Bum Rap

On a recent walk, Soren informed Chris and me that he needed "a big big big big big big stick to measure your bums." THANKS.

East Greenwich Music and Wildlife 2009

Last year, it was bagpipes and owls and foxes; this year, it's brass bands and hummingbirds and deer. The bagpipers seem to have moved on to another venue, or maybe demand for bagpipe artistry is another victim of this economy, or else they all got some kind of brain infection that caused them to actually hear the instruments they were playing; in any case, Wednesday night is no longer Bagpipe Night at Ichabod House. Bummer. I guess.

I haven't seen any owls so far this summer, but I also haven't been looking for them. On the other hand, I also wasn't looking for a teeny tiny hummingbird nest in our ash tree, and I found that, so I guess I'm doing something right.

Have you ever found yourself in a position where you have to ask someone if they did something that only an idiot would do, and you know that person isn't an idiot, but the thing happened, and you can't think of a good alternate explanation, so you go ahead and ask the person anyway and make it seem like you think he's an idiot? No? Well, anyway, on a related note, I asked Chris last week whether he had happened to swerve wildly the last time he'd mowed the lawn, thus shearing off the tops of all the hostas along the edge of the backyard. With a look that said My God, what kind of idiot do you take me for? he replied that no, he had not shaved all the hostas with the lawnmower. In fact, we have been visited by a deer. I've seen her eating the shrubbery across the road every day for the past week, and the neighbor's hostas have been clipped as well, and I don't think Chris ran next door with the lawnmower just to destroy the landscaping, so all signs point to the deer.

As for the brass band, there was a small brass ensemble playing at the church ice cream social up the street. I don't have a witty story about that. We enjoyed hearing it.

Potty Mouth

I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that this post actually has nothing to do with the potty.

Since Soren learned to talk about five years ago, I've been pretty good about watching my language in front of him. In fact, he's only picked up one curse from me, and it isn't one of the really bad ones, so I consider that a victory. He was taking a bath a few months ago (he's had a couple more since then), and I remembered that I'd forgotten to bring my library books back or something like that and said "Dammit!" Of course, as soon as it left my mouth, I knew it would come back to haunt me, because kids and parrots love to repeat words spoken with a lot of emotion. Leland never did learn any curses that we could decipher, but now "dammit" has entered Soren's vocabulary. He's only said it a couple times, and only busts it out when our friend Bryn is around, for some reason. She must be a bad influence. (I kid)

So yesterday, Bryn and her boys were visiting, and Soren dropped the D-bomb. I calmly called him over and let him know that it wasn't a nice word, and that if he said it again, he would get a time-out. A couple minutes later, whaddya know, I had to give him a time-out.

He sat out his three minutes without much trouble, and when the timer went off, he came down for his usual hug and non-specific apology, which prompts me to ask for a little more detail because I want to make sure he remembers what he got in trouble for in the first place:

"Sorry, Mama."

"Sorry for what?"

You know what's coming, right? Because I did.

"Sorry for saying 'dammit'."

So I sent his butt straight back into time-out.

Awww, no, not really. I just let him know that maybe next time (not that there will be one, right?) he could say "Sorry for saying a bad word" instead.

Blogging is Hard

It involves typing so many WORDS all right after each other. Lots of things have been happening lately, too, which means even more words need to be typed to communicate all the happenings.

Our little boy turned THREE on June 2nd! We went to the Children's Museum with our friends Bryn, Xavi and Maxi the morning of Soren's birthday, so he got to run around and play and get all tuckered out, and then he took a three-hour nap, and then he woke up on the wrong side of the big-boy bed and whined the whole time he was opening his presents from Grammy and Grampy. Besides that, it was a very lovely day. We have since abolished naptime, since it seems to be doing more harm than good lately.

We had a little party on Sunday and invited Soren's friends Ian and Xavi (as well as their associated parents, since they needed rides, and Xavi's baby brother, since he couldn't very well stay home alone). I baked a red velvet cake (Soren had asked for a red cake after I suggested that his original request, a white cake with white frosting, might need a little color), which was well-received even though it wasn't red enough, and the boys played in the yard while the grown-ups ate oysters and grilled pizza and drank sweet sweet sangria. Your typical third birthday party. Hey, we sang Happy Birthday and ate cake, and he got presents and had fun and felt special, so we got the job done. I'll upload the (very cute) pictures soon.

As proof that he is officially a big boy, Soren is fully potty trained! He is completely diaper-free -- even at night, which blows my mind. I'm very proud, and so is he. I still can't convince him to use anything but his potty chair, though, so we'll have to work on introducing him to the full-size toilet unless we want to start carting the potty around everywhere we go. I'm not sure how to go about making that transition -- he's really resistant to it so far. At this point, though, I'm way too happy about his progress to worry about it much.

