Simon Says I am a Sucker

Yesterday Jett and I were playing Simon Says, and Jett was Simon. This is how it went:

Round 1
Jett: Simon says, jump around in a circle.
Me: (jumping jumping and jumping)
Jett: (says nothing)
Me: (keeps on jumping)
Jett: (says nothing)
Me: (finally realizes that Jett is not going to tell me to stop, so I stop)
Jett: That was a lot of jumping, Mama.

Round 2
Jett: Clean up the toys.
Me: What?
Jett: Simon says, clean up the toys.
Me: (picks up a few toys and puts them in the box)
Jett: You missed those by the box.
Me: (cleans up the toys he spilled from the box earlier that morning)
Jett: You forgot the ones under the chair.
Me: (cleans up the toys under the chair, that he refused to clean up before his nap)
Jett: Don't forget to pick up my bib!
Me: (cleans up the bibs Jett threw on the floor ten minutes ago)
Jett: Get those cars in the corner.
Me: (dutifully cleans up the cars in the corner)
Jett: Nice job, Mama. You put away all my toys!

Fine Motor Skills

Kai was awake during Jett's nap, and so he had a chance to play with the cars all by himself. First he took them out of the semi, one by one. Then he crawled across the room and over to the chair. One at a time, he rolled each car over the seat of the chair. Then he drove each of them off the arm of the chair, creating a pile-up of cars on the floor. Watching him play with the cars, uninterrupted, at his own speed, was a beautiful thing.

(knuckle dimples!)

I wanna go throw rocks down!

We live across the street from a school, and sometimes we use the school grounds as our backyard. We've set up a grill and had lots of picnics on the grass. We splash in the puddles on the pavement. When the boys are just crazy and dinner won't be ready for 30 minutes, the school is our "go to" place to go. We jump from stone to stone along the path around the building. Jett rides his bike and his scooter in the big open expanse of concrete. Or he does his favorite thing: "throw rocks down".

The school has these huge metal grates in the ground. I'd say they are 12 feet by 12 feet. You can stand on top of them and look down about 20 feet to the ground. They are connected to the school and big garage-like doors open in to them way below. Charlie thinks they have something to do with the air conditioning system in the building. Suffice it to say that if you are one of those people who are afraid to walk over grates in the sidewalk, then this activity is not for you, as these grates are huge and high, and generally scary. If you are a mother of a son who likes to walk on them they are horrifying.

But he does like to walk on them and we let him. (Note: Charlie is to blame. I never would have let him walk on those grates. I check them out first every time we walk over there). We also let him pick up rocks from the sidewalk around the grates, even though we have to watch closely to make sure he doesn't pick up cigarette butts or broken glass or bits of trash.(I swear we don't live in the ghetto, it only sounds like it - stupid high schoolers and their littering ways. Again, I would have walked Jett over to the cleaner sidewalks, or the grass, to collect rocks. Charlie is a daredevil).

So Jett gathers up the rocks and throws them down the grates. Lately most of his rocks have actually been bits of pavement that he pulls up from the sidewalk. The sidewalk is cracked and broken in some places, (and I wonder how responsible we are for it). But the chunks of concrete are perfect for Jett's job. He's getting good at recognizing which ones are too big to fit through the grate before he even tries to throw them. The big ones smack and the little ones ping and the tiniest ones we can't hear at all. Sometimes Jett and Charlie even hit their targets (crushed soda cans, puddles, other rocks 20 feet below). Now Kai does it too, although I keep him in the stroller and hand him the rocks to throw from there.

I'm not sure what is so alluring about throwing rocks down the grate, except that it is orderly (to line up the rocks before throwing them) and satisfying (smack, smack, ping!) and thrilling to walk 20 feet above the ground. Still, I shudder.

A night out

Charlie and I went to our friends' wedding last weekend and his parents came to our house to watch the boys. It was our first night away from Kai. I don't want to say I was excited to have a 24-hour break away from the kids, but......I was excited to have a 24-hour break from the kids. Actually, it's not the kids themselves that I savored the break from, but rather the responsibility of having to meet their every need every minute of the day.

We went to the wedding, which Charlie was in, and it was lovely, even though I spent the entire homily looking at pictures of the boys on my camera - and frantically trying to figure out which ones I could stand to delete in order to take some pictures of the bride and groom. Then we went to the reception and spent the entire time in the photo booth (see below). Finally we woke up the next morning and met back up with the boys at our niece's birthday party. I spotted Kai sitting on Katie's lap, and I felt like I had a magnet in my chest, pulling me towards him. I may have jumped out of the car before Charlie had even stopped driving. I made my way to Kai and scooped him up and...

