It tells you all the ins and outs of the body and she loves the page with the bottom on it. Last night Clarke read the side about how Joshua's body has many nice and useful parts, a head for thinking, eyes for seeing, etc. The opposite page says "...and a bottom for sitting and in it a little hole for making poo poo." (I know, I know...Clarke hates this book, for the record). Anyway, after he read the first page, Arden just pointed to the next page and said, quite matter-of-factly, "Poo Poo." It cracked us up.

She got her toe nails painted for the first time on Sunday. I was painting mine and she kept signing please the whole time. I was going to put the polish away, but she looked at me urgently, signing please and pointing to her toes. It was so cute! So I held her on my lap and painted her nails and she sat perfectly still. She's such a girly girl!

This is Huston playing outside yesterday. We had chalk out and he told me he was a painter and he was just painting the ground. Clarke and I always talk about how strange it is that Huston doesn't really play with toys. At all. His favorite things to do are to reenact real-life events. The other night he loved when I put on a pair of his glasses and he would pretend to fix them for me when they were broken. A few weeks ago he was playing with Bear Bear and he told me, "Bear Bear just keeps screaming. I've told him, like, five times, but he just keeps doing it on purpose." So, Bear Bear is also a big player on the pretending scene in his little world. Bear Bear had to get x-rays on his arm last week, because he broke his arm, too.

Huston is still such a big questioner. Everything is "why" and he'll ask you things over and over and over. So inquisitive. I can hardly ever get pictures of him because he runs away and gets so mad when I get out the camera. This past week he finally asked us to uncover the knobs on his bed, which had been draped with sheets for a year or so because he was afraid of them. Then he said, "Why didn't you know that I wasn't afraid of them anymore?" Speaking of afraid, he is still petrified of getting his nails clipped, especially his toe nails.

Those are all of my random thoughts for the moment. I just wanted a reason to post these pictures of my cuties.

A fractured wrist

So Huston got his first cast yesterday (and hopefully, last). I never would have imagined my super-cautious, completely non-daring, timid, sweet boy would have ended up with a cast at the tender age of 3.

A seemingly normal fall off of his tricycle seems to have been the culprit. He was riding it around the house Tuesday night, holding Bear Bear and Blankie while he did it. He pedals reealllyy slowly so, as usual, I thought nothing about it. When he fell over to his left side with the tricycle kind of on top of him, he obviously cried and I kissed him and hugged him, but then he got right back up on the tricycle and kept playing. He played until bedtime, went to sleep, and I didn't have a clue anything was wrong. Wednesday morning he woke up, ate breakfast, and my mom said he was riding his tricycle again that morning. He never said a word about anything hurting.

The first clue I had that something was wrong was a call from his preschool teachers around 12:30 that afternoon. They said he was being even more clingy and reserved than usual, that he seemed really sad, and that he wasn't really having a good day. They also said he had kind of been pinching his arm really hard and leaving marks and when Ms. Kate took him out of the room to ask what was wrong, he burst into tears and said "It hurts!" She tried to figure out why it was hurting, but could only really get that it might have been hurting from pinching it. But then when Ms. Kate said that they noticed he hadn't been using his left arm all day, I got really worried. They told me that they put hand sanitizer in his right hand, and he just let his left arm dangle and kind of looked at it like, "What am I going to do now?" I immediately thought of the tricycle fall, but didn't know if it was possible the two were connected. How could he not have said anything all night and all morning, if there was something wrong?

When my mom picked him up from school shortly after that call, she noticed that he wasn't using his arm either, so I made a doctor's appointment and met them at the doctor's office. When the doctor touched his wrist, Huston winced and jerked and cried in pain. My poor baby! He had x-rays done (which he cried during because he had to move his arm in uncomfortable positions), and the doctor said it looked like a possible fracture, but we'd need to go to Cook's Orthopedic to be sure. They sent Huston home in a splint which he was NOT a fan of. He screamed all the way home about wanting to take it off but had finally calmed down by the time we got home.

Thursday morning we got our appointment set for 1:15 at Cook's. My mom went ahead and took Arden to bible study, and I stayed home with my sweet Huston, just the two of us. We had such a nice morning and afternoon together, playing and talking and having lunch at Chick Fil A at the mall. I was holding his hand as we walked into the mall and he said, "Mommy, I love you." It was like a little mommy and son date.

I was worried that his appointment would take a long time, but they got us right in, confirmed that he had a fractured wrist, and got his cast on him. The doctor said it wasn't a complete break, so he'll only have to wear the cast for three weeks (Praise God!). He said that at Huston's age, the bones are so soft that it's really more like a wrinkle in the bone. Huston cried a little bit from fear that it was going to hurt, and then after the cast was on he cried and said he wanted it off. By evening he had mostly adapted to it and was even making jokes about his arms, saying "Look, Mommy, this arm's up and this arm's down."

He went back to preschool today and had a great time. I was sooo grateful. He has been cracking me up with his adaptations, learning how to use his chin to hold and open things. The funniest thing, though, has been the way he's already taking advantage of us because he knows we feel sorry for him. He is forever trying to get us to put his glass of milk back in the refrigerator for him when he's done, and we're always telling him to go do it by himself. I hadn't mentioned a thing about resting his arm or being careful with it, but Wednesday night when he had the splint on, he walked all the way into Arden's room where I was (twice as far as it was to the refrigerator) and said, "Mommy, would you please put my milk away for me. I just need to rest my arms." Of course I did it.

