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!"