Growing a Pumpkin Patch is Hard Work.

Bowling

So, today we went bowling at the classiest bowling alley I've ever been to - no stale beer or smoke smell, clean, very nice employees, and Adam's world was rocked by a platter of fried cheese sticks.  He'd never had them before today and he's a fried cheese convert.  He had a blast bowling with his friends and cheering for everyone, and we will definitely go back soon.  The fact that the lanes had bumpers definitely helped.  We went to Rock & Bowl a couple of years ago - it was Adam's first time bowling - and they refused to put up the bumpers.  And really, for a preschooler to have anything other than a miserable time bowling, you need to have bumpers.  (Full disclosure: we went back to Rock & Bowl last year in their new location and they were more than happy to put the bumpers up, so yay Mid City Lanes!)

Sylvie liked bowling, too - for two frames.  After that, she took off her completely adorable size 8 velcro bowling shoes, put her Keds on by herself, and declared that she was done bowling.  Then she found a pack of graham crackers somewhere in the bowels of the diaper bag and sat munching crackers for the remaining eight frames.

She is completely adorable, by the way.  She loves to sing along to the radio and she'll surprise me with great big kisses.  She'll also come up to me, pat my hair, and say, "Oh, Mama!  I like your hair!  It is so beautiful - did you take a shower?"  

Last week, we took Adam to his first nighttime Braves game.  He had a ball: he ate a footlong hot dog, some Cracker Jacks, a pint of DIppin' Dots (that shows you what a good mood my husband was in), and a half a bottle of Fanta (that shows you what a good mood I was in).  He made it all the way to the end of the game and through the fireworks that followed the ninth inning.  He fell asleep as soon as we hit the MARTA shuttle - but he always loves MARTA.  Yesterday morning, in fact, he took his MARTA Breeze card and made a tag on which he wrote, "MARTA breeze  TAP HERE -->" just like how you tap you card to get the gates to open to get to the platform.  And he carries his TAP HERE --> with him and we tap it with the used Breeze card when we need to open a door.  Perhaps he can find the cure to what ails Atlanta's regional transportation issues?

Oh, and another cute Syl thing: Chris wears a tie to work pretty much every day, and Syl always says, "Oh, Dada, I like your tie!  It is so beautiful!"  Except yesterday, when Chris came down wearing a bow tie.  "Dada, I do not like that tie."  

Oil Change

I am a generous wife and last week I took Chris's SUV to the nasty Chevy dealership for some long-overdue service.  That meant that Syl and I had to hang in the nasty pit of a waiting room at the nasty Chevy dealership.  There is a bright, shiny, happy Chevy dealership, but it's way up in, like, Acworth, about a 40-minute drive from my house.  I opted for the nasty place that's 5 minutes from home.  What can I say?  It was nasty, and Syl kept futzing with the nasty M&M dispenser, and then with the nasty vending machine, and the whole experience was just nasty.  

And then today I had to take my car to the slightly-less-nasty Mazda dealership for an oil change.  It's really not nasty at all - it's just a car dealership that - I am guessing - was designed by men who didn't think that maybe women would be spending time there waiting for their car to be serviced, and maybe those women would be there with a kid or two in tow.  And one of those kids ($1 to whoever guesses which kid it was - hint: the one who's already had a skull fracture) would try to climb up the rail on the balcony that overlooks the showroom, and also try to jam her hand up in the vending machine because her cruel, heartless mother wouldn't spring for any animal crackers.

So you know what I did?  I took both kids down to the showroom, which was empty because no one is out car shopping on a nasty, snowy, cold day.  And I let the kids pile into the back of a Mazda 5.  Then I slid the doors closed and let them play in the car while I leaned on the side of the car and played Bejeweled 2 on my iPhone.  

Yes, I am That Person.  But at least we left the dealership with both kids intact!  

Birthdays

I just finished designing the invitation for Sylvie's birthday party next month.  "Design" is probably an overstatement.  Syl loves Brown Bear, Brown Bear, so we're doing an Eric Carle theme.  For the invitation, I scanned some Brown Bear fabric and sort of took it from there, no doubt violating many copyrights along the way.  (Hi, Eric Carle's attorneys!  We're super big fans!)  I had the fabric because I'm making her a reversible Brown Bear pinafore that she can wear at the party.  Because, like I always say, if you're going to have a theme, have a theme.

A birthday party is probably overkill for a two-year-old, but we had one for Adam's second birthday, so it doesn't seem fair to deny poor second-born, baby book-less Syl the pleasure of her own.  Plus, Sylvie loves birthday parties.  Just loves them.  Every time she attends one (most of Adam's friends are still at the age where birthday parties are a whole family affair), she runs around singing "Happy day to you!" and babbles about the "happy day cake."  She loves parties, and I can't deny the girl a birthday party.  Plus, I like throwing parties.  Themes!

Chris's birthday was last week.  Sylvie was mainly excited about singing "Happy day to you!" but Adam was beside himself with the surprises we'd planned.  He is into celebrating holidays, and January and February have a boatload: MLK Day, Groundhog Day, Valentine's Day, President's Day, Mardi Gras, George Washington's birthday...  So Adam was beside himself about Chris's birthday falling in the middle of the holiday frenzy.  

In the past, I've always ordered barbecue from different parts of the country for Chris's birthday dinner.  We've had Memphis, Austin, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kansas City, and two kinds of Georgia barbecue, but this year Adam wanted to pick a restaurant for the birthday dinner.  He went with his favorite: Buffalo*!  Because eating out on a weeknight is always fraught, we needed Chris to meet us at the mall, but Adam did not want Chris to know where we were going.  I told him that we'd tell Chris we were going to Chick-fil-A (which is probably Adam's second-favorite restaurant), but then we'd surprise him with Buffalo.  We parked the car and were walking to the mall entrance and I asked Adam how he was going to let Chris know we weren't going to CFA.  

