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 :)

Thievery... and Other Crafting Adventures

I'm a crafty sort of person.  What I mean by that isn't that I'm artistic, that title goes to my husband.  He can create something out of nothing.  I, on the other hand, am good at stealing ideas from other people.  That, and I have a personal affinity towards the mundane and monotonous.  Honestly, usually find tedious tasks very cathartic.  Anyways, a few weeks ago, I was walking through a garden center and found some boards for really cheap.  So, I bought a few and some wooden cut outs, brought them home and started searching the internet because these boards, I knew, would be the perfect venue to complete a project that's been stewing for nearly 5 years.

You see, when we choose names for our kids, I have personal criteria.  Most people pick something they like the sound of, or maybe a family name.  A few even find out what a name means and pick based on that.  I wish I had something so simple, but I don't.  I have three rules.  1.  It must yell from the bottom of the stairs well- full name, middle and all, otherwise, it's out.  2.  It must be after an American author because there are some things which I dearly love, and books rank extremely high.  3.  It must be a last name.  Every time I walk into a place (like the doctors office) and have to give my surname, I'm always asked to repeat myself because inevitably the little girl asking the question thinks I don't understand what a "surname" is.  This happens in every country I've been to with my married name.  I figure, this way, at least it will make sense when there's confusion :)

Anyways, because each of the kids have an author behind their names, I made a point to pick authors I personally love, whose books I've read and enjoyed, and who have rather profound statements.  When we were dedicating Emmerson, our pastor encouraged us to find a verse for her, a "life verse" if you will, and as we were going through that process, I also went ahead and picked quotes as well.  As a result, for a number of years now, I've been holding on to these quotes, wanting to put them on display around our house, but not sure how to get writing on the walls (without Todd freaking out on me).  Enter stage left:  The boards.

The first thing I did was lay out Em's quote, to make sure it would fit the board I'd bought.  Then I grabbed the wooden cut out, and after searching the internet for ideas and inspiration, I figured I'd wrap the thing in yarn and see how that looked.  LOVE how it looked, hated the connected wooden parts!  After a few hours of wrapping, it came time to write the quote and hang it above the entrance to my kitchen.  I know grey seems rather dull, but the whole house is now this beautiful robins' egg blue and grey so it looks really nice with everything else.

Finally, it came time to write the quote and hang it above the entrance to my kitchen.  I know grey seems rather dull, but the whole house is now this beautiful robins' egg blue and grey so it looks really nice with everything else.

Em is blessed with a writer who has an abundance of wonderful things to say, so I actually wrote in chalk so that if we ever want to, we can change out the quote.  I thought I was so clever.

The second board was going to be for Cooper's room.  I wanted a "surf" themed nursery before Em was born, when we didn't know if we were having a boy or girl, and I've kept that dream alive over the years.  Now that Em is thoroughly entrenched in a love of all things pink and purple, I've given up on her and focused on Coop.  When we were still living in the States, Todd had a work trip down to Florida and he brought back a number of shells, so I wanted to somehow use those on Cooper's board.  Since I want all the authors' quotes in the main living space, I decided to use his verse, but unfortunately for me, the verse we chose for him  is long.  I only used the second half, but I still love the way it turned out and Cooper loves his crab down in the bottom corner.  Win-win!

And then at MOPS this week, we made "Celebration" plates.  The idea is that any time someone is celebrating something (first day of kindergarten, birthday, promotion, etc) they get to eat off the Celebration Plate... or if they need a pick-me-up, which with my two girls might come in handy sooner rather than later.  Anyways, we had to decorate this big, white plate.  Right.  But then I remembered that Dr. Seuss is really easy to copy and decided to go with my favorite, Oh the Places You'll Go.  I still remember my high school Econ teacher reading it to my class and thinking it was such a treasure trove of wisdom... and so easy to remember.  Needless to say, I didn't finish in the hour we had at MOPS and ended up taking the plate home.  Todd's been having Regional-something-or-other meetings all week and has been getting home rather late.  Which means instead of folding laundry or washing dishes after the kids are in bed, I've been finishing this little gem, and tonight, I finally got it done!

It's been one of those weeks where I feel like I'm slightly more than invisible, but slightly less than productive... you know what I mean?  When nothing seems to go right, but nothing seems to go terribly wrong either?  So as soon as I finished my plate, I thought that at least I could look at all the hours I've spent stealing ideas from other, slightly more inventive and creative people, and realize I'm not half bad at thievery, which has to count for something, right?  And something is much better than nothing! :)

Happy Birthday Buddy!

Monday was Cooper's actual birthday.  We did our traditional celebrate-on-the-actual-day-as-a-family and had cupcakes with brown and orange sprinkles (thank you Grammy!).  Cooper was really happy to have a candle and frosting... the cake part seemed rather superfluous.  

 The party, which needed a chocolate T-rex Buddy cake (from the Dinosaur Train PBS show), was held on Friday.  Seriously, dinosaurs and trains in one show- GENIUS!  Anyway, the weather all week has been so lovely, and then around 4pm as I'm setting up the tables outside with food and drinks, I could feel the wind switch and knew rain was coming.  Great.  We had 9 adults and 9 kiddos coming over for an outdoor party.  9 kids aged 6 and under....  but the kids didn't seem to mind the change in venue, and Cooper loved the cake so the only complaining was from the parents trying to keep their children using "inside voices."  Not one of us won that battle, which was rather nice when all was said and done.