Schkernky is also doing well, and is working on rolling all over the place and sitting independently. She's also working on making my life miserable by waking up several times a night and being unwilling to fall asleep anywhere but the swing or the car. The potty training success has left me feeling like I can do anything with my crazy parenting skillz, so I am now picking a fight with Sigrid about sleep. She will learn to fall asleep in her crib. This is my mission. It is a mission fraught with much crying and wasting money on expensive Fisher Price Aquarium Bubble And Light Action Crib Soothers That Don't Seem To Be Working. But I will not back down, and I will face these obstacles with back-patting and shushing at intervals of increasing length over the course of each night, as well as a thorough review of Babies 'R Us's return policy. In the end, I will emerge victorious, with a self-soothing baby in her crib and $44.99 credited to my Visa. It will be beautiful. You just wait.

Have I Ever Told You...

... my racy letterpress limerick? You won't get it, but I feel like showing it off anyway. There are a total of 9 letterpress/printing references, including some homophones.

A gal fair of form and of face
You should strive to impress, just in case
She may someday be led
To be tied up in bed
But her type likes the thrill of the chase.

Mainly I'm just posting this so that someone can get a good result if they Google "racy letterpress limerick".

In other news, if it were sunny and twenty degrees warmer, the weather would be perfect.

Go Potty Go Potty Go Potty Go

We've been working on Soren's potty training for the past week, which is a little hard to sustain at the moment because I don't feel like sitting around the house all day for a week, which is what it seems to require. But we'll have to deal with it eventually, so i figure I'll start off with a half-assed effort and see how that works out. So far, it's OK -- he seems to have the necessary control and awareness of the relevant processes, so he has used the potty successfully a number of times, and yet he does not have the ability to put his diaper back on, so there's nothing he can do about his (short-lived) antipathy toward Potty Time. Grammy sent us a couple potty training videos which are purported to be successful, and Soren certainly does enjoy watching them and singing along with the songs and claiming that, like Paige and Parker Panda, he wears big kid underwear every day. That last item is a lie. We bought him some Cars underwear, but he hasn't put it on yet.

Sigrid, meanwhile, is working on the essential skills of eating, sleeping, and not eating when she's supposed to be sleeping. She's being a little difficult about these things (I'd say she's being very difficult, but I know she's being easy on us in the grand scheme of things). I haven't even tried giving her a bottle lately, since I really seem to be getting nowhere with that, and have instead been giving her some solid food. You know, the basics -- rice cereal, mashed bananas, guacamole, that kind of thing. She digs it in theory, but is not very good at keeping the food in her mouth or swallowing it. She usually gets so excited about the food you put in her mouth that she screeches and sends it oozing into her neck folds. We should probably bathe her more often than we do.

She's also being a pill about going to sleep in her crib. She'll do it 5% of the time, although she'll sleep fine in there if she's already snoozing when you put her down. The rest of the time, she will only fall asleep in the swing. For whatever reason, I really want to pick a fight with her about this, so I keep putting her in the crib, and she keeps yelling for extended periods of time with no sign of stopping until we finally cave and put her in the swing. Chris thinks it's more important to get her used to sleeping 7-hour stretches at night than it is to get her to accept the crib, and I know he's right, but it still bugs me. Why don't children just do as they're told????? Punks.

Luckily, they're cute.




I'm excited because Soren has been writing letters and a couple names ("Soren" and "Ian")! It's so cool! He even drew a picture the other day, of "a cake and an animal that wants to eat the cake". He claims to have drawn the picture for his birthday. I scanned his renditions of his and Ian's names:


"Ian" reads from right to left.



"Soren" is written kind of in a circle; the S is sideways, middle right, and the rest of the letters read clockwise from there (the "N" went off the paper a bit).

I'm so proud!

One for the Grandmothers

I'd like to give a shout out to the grandmothers today! I happen to know that Nana (Kathy, my stepmom) checks every day to see if there's something new on the blog, which means she suffers disappointment about 95% of the time; sorry about that. I know Grammy (Margie, Chris's mom) checks regularly as well -- not sure if it's every day or every hour. That's a lot of pressure. Gramma (Claudia, my mom) may be subscribed to the RSS feed, so she gets some kind of trumpet fanfare every four months when I post something. The other two grandmothers might want to look into that to save time.

All three are clearly devoted to their lovely grandkids, and I should probably post more often so they can get more details about Soren's and Sigrid's daily doings. I certainly wish we could get together more often.

Happy Mother's Day, grandmothers! We love you!