Colorful candy shell

I've never really thought about it before, but I guess I should have known I'd be the family-theme-halloween-costume type. It's got just the right amount of cheesiness to suit my personality.

A $3 find at a yard sale (thanks Mimi) brought the big red M&M costume into our family. Abby hasn't really wanted to take it off since September, so it seemed like a no-brainer to let her wear it for Halloween. Spike was our little Peanut long before we named him Caleb, so I crafted a blue costume for him to match. A little homegrown screen printing with fabric paint, an iron and some freezer paper yielded a green and a yellow M each for mom and dad, and voilà! Suddenly we became the family that melts in your mouth, not in your hands. (Abby, for her part, was a great sport about letting me spray her curls red, and was quite entertained by "mommy's hair green!")

Personally, I think this picture has excellent Christmas Card '09 potential.

Learning is fun: Letter K

I know, I know...cat begins with the letter C. But kitty cat (which is what Abby calls them) begins with K, which makes it a perfect subject for our Letter K activity. Justin helped me prepare this furry felt kitty, because apparently I'm good at a lot of things craft-wise, but drawing cat faces is not one of them. So pat him on the back and tell him what a crafty dad he is next time you see him.

I decided to see how well Abby could handle drawing in the lines this week, so I gave her a gray marker, demonstrated the drawing of stripes, and sent her to work coloring our kitty's body. As she does with most things, she concentrated pretty hard on trying to do what I was asking and seemed to get a little frustrated when her toddler hand wouldn't obey and keep the marker on the white circle like she was asking it to. I showed her how to draw slowly so she could have more control over what she was coloring, and she seemed pretty pleased that she could keep the marker in the appropriate area using that technique.

She's getting better and better and identifying first sounds of words, and spent a good deal of time after our craft showing me how she could "k-k-kick a kettle!" (This she learned from our Dr. Suess ABC book, a nonsensical tale that is mostly jibberish, but does drive home the sounds of letters pretty well).

She knows the drill, so as soon as we were done with her craft, she demanded we hang it up in the playroom so she could show her dad when he gets home. Her demand goes a little like this, with no pauses to breathe: "Abby finish a craft! Abby make a kitty. Kitty starts with K, like k-k-kick a kettle! Mommy hang it up in playroom. Abby show Daddy. Daddy get home from work and Abby show Daddy kitty cat!"

Yeah, crafts are a pretty big deal to her.

Artsy Fartsy

The air was crisp, the leaves were turning, and the evening sun provided the perfect lighting. I took one photography class in college, so I thought I'd bundle up the kiddos, head to the park and try to be artsy. Maybe, I thought, we'll end up with some decent shots that I can frame and give to the grandparents so they won't have to read the blog all the time to see pictures of their grandkids.

On the other hand, maybe my daughter will realize that while mom's attempting to be artsy with what's in front of the camera (Caleb), she's not paying a lick of attention to what's going on behind the camera (Abby).

I managed to snap the shot above just moments before I heard my darling toddler exclaim "Abby running!" as she swooped in and tackled her brother to the ground. My life, it seems, is not meant to be artsy...

Grand Old Flag

Justin's grandpa was honored at the World War II Memorial in D.C. in a ceremony put together by a very cool organization, Honor Flight Network. Since it took so long to build a memorial to the veterans of the second world war that most of them (our grandpas included) are long gone, the guys at the Honor Flight Network decided to fly the remaining veterans up to see their memorial at no cost. The families of veterans who did not live long enough to make the trip can elect to participate in a flag ceremony that brings their burial flags to the monument in their stead.

If you know a veteran of World War II, I encourage you to find out more about this program and get him up there to see the monument built in his honor. (Or hers...there was a veteran WW2 nurse among the crowd we met.)

You can see the video of the flag ceremony at the memorial by clicking here.

Read aloud

I'm going to go ahead and upgrade Abby's love of books to an obsession. I will, at times during the day (usually during Caleb's morning nap) leave Abby alone just to see what she'll do. She's always been great at entertaining herself and playing alone, and it seems that trend is continuing into her 2's.

On most days, when I tell her it's time for her to play quietly for a while, she'll pull all of the books off of her bookshelf, stack them up on the couch in the living room, climb up next to them and work her way through to the bottom of the stack, carefully "reading" each one aloud, narrating the pictures she sees or repeating the phrases she's heard us attach to particular stories. She's memorized a number of her books already (Goodnight Moon, Corduroy, a few Clifford books, Splosh, portions of Peter Rabbit, a number of Dr. Suess books and a couple of Bible stories, to name a few), which I was pretty excited about until I realized it meant I could no longer skip pages. Now instead of us reading stories to her, she likes to climb up on our laps and recite the stories to us.

On this particular day, she decided that her toys (and a few bracelets) made a much more captive audience than her mom. So she lined them up at attention, grabbed a few books and proceeded to spend about an hour sprawled on the floor"reading" to them about big red dogs and Jesus and cats wearing hats.