 A family just moved into the neighborhood with three kiddos.  We've been talking about their coming to the kids for a few weeks now and Cooper was desperate for the "new friends" to be at the party.  They arrived in town on Thursday from the US, so the kids were jet lagging, exhausted, and had no idea how to sing "Happy Birthday" using the South African words.  The whole thing made me laugh because between the singing and trying to keep Harper away from the massive thing of orange frosting on a very shinny plate for the last few hours, I just wanted it all to be over so the cake could be eaten!

 And in the middle of it all was my boy, complete (as only a boy's birthday could be), with a rather massive bruise across his forehead.  It just wouldn't be a birthday celebration without some bruising and in true Cooper fashion, he held to tradition- four years running, an impressive record for one so small.

At the end of it, with so little room and no where to play, we turned on a Dinosaur Train episode so that the adults could catch a little more time chatting... I mean, so that the kids could have more time before bed!

Last Chance at Two

For some reason, Cooper's birthday tomorrow has me totally sad.  Its been a while, a rather long while with two toddlers in my house.  First it was Em and Coop, then Coop and Harper.  Now, it will just be Harper, all by her lonesome and I will have two preschoolers.  I'm not sure how that happened- them growing up so fast on me, but they have.  I wanted to take one last picture with my 2 year-old little guy before he becomes a proper boy, but as I looked at the picture, I realized that at some point in the past, on some unmarked day when I wasn't paying attention, he already turned into that Big Boy.  He is no longer squidgy and uttering incoherent words in my general direction.  He's having conversations (even if I'm the only one who understands what we're talking about).  He rides a pedal-less bike with ease and he can do so many things that state his growth and independence.  

I didn't understand people who used to tell me that boys and girls were different.  I thought they only "got different" around the time they walked into my Grade 6 classroom- smelling differently, acting differently, having different motivations and goals.  But from the moment I found out I was pregnant with this second child, I knew he was different from his sister.  When he was an infant, his fussiness and refusal to sleep confirmed that he was most definitely not his food and sleep-loving sister.  When he started walking and would continually run into stationary objects, ones he had just run into, again I realized he was his own person, and all boy to boot.  And the sadness and nostalgia I feel is different as well.  I'm looking forward to Em growing up, to having her ask me to paint her nails or do her hair.  I look forward to the "girl days" we've just started enjoying.  But this boy of mine, it feels as if the older he gets, the more he wants his Dad, or uncles, instead of me.  It's rather sad since I know, I know in my bones, that this boy who only wanted his mamma for so long is slowly but surely becoming the man who will no longer want to sit and sleep next to me.  I know its proper and needs to happen, but as I realize with each passing stage how much more mature he is, how much more of a "boy" he is and the difference that distinction has, but for now, I'm in the same boat with so many other mothers across the centuries and continents who have wanted their little boys to stay "their little boy."

That said, whenever I get over the nostalgia, I will inevitably look at this handsome face and know that he'll be a good looking man one day... but not today.

 One year ago.

 I think this may be the last picture I have of my baby boy before he became a big kid.

And yes, I fully expect him to love cartoons and Michigan football as much when he's 30 as he does right now. :)

Fun Weekend

Em has always seen her wardrobe as a suggestion but not something desperately worth fighting over.  As a result, she generally gets what she wants, within reason (no I will not send her out in a skirt and sandals when it's snowing, I don't care what continent we're on).  Cooper is a boy, so he could care less except when it comes to the print on his underpants (thank you Aunt Hilary).  Harper, however, seems to have decided rather early that she will refuse, flat refuse and do everything in her power to object to my choice of clothing for her if she deems it "less than."  We just had one such fabulous day.  After 4 complete outfit choices, it was apparent that she wasn't going out the door unless she was in a frilly sweater with a frilly shirt.  Fine, like I really care.

As soon as older sister, Emmerson, saw the girlie nature of said outfit though, she instantly ran to the accessory drawer and picked a matching pink butterfly for Harper.  Great.  Girlfriend has seventeen hairs to speak of and now I've have her pitching a fit when trying to convince her that seventeen isn't a sufficient number for the butterfly clip.  Fine.  I'll put it in to the best of my abilities, and low and behold, with the help of mean plastic elastic hair ties, I managed to get the dumb butterfly to stay in...

 ...which was pretty darn cute once all was said and done.

 And Em had a sleep-over with a friend from church.  This, this right here is why we decided to go with a bench instead of chairs for our table.  Genius mom-moment if I do say so myself.

 Then today at the store I saw these massive, juicy ripe strawberries (on sale!) which I couldn't pass up.  It's been cold and rainy all week, which is unusual to get both at the same time.  I've wanted to climb back into winter clothing, but these massive beauties reminded me it is indeed spring.  I loved that Em ate her entire ration of three with two hands because they were "so big Mommy!"

And Harper tried to put the whole thing in her mouth, like she does with 'normal' strawberries.  In the end, she couldn't mange it but man did it get a good laugh from me!