Inquiring mind

Abby is growing more impatient by the day with our failure to expedite her moon launch.

"I'm going to be the first woman in space," she informed her dad the other day.

He had to break the news to her that there have already been number of women in space.

"How many?" she wanted to know.

He guessed. About 20, he told her.

"Okay," she replied. "Then I'll be the twenty-first woman in space."

If there is one thing I know about Abby, it's that she doesn't give up easily.

To buy ourselves some time, we bought her a new space encyclopedia, which she proceeded to read cover to cover.

And now, when I can't get her excited about our handwriting lessons, I can set her up with her space book and assign her the job of copying one of the pictures and writing a description of it for me. She's going to make a space book of her own, she explained to me.

"It won't be heavy like this one," she went on. "That way we can bring it with us."

Bring it with us where? I asked.

"To space."

I should have known.

Bookworm

It didn't take us long to figure out that Abby was the reason the outside lights on the front of our house were always on. Each night, after everyone was tucked in bed, she would sneak over to sit beside her window, turn the outside light on, and read by the light that shone in through her blinds.

So we bought her a little lamp that clips onto her headboard, and now every night looks like this.

Her current reading list includes Alice and Wonderland, the Miss Piggle Wiggle series, and an old book on how things work that I picked up at a consignment sale. (Abby generally has three or four books going at a time. She gets that from me.)

When I left, she was educating herself on how leather is made and how shoes are put together. I expect we'll hear a full report on how my boots came to be over breakfast.

Anything you can do...

Levi, 7 months
February 2013

We still don't know why he does it, but now at least we know where he gets it from.

I guess we'll call it his Levi face.

Jacob, 8 months
June 2011

You want fries with that?

After all the food and digestive woes we've endured with Jacob, having another big healthy eater like his big brother Caleb is a welcome change.

Levi seems to be enjoying the addition of some protein in his diet, and is only slightly mystified by being able to hold his food instead of having it spoon-fed to him.

Chicken nuggets, anyone?

Thicker than thieves

I don't know which of them pushed the button, but the evidence is clear that my eldest two have figured out how to take self portraits with my phone.

What they don't know how to do is cover their tracks.

Backseat reader

"Do you want me to read you a story from my Bible?" Abby asked as on our way to the grocery story.

"We'd love that," I answered for her brothers and myself, anticipating a retelling of Noah's ark or the birth of Jesus.

"These are the words of Nehemiah..." she began, and then proceeded to read the entire first chapter of Nehemiah to us, conveniently skipping over the hard-to-pronounce Old Testament names.

Only Abby.

Larger than life

I am confident that my mom never saw herself as the type of person who would drive an hour to get up close and personal with a monster truck.

But that was before grandkids came along.

For the record, I don't know who was more excited: Caleb, at seeing the real live Gunslinger, or Mimi, at seeing Caleb's reaction to it.

He took his toy Gunslinger with him and got it autographed by the driver, and will probably spend the next few months reminding us that Gunslinger will be back in the fall (the driver gave him all the details) and that we can go see him again, and bring the whole family this time.

I'm not going to lie. I'm a little worried about what we may have started here.

Paradox

I hate that he's sick. But I love that he nodded off in my arms.

Even if he does pick his nose in his sleep.

Attaboy, Levi

This is the face of a baby who's being raised right.

We have a great system in place for rewarding good behavior around here. Polishing off half a sweet potato totally warrants a whole Oreo for dessert.

Levi agrees.

Flying sharks

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them.

We were on our way to Target in the rain (the Fab Four and I) to get Valentines for the parties the kids were having at Bible Study and at school on Friday. It was early, and I probably hadn't had enough caffeine to be thinking clearly. It was a mistake any mom could make, but that a seasoned mom should not.

And yet there they were, those fateful words, carelessly spilling out of my mouth before I could stop them.

"What kind of Valentines do you guys want to make?" I asked the underage crowd riding behind me.

They paused, long enough for me to realize just how much power I had given them, and to realize that I should have simply suggested the purchase of some premade cards.

Then Caleb piped up with a suggestion that was heartily approved by his siblings.

"I want to make shark heart paper airplane valentines," he yelled, much too enthusiastically.

Shark. Heart. Paper Airplane. Valentines.

Who ever heard of such a thing?