I asked, "So, you'll run up and say, 'Surprise! We're really going to Buffalo!', right?" Adam was aghast.

"NO! That would ruin the surprise! I will tell him to close his eyes and then we will walk him to Buffalo and walk in and say, 'Surprise! We're at Buffalo!'"

A subtle difference, indeed.

So, Chris turned 39, complete with pie, ice cream, presents, and a big surprise for dinner.

*Buffalo = Ted's Montana Grill.  Adam has always called it Buffalo because, at least at the one we visit, there's a big stuffed buffalo head on the wall.

Redux

When Adam was little, he liked to rock.  Thankfully, that phase didn't last too long.  Flash to this year, where poor Sylvie's sleep has suffered because of her recurrent ear infections (as of this week, she's had 13 since December 2008.  We visit the ENT in early March.).  This week, she's been waking up around 5:30.  To keep her from waking Adam with her predawn shenanigans, one of us will go in there to change her diaper and rock her for a little while, and this morning when I went in there, she plopped her head on my shoulder as soon as I picked her up from the crib and moaned, "I want to rock!  Want to rock!"  

Another thing that Adam did when he was little, but hasn't done in a while, is demand that Chris remove his jacket as soon as he entered the house in the evenings.  We quickly deduced that Adam had figured that jacket off = Dada is home and intends to stay put.  A week or so ago, Chris came in from work and Syl ran up to him squealing, "Jacket off!  Jacket off!"  I get it, too - probably because I go to a lot more meetings now than I did when Adam was small.  It gets tricky, though, when I'm wearing a cardigan over a camisole and Sylvie demands that I remove my jacket.  She doesn't really get the whole point of cardigans yet, I guess.  I should probably take her on a field trip to Talbot's.

NOW!

Syl is 18 months old, and she's learning how to talk.  The language stage that hits around 18 months is one of my favorites - you start finding out so much about their little personalities.  They're all sponges, but you really get a taste of what they've been absorbing when they start repeating it back to you.

You're also reminded of all of your verbal tics.  I apparently say, "All right!" whenever I finish a task.  A couple of weeks ago, Syl was following me around while I vaccumed the upstairs.  When I finished, I declared, "All right!"  She repeated me - "Aw-RIGHT!"  And now, every time she's done with whatever she's doing, she'll trill, "Aw-RIGHT!"  Chris's is "Oh boy!"  He's usually the one who goes to get Syl out of her crib in the morning, and lately, he's been greeted with "Oh BOY!"

The word she says most often is "NOW!"  As in, "Ahn [I want] outside NOW!"  Or, "Ahn cookie NOW!"  Whenever the sitter comes, it's "Ahn bee-men [basement, where the playroom is and where the sitter takes them while I finish cooking supper] NOW!"  We've been trying to get her to switch "please" for "NOW!" and we've had a little success.  Now (heh), when she wants an apple - which she eats whole, without me peeling or cutting it - she'll say "Ahn app-uh PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAS!"  

Adam's having a good time teaching his sister new words, and he gets so excited when she repeats something now.  "Mom!  Sylvie said Halloween!" ("Ha-WEEN!")  A lot of the time she has no idea what she's saying and Adam's having fun getting her to say tricky words like "ambulance" and "delicious."  She's also - finally - saying Adam's name.  When she started talking several months ago, she could name all of us - Mama, Dada, Dutch - but she wouldn't say Adam or Brother or anything, really, for him.  Now she calls him either "Bruh" or "Dadam" and he is thrilled.  We're pleased, too, more for Adam than anything else.  It was so pitiful when he'd lament, "When will she say MY name?"  

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Adam is nearly five, and he simultaneously seems like such a little boy, but also so grown up.  He loves reading more than just about anything else.  He's been practicing his writing at school, and yesterday he started copying words from books.  He also loves to color now, something that he'd never spend more than a couple of minutes on the past few years.  His interests have expanded from trucks, trucks, and trucks to include dinosaurs, pirates, knights, weather, space, robots, and science.  He LOVES science.  A lot of folks have heard this story, but it's such classic Adam that it bears repeating.  Several months ago, we had a library book about some cat who called himself a Man of Mystery.  Chris asked Adam if he was a man of mystery, and Adam replied, "No, Dad.  I'm a man of science!"  Man of science, indeed.

Subsurface

Adam has been interested in volcanos lately, and props to the Discovery Kids online volcano game - it does a great job of illustrating how the different types of volcanos are formed and how they erupt.  Still, at 4 years old, Adam is pretty literal, and while he understands that lava and magma are underground, "underground" for him is a pretty catch-all term that includes dirt, worms, rocks, slugs, and lava.

The other day, Adam was asking Chris about skunks - he's also into pretending he's a skunk - and he asked where skunks sleep.  Chris replied that sometimes skunks burrow underground in the winter for a nice warm place to sleep.  Adam thought about this for a minute and then asked, "Wow.  How do the skunks tolerate the lava?"

Four Years!

Adam is four years old today!  He is an amazing boy, and three was a fantastic, fun year.  He truly is a little boy now - his proportions, his actions, and his attitude are all those of a little kid, and not a toddler.  I'll pull him into my lap and tell him that he is my sweet baby boy and he always says, "Moooooom, why do you always call me a baby?  I'm NOT a baby - I'm a big boy!"

Yes, you are, sweet boy.  Happy birthday to my first baby.