Mini Me

I've never really been able to see how kids, particularly babies, can look "just like" a particular parent.  Maybe I'm blind, but even with my own kids I was unable to see it.  All that changed however when I found a packet of dresses and some pictures of me when I was Harper's age in the organizing frenzy of this week.  It wasn't even similar, it was the same child just three decades difference.  I told Todd to leaf through the pictures and all I could hear was, "Oh WOW!"  Doubt this is a good thing, since she has the same facial expressions and all, but like it or not, Mini-Me is here to stay. 

 

 Who wants this hair?  Oh wait, NO ONE!  And I, and I alone have gifted it to my second daughter.  Sweetheart, I'm publicly declaring how very sorry I truly am.  

Anyone from church will recognize this face.  Not my grandparents, but that face and those screams, yep, that's my girl.

 In the packet, I also uncovered this dress.  It was one of my old dresses.  I wish I had found it when Em was about this age, but alas, no such luck.  I think my mom has a few pictures of me in this one, but I also had a Laura-Ingalls-Wilder bonnet on.  No bonnet but Mom, same face? 

The Caterpillar and the Watermelon

The other day, Harper was walking to the slide when she spontaneously imploded, complete with screaming that I imagine would accompany a jellyfish sting or something equally painful.  I went to investigate and upon arrival at her location, realized she wasn't stung by anything at all.  She wasn't even hurt!  She had been frightened when she stepped on a small little caterpillar!!!  It took a few minutes for my heart rate to return to normal.  The thing is, Girlfriend can (and frequently does) scare and terrorize kids three times her age, and here she is in a panic attack over a fuzzy little caterpillar.  Fabulous.

So we had a long chat about small animals in the garden, completed by observing the caterpillar and other insects and bugs.  Em loved it since she's studying life cycles at school and they're currently raising silk worms.  She's been begging to bring some home but I keep telling her that Mommy has a hard enough time remembering to keep the humans in this house alive without adding some animal to the chaos.  (She doesn't like that answer)

Last night, we ate dinner outside and as we were cleaning up, I spotted this little guy.  Rather than let Harper freak out on me again, I pointed it out to the kiddos.  All three proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes inching along in-step with the caterpillar.  Em decided it was a girl and tried to name "her" amongst adamant protests from Cooper that it was a boy.  Then someone remembered that caterpillars eat leaves.  Thank you Eric Carle for your informative book.

That meant Todd and I had a battle on our hands to keep our trees and bushes from getting stripped bare.  Harper decided that since the caterpillar didn't seem interested at all in the leaves, she'd share her watermelon rind.  And when the caterpillar didn't seem to like that, she decided to beat the poor thing into submission.  At that point, interventions occurred on behalf of the bug and I vaguely remember hearing Todd mutter something to the effect of, "I'm not paying for counseling of that thing.  HE wandered into our yard, complete with OUR kids so he knew what he was getting into!"  Never a dull moment around here :)

At some point, feeding the new "pet" became boring and Coop and Harp realized that if they put their hands close, but didn't touch, they could actually 'steer' the caterpillar where they wanted it to go.  Early manipulation skills.  Awesome.  Another reason why we can't have animals in this house :)

Entertainment Sans Internet

There was a storm Monday morning that knocked out the power for a short while.  I didn't think too much about it until the internet stopped working... even when the power came back on... and kept not working until late last night.  Needless to say, I was a bit sad.  I like showing the kids pictures of their American friends and family on Facebook, or finding a new recipe for Em and I to test while the other two are still napping.  I kept forgetting about the internet until after I'd already sat down, which meant the kids were already huddled around waiting for some new snapshot or some-such.  So in an effort to appease them, we started to go through old pictures.  Along the way, I realized there were a fair amount of short home videos.  It became a sort of game to hunt for another video of them when they were little(er).  Em had a hard time not calling herself Harper in many of the clips, but she eventually caught on.  Here are a few of my favorites from back when.

Coop was somewhere between 18-24 months in this and he'd just discovered frogs.  This is his rendition of what a frog looks and sounds like.  (It makes me giggle every time!)

This was a little over a year ago.  Still can't believe how big Harper has gotten in such a short time.

My baby girl, right around 2 1/2 with one of her first Bible verses.  I love this girl so much :)