Tag Archives: kids

For Rent

Do you have a long solo car trip coming up? Feeling kind of tired? Thinking you should cut back on the caffeinated beverages? Look no further, we have the solution to your problems.

For Rent:  Two young girls to ride in the car and keep you awake on your long car trips.

Rent them separately!

Clara:

Clara will talk to you non-stop, but that’s not all!  To keep you awake and make sure you are paying attention she requires a response, a real response, to everything.  Keep your brain working by puzzling our her mispronounced and unclear phrases. Can’t figure out what she’s saying or getting to sleepy to respond with more than a mumbled “mmmmhhhmmm” to her query of “See Cow?”

She’ll wake you right up with:

“See cow?”

“See cow?”

“See cow?”

Until you finally say: “Yes I saw the cow!”

getting a response of :

“YEAH!”

that’ll shake any cobwebs that might have been in your brain right back out again.

Or Ivy:

Ivy will also talk, and talk and talk.  She requires less responses for more talk time but you never know what you’ll get. It could be a discussion of her Disney princess friends and their pet lemurs. It could be a recital of the last story/movie/book/thing she saw. Or it could require a little more participation. For example a conversation could go like this:

“Mom, tell me about deer.”

“What would you like to know?”

“I want to know what they like to eat and what they like to do.”

Clearly there is no nodding off behind the wheel when you are racking your brains for any and all deer facts you’ve ever heard.

Just in case that isn’t enough Ivy comes with one more special feature to keep any driver awake.

Imagine quietly driving down the road and all of a sudden…

“SANDHILL CRANE!”

or

“GOOSE!”

or her personal favorite and one I guarantee to keep any driver awake:

“HORSE!”

Think that’s not enough for you? Worried that one girl might fall asleep jeopardizing your ability to stay awake? Don’t worry if you rent one you can rent the second for half price!

On your road trip with both girls you can enjoy the benefits of each individuals keep-the-driver-awake-techniques, often at the same time!  With both girls along if that’s not enough you can always resort to the oldest, most surefire technique. Get one new toy and throw it between them.

Say good bye to energy drinks and hello to your new backseat driving friends.

Serious inquiries only.

Not responsible for: Tickets incurred while swerving to pick up toys off the floor, hearing loss, potty breaks or temporary insanity.

Quiet… Too Quiet

You know how they always say that when you can’t hear your children, you should be worried. Well, that had never been too much of a problem for me.

Until today.

Today the girls are making up for months of playing quietly without getting into trouble.

The first mistake was when I let the girls watch part of a movie while I made lunch.  I entered the office to get them, only to find the door of the dove cage broken and ripped off and dove seed scattered all over the office.

I was, shall we say… unhappy.

Not to be taken in by the same trouble twice, I did not let them return to their movie, and after lunch we got ready for naps. I can only blame my extreme sleep deprivation that I never thought twice about putting them to bed together.

I should have known better.

Over an hour later when it had been so quiet I actually thought they were either asleep or reading in their beds like they were supposed to be, I heard a huge crash and a scream.  After ascertaining that everyone was alive and in no mortal danger I took in the situation. Clara’s bed (which is just a crib mattress) was stripped of blankets and sheets and on top of Ivy’s bed. Ivy was also on her bed, standing up and pushing Clara’s bed off the end. And Clara was crying on the floor as she extracted herself from the rocking chair that she had crashed into when Ivy shoved her off the bed with the mattress. Naked. Which is unfortunate because it’s a lot easier to get scratches all over your body while tangling with a rocking chair when you don’t have clothes on. In fact I’m pretty sure that’s why people started wearing clothes… so that when older siblings shoved them down they sustained less damage. Then I noticed the crayon across the walls and the books strewn everywhere.

Clearly it had been too quiet.

I continued to be… unhappy.