Unpack your adjectives

If I could only have one word to describe my daughter, I'd have to go with fearless. She's willing to try anything that looks fun (or in many cases, dangerous) with no thought to the consequences, or how she'll get herself out of a situation once she gets herself into it. Chalk it up to being 2. To her credit, and by the grace of God, she usually succeeds (except for the incident with the concussion and the time she broke her tooth in half). Those successes, to her dad and me, are both amazing and terrifying.

I mention all this because Justin asked the other day how I would describe Abby, and I had fun trying to sum her up in a couple of words. I'm a list person. You know the kind...the one who has lists of things to do, things to buy, rooms in the house to clean. I've even been known to add things to an existing list that I've already accomplished, simply to be able to cross them off. So making a list of adjectives to describe my 26-month-old seems like a logical thing to do to help me remember down the road what she was like at this age. Here goes, in no particular order:

• boisterous
• excited
• noisy
• bossy
  
• fearless
• brave
  
• joyful
• musical
• impatient
• cuddly (finally!)
• energetic
• daring
• tough
  
• inquisitive
• helpful
• sophmoric
• carefree
• vivacious
• crazy
• adorable
• smart
• eager

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And for those who missed the School House Rock reference in the title, shame on you for not growing up in the eighties. Click here to be enlightened.

Beep, beep!

We interrupt this shopping experience to bring you some serious cuteness. It's hard to hate grocery shopping when the kids are having so much fun.

Abby showed Caleb how to honk the horn on the car on the front of the grocery store buggies, and we proceeded to bring smiles to the faces of all the produce shoppers.

Learning is fun: Letter J

After watching me spend a great deal of time working on Caleb's Halloween costume, Abby has become pretty interested in sewing. Well actually...she's become really interested in unwinding as much of my thread as possible. But that's a start.

So for our Letter J activity, I decided to let her try her hand at some domestic engineering with a little sewing project of her own. Armed with some scissors and a hole punch, I created the front and back of a pretty simple "jacket" that she could stitch together. I discovered that her fine motor skills are not quite refined enough to thread the yarn consistently into the little holes, and I also learned that she can be pretty darn stubborn about accepting assistance. Once I convinced her that I was simply going to "help" her and was not going to take it away and do it for her, she happily held onto the tip of the yarn as I put it into the hole, then she would reach around back to pull it through. It was a tedious and time-consuming process, and she loved it.

Once our jacket was finished, I had her dress our Letter J, which prompted her to exclaim "J's wearing a jacket! J's nice and cozy." When I asked her why the J needed a jacket, she paused for a second and then replied, "J's cold. It's cold today." (As our weather has cooled off, we've started most mornings by bundling up a little more than usual. I always explain to Abby that "it's cold today" and she needs to dress warmly so she'll stay "nice and cozy." Amazing what they pick up on...)

We ended our craft with the application of googly eyes and a smile, which Abby seemed to agree was a nice finishing touch.

Suddenly, a tooth

Ice cream soft and slowly thawing in the hands of parents dear
Caleb scooting, ever drawing slowly, oh so deftly, near
Vanilla, cool and most delicious, in a crisp dark chocolate shell
Oh, how Caleb fiercely wishes that he had the words to tell
But the sharp central incisor peeking through his lower gums
Makes his mother much the wiser as she feels her bitten thumb
Now he looks up, gently pleading, begging her to know the truth,
Wanting, no--make that needing--one bite to sooth his aching tooth
And in a move quite impromptu, she holds it out, but not too far,
Amazed at what her son would do for one bite of a Klondike bar.

Play us a song

This piano might just be the best dollar I ever spent. I snagged it at a yard sale last year when we started thinking that Abby might enjoy some toddler-type toys, and it served us well for a few months. We unpacked it recently for Caleb's enjoyment, and he soon realized that it provides him with just the right amount of leverage to pull himself into a standing position. Now our little piano man loves to stand up and bang on the keys forever. Or until his sister decides it's her turn. We're still working on that whole sharing thing.

'Cause they're so delicious

It's all fun and games until someone eats the last goldfish.

Abby has a designated snack spot in the kitchen where she's allowed to eat her snacks on the floor. She'll go pick out a plastic plate, sit it down on the rug and wait while I pour goldfish onto it, then scarf them down real quickly so she can run around again. And every once in a while, for no particular reason, she'll decide that snacking on goldfish is more fun with a buddy and will cease her attempts to defend her stash of goldfish from her little brother.

And those are the sweet little once-in-a-whiles I live for.

Learning is fun: Letter I

Now this craft was a big hit. I used lots of what I know Abby loves--crayons, foam and references to ice cream--and very little of what she (lately) doesn't: glue. And in the end, we had a product so exciting that she actually tried to take a bite. That's a slobber mark up by the top scoop of foam ice cream.

I tried to channel Abby's crayon energy into something fruitful, so I asked her to hunt for certain letters in the words "ice cream" and color them when she found them. She thought that was lots of fun.