My defenses were low (probably the lack of caffeine) and I agreed to try to find supplies to make these shark heart paper airplane valentines. We managed to locate some sparkly shark stickers for Caleb, some frogs for Abby, and some train stickers for Jacob. Back home, I drew hearts for Caleb to color while Abby decorated her own red and pink paper, and the hubby and I spent the evening folding a few dozen tiny paper airplanes. (Thankfully, Abby was able to fold her own.)

And just like that, their wish came true.

Next year, I'll know better.

Mount Washmore

Sometimes, I can't remember what life was like without them.

Laundry day is not one of those times.

Stink Eye

\ˈstiŋk·ˈī\
noun. 
: a facial expression of distrust, disdain, or disapproval
: see illustration above

Example: When I took away the spoon Levi was playing with, he gave me the stink eye.

Only brush the ones you want to keep

Come to think of it, we might all practice more thorough dental hygiene if we brushed our teeth while sporting an airplane costume.

Sharks included.

Unsolved mysteries

This video monitor is turning out to be even more fun than I thought.

Turns out all those times I thought Caleb was up to no good in his room when he was supposed to be napping, he was just sitting quietly on his couch, flipping through a book before nodding off.

And that horrible pounding noise I kept hearing was just the sound of two very heavy boy feet kicking the floor as he turned the pages.

Life is full of surprises.

Hey y'all, watch this!

Today's Language Arts lesson included the -all word family. The assignment was to think up as many words as possible. I thought I had given her just enough lines to write all the ones she knew: ball, call, fall, etc.

I failed to factor in her familiarity with Southern colloquialisms. I tried explaining that y'all is not really a word. She countered with the argument that y'all is a contraction. (At least I know she paid attention to last week's lesson.)

So I did what any good English teacher would do and followed up with how to punctuate it properly. If she's going to add it to her vernacular, at least she'll know where the apostrophe goes.

Railway engineering

Nothing is ever simple when it comes to Abby.

She wanted to build a train track. She was done with school for the day, so I told her to go build one. But instead of heading to the living room, where the train tracks reside, she headed to the kitchen table. She stopped on her way to procure some paper, a few stickers and a pencil with a good eraser.

About 20 minutes and a big stack of paper later, she brought me this:

"I want to make this train track, Mommy," she informed me, in the matter-of-fact way she has of saying most things.

Of course you do, I thought to myself.

What I said was, "That's a great design Abby! It looks really complicated. Do you want some help?"

She did not, which didn't surprise me in the least.

I sent her brothers upstairs with every wheeled toy I could find, thinking this might increase her chances at successfully constructing the track she had designed.

A half an hour later, I found this:

Sometimes I think she does stuff just to prove me wrong when I doubt her. I'm totally okay with that.

You have something on your face

Why yes, as a matter of fact, Levi does like sweet potatoes.

He also enjoys flailing his arms like a madman when the spoon gets close to his mouth, and laughing hysterically at his own messes.

And his cheeks still get rosy when he's excited.

And he's still really, really adorable.

Any more questions?

Fun for all

Levi can't quite sit up on his own yet, which is bothersome to the brothers and sister who want to play with him. So in an attempt to involve him in their construction project, they decided to build him a little chair.

I'm fairly certain that it was Abby who decided to build him a little chair, and that she coerced Caleb into giving up the blocks for his tower to help with it. And I'm also fairly certain that she managed to convince Jacob that contributing to the building of the chair was a much more worthwhile end for the blocks he had used to build his puppy. This is typically how these things go.

But however they arrived at it, it became a collaborative effort, with all elders working diligently to make certain that the younger did not fall over. 

Caleb put himself in charge of structural integrity and worked to ensure that the back was connected to the sides so that his brother didn't lean back and collapse the whole thing.

Abby worked on architectural design, adding the little extras that would set this chair apart from all others. The working fans on the arms, windows built into the sides and the color choices were all her doing.

And Jacob made sure that no piece went unused, adding insect eyes and roof pieces to the outside edges, and building the back and sides as high and as thick as his siblings would allow.

The end result was quite an impressive feat of engineering, and Levi seemed to appreciate all the attention, if not the project itself.

I appreciated that the four of them managed to entertain themselves for so long without the whole episode devolving into chaos.