It’s about an hour later, my girls have not yet napped, Ivy is grumpy beyond belief and Clara has entered the stage of complete and utter over-tired-manic-crazy-girl. Unfortunately having tried all other solutions to get Clara to bed I have again put them down in their room together. But I’m not worried about them yet, I can still hear them jumping on the bed…

Bedtime

Clara is almost two and her language is exploding, in the last week she started saying two word phrases and adding new words to her vocabulary everyday.  I never know what she’s going to come out with,  some of her phrases are totally new and catch me off guard like “shower curtain.”  Whereas others are just combo’s of some of her common words such as,  “duck poop.”  But no matter what the words, the really fascinating thing is how quickly she can incorporate her new phrases into delay tactics at bedtime. In fact I think it’s possible she has so quickly expanded her vocabulary just to try and stay up a few minutes later.

Just days into two word phrases she now has all the typical tactics down.

It starts with:

” ‘Nother Book?” and once I leave the room moves quickly to:

“WATER MOM!”

From their we head to:

“POOP POTTY!” (Always a large dilemma for the potty training stage. Is it a fake? Is it a false alarm? Is it for real? How can you tell?)

If the girls don’t quiet down when they should the hall light goes off which has always been accompanied by lots of yelling, whining and now new shouts of:

“LIGHT ON!”

As skilled as she is in the delay tactics of the world for better or worse she has one of those mean mothers who doesn’t bend much a bedtime, until she pulls out the big guns…

” ‘Nother Hug?”

Forgiven

Last night Clara had an especially bad, nightmarey, screamey, yelley, sort of a night. So this morning when she didn’t sleep until noon I was still tired when we got up. Tired and perhaps a little grumpy that the girl who kept me up all night was also the early riser of the day.

Without waking Ivy we quietly made our way downstairs and found an armchair in a patch of sunlight to sit in. Clara went into her snuggling pose. (Unlike most snugglers Clara cuddles up to your chest, nestles in with her heads, then picks up both arms and tucks them in between you.  Which is odd but endearing) So we sat in the sun while we woke up snuggling and every so often Clara would pop upright and give me a kiss on top of the head.

And all the screaming of the night was forgiven, forgotten and irrelevant just like that.

Our Poor Carpet

Our house is old, and most of our family, friends and acquaintances have at one point or another suggested the best fix for it might be either a wrecking ball or a fire.  I don’t usually agree with these plans, unless it has to do with the carpet. The carpet in the house was less than perfect when we moved in. Then we arrived along with our unfortunate version of  Murphy’s Law; if anything is going to secrete a bodily fluid it will end up on the carpet.  The marginal carpets made the transition to nasty carpets and I have been removing them room by room. Only two rooms in the house still have carpet in them.  Yet the Murphy’s Law of Carpets remains and every time something in this house pees on the floor, it hits carpet.

Tonight in the current installment of you’ve got to be kidding me. I stepped in a cold pee puddle on the carpet in the girls play room. The play room, the only room in the house I’m not planning on ripping the carpeting out of. No doubt because it used to be a storage room with the door always closed preventing anything from doing anything to the carpet. But I digress, back to the pee puddle.  Given that Clara is working on personal diaper removal and therefore I am working on potty training her I assumed the puddle was hers.

I was wrong.

A long conversation with Ivy later I learned that it was in fact Ivy’s puddle. This conversation, which was conducted in calm reasonable tones by both parties should have won me some sort of award in the Best Instance Of Mom Not Losing Her Cool category. Especially when it concluded like this:

Me: “But why did you pee on the carpet?”

Ivy: “It was just the only place to go.”

Poor carpet.

What Happens in May

What happens in May is that the lawnmower breaks.

Last May I wrote about the difficulties in fixing a lawn mower with help.  (You can read all about it here: New Respect)

This year the lawnmower had difficulties beyond my paltry mechanical skills so I laughed and took pictures while the girls helped John.

That was fun until he looked at me with this smile on his face and said something to the effect of…

….”If you don’t put your camera down and get YOUR girls out of here I’m going to feed them to the pigs, throw the lawn mower in the neighbors pond and run away to Acapulco.”

So the girls and I left him to his work and did the only other thing to do when the lawnmower is broken, we made dandelion crowns. Because when your grass has grown tall enough that you can lose a Great Dane in the yard (Really, it was that tall!) the dandelions have nice long stems for braiding!The lawn mower was back in service today and we finished mowing the lawn for the first time this afternoon!