I've been trying to focus more on number identification lately, so I incorporated that as well. Much like she did with letters when she was first learning them, Abby can tell you if she sees a number, she just doesn't know which number it is. (Except the number 4...she knows that one because she pays close attention when I change Caleb's size 4 diapers.) So I had her watch as I carefully numbered each scoop of ice cream and we practiced finding the numbers 1 through 3. She did pretty well with that exercise, although she was kind of disturbed by the fact that the cone didn't have a number as well. I made her count and tell me which number should be next, and when she correctly answered "four!" I added a number 4 to the cone before hanging up her craft on our alphabet wall in the playroom.

I think our Letter I craft successfully erased all her bad memories of the oh-so-sticky Letter H activity. Whew.

Never too early...

All this talk of alphabets and letter-learning got Caleb curious. So to prove he loves letters too, he likes to pull all the magnets off of the side of the fridge and scatter them about the house. And he likes to do it a couple times a day. And he likes to do it even when I put the magnets up high enough that I'm certain he can't reach them. (I think his sister's chipping in a little help.)

That's his "who, me?" face, in case you were wondering.

Flight lessons

When the Abbys asked Justin to read to them, I'm not sure they expected a dissertation on the finer points of aviation. I knew that A-to-Z airplane book was a good find...I just didn't realize it would be such big hit with my hubby.

Wherever I go, you're gonna go

Caleb's fully mobile now, and he leaves a path of destruction in his wake wherever he goes.

Like his big sister, he's not so keen on the hands-and-knees crawling. He prefers to stay low to the ground and sneak up behind you, commando-style.

Most notably, this means our oh-so-social little guy no longer has to miss out on the action when everyone leaves the playroom to head into the kitchen for a snack. If we wait a few seconds, we'll hear the familiar "scoot-scoot-scoot" of Caleb pushing along the floor, and in no time he rounds the corner and peeks his smiling face around as if to say "Hey! Where'd everybody go?"

Picture crazy

A few weeks ago I was working on the computer at home and noticed that its quite-big-enough hard drive was completely full. Upon further inspection, it seems that Christina's avid use of the digital camera and unwillingness to delete any pictures (not that I really blame her) was the culprit. This is the reason I installed the new 2 terabyte RAID-1 NAS system (fancy geek speak for big disk with auto-backup) on the home network. For the curious, here is a graph I put together of our picture taking over the years. If the trend continues we'll be full again in four more years.

* Projected

Learning is fun: Letter H

Letter H was not our most popular craft. The girl who, just a few weeks ago, was absolutely in love with glue and sticking things to other things found the stuff totally offensive this week. She enjoyed tracing and watching me cut out her hands, she liked coloring the hands, but gluing them down she could have done without. Just when I think I've got her all figured out, she goes and changes her mind about something as simple as glue. That's just life with a toddler I guess.

Our letter H craft did give us a lot of opportunities to talk about colors and numbers, which proved quite fruitful. She knows all of her basic colors by this point and a few obscure ones as well. (I can't very well let her call her crocs "green" when they're so obviously teal. So I taught her to distinguish between the two. She's also pretty good at picking out coral and cranberry.) She recites the numbers 1 through 10 flawlessly, and can count to about six or seven. (And by counting, I mean actually pointing at individual pieces in a grouping of objects and numbering them correctly to determine how many there are.)

And since the point of this exercise was to learn more about the letter H, we talked about words that start with the "ha-ha" sound, like "hat" and "hug." But mostly, we were ha-ha-happy when this craft was completed. Next week we'll try to put less emphasis on the glue portion.

Random acts of kindness

Our mornings follow a fairly consistent routine--one in which I actually get to shower, eat breakfast and get dressed before the kids make a peep. Once the peeping starts, things get a little crazy.

Caleb will wake up and begin grunting around 8, which is my cue to scoop him up out of his crib, cuddle the heck out of him and kiss his big ol' cheeks until he starts grumbling for food. Down the stairs we go to a breakfast of oatmeal or, more recently, banana crunchies (bite-size pieces of banana coated in wheat germ...thanks Catherine!) that he can feed himself. He makes a big mess, I clean it up, then we trek back up the stairs to check on the noises coming from Abby's room.

Around 8:30, Abby wakes up and apparently sticks her finger in a light socket--what other explanation could there be for her crazy bedhead? She does a few laps around her bed, jumps up and down to make sure the mattress is still in good shape, pounds her feet against the back of her bed then curls back up as if nothing has happened and waits for me to come get her. Each morning I find her curled up with her pillow and her blanket, smiling innocently at me as if she's just opened her eyes. I know better. I just can't prove it yet.

This is where the cuteness starts. Abby loves for Caleb to come get her up. Once I left him downstairs to run up and get her, and she actually told me "Mommy down the stairs. Cabey wake Abby up." I learned my lesson, and now I never go into her room in the morning without him.

On this particular morning, she was insistent that I put Caleb on the floor and "move, Mommy." Apparently he was looking more huggable than me, and me holding him was standing in the way of her completing her morning cuddle mission. I wasn't certain of her motivation as she headed toward him with arms outstretched, so I asked to make sure she wasn't about to push him over or poke him in the eye.

"What are you doing, Abby?" I asked politely.

"Abby cuddle Cabey," she replied matter-of-factly. "Cabey having big squeeze!"