Snow is Overrated

Despite our not-so-great experience playing in the snow earlier in the week, the freshly fallen, fluffy snow tempted us outside again this morning. Although my instinct is always to stay inside where it's warm and just enjoy the view, I also think I might be denying my kids an essential part of their childhood if I don't take them outside to play in the snow, especially since it's so rare. Well, from now on, I won't feel bad about denying. Although Arden loved seeing the snow while we were holding her, she promptly fell as soon as we set her down and got all wet again. And why are there no pictures of Huston, you ask? Could it be because he started screaming and crying when we said we were going to play in the snow, tried to rip off his jacket, and refused to stand up when I set him down outside, which caused him to fall forward and get all wet and scream some more. It was awesome and soooo worth all of the wet clothes and towels and changing clothes and definitely, most definitely, worth the screaming. We're thinking about doing it all over again after lunch.

Why, yes, those are socks on my daughter's hands. Why, no, we don't have any gloves or mittens for our children.

After the great snow debacle, we came inside and Arden colored her first picture. She's been really into pretending that she's writing with pens lately, and she enjoyed taking the colors out of the box. Very little actual coloring took place, but she had fun anyway.

Here's Huston earlier this week, enjoying the view of the snow from the window.

Snow Day!

Lots of hassle dressing the kids in their coats and shoes for about 45 seconds of fun and a few pictures, followed by tears because it was just too stinking cold outside. At least we're having lots of warm and cozy fun inside on this snowy day!

Big Boy on a Red Tricycle

Who is this big grown up boy on a tricycle? I can't believe it's my little Huston - how did he get so big? He has just been delighting my heart so much the past few weeks - I feel like I've really been enjoying him as much as I can and trying to treasure every word from his mouth and every hug and every silly little thing he's doing. Here, in no particular order, are some of the wonderful things I'm loving right now:

- His prayers. He's offering them up more freely lately and last night at dinner prayed: "Thank you God for this food and for this day and for Arden and Mommy and Daddy and for Mimi and Mimi's Grandpa and for Grandma and Grandma's Grandpa. Amen." Then we started eating and he said "Oh, Mommy, I just forgot to thank God for the glasses," so we closed our eyes and he prayed, "Thank you God for the glasses and the pink glasses and the sunglasses. Amen."

- His songs. I love when he comes home singing songs from preschool. Lately he's been singing something about graham crackers, something about "things go up, things go down, and the world goes around and around," and "Skinamarinkydinkydink."

- Poopy jokes. Everything is funnier with the word "poop". Yesterday he was singing "Feliz Poopy-dad," "I wanna wish you a poopy Christmas," and "Skinnamarinkydinkydink, Skinnamarinkydoo, I poop you."

- Dancing in the bedroom when Daddy comes home from work. This is a tradition that we seem to go through phases of doing and not doing, but lately we've been doing it daily. Huston often requests "Hey Mambo" aka Mambo Italiano (Rosemary Clooney) and I love when he sings "mixed up siciliano." He's got some awesome dance moves.

- Running around with no pants on. Huston's still using a pull-up to do his business and it's working quite well. When he needs to poop he'll just ask for a pull-up and say, "I'd like a pull-up to poop but no pants on." And then he'll run around with no pants on until he's done.

- His love for haircuts. He always gets so excited when it's time to go get a haircut with Daddy. He really loves the whole experience.

- His memory - which astounds me. We were at the library and he pointed to the walls and said excitedly, "Look, Mommy! They're like your school!" and sure enough the walls had the same gray and green square tiles that my school does. He hasn't been inside my school in months. He's always remembering the roads we take to places, like "If we just keep going straight is my school down there," and "Is this the way to Granny and Papaw's house?" At the grocery store the other day he picked up the frozen Eggo waffles I'd thrown in the basket and said, "Mommy, these purple words say 'granola bar'." He was pointing to where it said "Nutri-grain" because he recognized it from his granola bar boxes. He can also "read" the words Baylor and TCU and all kinds of store names like Kroger and Walgreens and Tom Thumb, and the obvious ones, like Chick-fil-A and McDonalds.

- His vocabulary. I love how he tries out new words. At Kroger the other day, I gave the pharmacy the wrong insurance card and on the way out he said, "Why did you just hand those people a mistake?"

- Pronunciation. He says "oose" instead of "use" and "oosually" instead of "usually." I love it.

Sweet, Sweet Huston. I treasure you and every single thing about you.

love,

Mommy

Peek-a-boo

I took these pictures of Arden this afternoon at the birthday party of a sweet friend. Just had to post them because she's looking so grown-up with her crooked pigtails and little boots (that she kept tripping over). She's been cracking me up with her favorite games lately, which include running away anytime she thinks you want her to come, especially if you're in the process of trying to change her clothes. She also likes to pretend to hand you something and then snatch it away and smile and laugh like she's so hilarious. She does this to Huston, too, when she has a toy that he wants. She'll hold it out like she's going to be so sweet and share, and then snatch it back before he can get it. Such a little sister!