...he couldn't take his eyes off of the birthday presents. He was totally unfazed by my reappearance, and so was Jett. I guess Charlie and I will have to take off for the weekend more often.

Oh Those Plastic Toys

Those musical, plastic toys. Their mechanical, repetitive music drives some parents crazy. Some of my friends don't even let plastic toys in to their house. I'm impressed by that, but I can't go back now. Look at how happy Kai is!

Every now and then...

I think I'm going to enlarge this and wallpaper our condo with it.

Vacation

In July we spent a week at the Indiana Dunes with Charlie's whole family. I haven't posted about it because I don't have any pictures of it. I don't have any pictures of it because my camera doesn't whine, or cry, or need to eat, and therefore it was never in my hands. (The pictures below are all from Charlie's phone). I've been patiently waiting (ahem) for some aunts or uncles or grandparents to share some photos (hint hint), but they were probably too busy for their cameras that week too. They were probably too busy chasing my kids, and in that case all I can say is thank you.

It wasn't the easiest vacation my boys have had. Kai had an upset stomach and was cutting a tooth and was uncharacteristically clingy to me all week. And Jett, well, Jett needed most of the week to adjust to our new environment. He had to share the TV for instance, and keep his clothes on in the house, and not throw sand. Rules, rules, rules.

It's an interesting thing, trying to manage your kids' behavior on a family vacation. On a family vacation, you've got two things working against good parenting. One, you have witnesses. When your child is throwing his third tantrum of the day at 7:30 in the morning, and you find yourself bribing him with Oreos to quiet him down, you have witnesses. Not only are they witnesses, but they are people who's opinion matters to you, and don't know what they are thinking when you fix your child a breakfast of Oreos. Now you're stressing over your kid's behavior and your own behavior which in turn guarantees that you kid will start another tantrum, and the cycle continues. Secondly, you have unrealistic expectations. You are on vacation, and you want to relax, and so if you have to tell Jett to stop throwing his cousin's shoe in the house one more time, you are going to lose it. It might take you a couple of days to remember that vacations are different now. You have kids. Aren't they cute. 

I know some people don't have these issues. Some people are nurturing and relaxed and confident naturally. The rest of us are reading their notes and trying to catch up and pleading with our kids to please use their indoor voice because everyone else in the vacation house is still sleeping and you just don't want to be the one to wake everyone up.

Thankfully the Johnsons are fabulous for playing with kids. And no one ever complained to me about waking them up, even though Jett was the first one awake every single morning. One morning Grammy and Papa took the grandkids to the zoo. One afternoon on the beach, Uncle Dave and Megan spent nearly an hour with the kids on a boat trailer, parked in the sand, "driving" to various locations and then jumping up and down at each "arrival". (That would have driven me insane)! No one seemed to mind moving the toddler seat off the toilet. They seemed to think that Jett's streaking was cute.

One day we visited Mount Baldy, which is a big sand dune on Lake Michigan. Jett and I ran down the dune, and as I was running I vaguely wondered how we were going to get back up the dune, but the running down was so fun that I just stopped thinking about it. Silly me. The way we got back up was, I carried Jett on my back while I literally crawled up the side of the mountain. The mountain of sand. It was so steep that I was afraid to stand up for fear that Jett would tumble off my back and snap his neck. Why I didn't make Jett walk himself is a good question. But honestly, the unending amount of sand that we needed to climb was so overwhelming to me, I just assumed it must have looked even more impossible to him. When we got to the top I was completely winded and had to sit down and catch my breath. I think I remember having to stop Jett from running down again.

here we are just starting our climb

here we are at the top

and proof that we survived

One of my favorite parts of our vacation was a nearby ice cream joint called Oink's. If you are ever in the area over summer, you have to try it. Kai was a total riot there. He tasted a little bit of everyone's, and he seemed to like them all equally until he started doing nose dives in to the mint chocolate chip. He couldn't get enough of the mint chocolate chip, and he went after it with serious determination. Unfortunately Megan, the actual owner of the mint chocolate chip ice cream cone, isn't in this picture, but she deserves major snaps for basically giving her ice cream to Kai and accepting his slobber all over her cone.



Of course, we spent as much time as possible at the beach. Kai loved the beach. In particular, he loved to sit in the sand and throw rocks in the water. Jett had some fun at the beach too, but mostly loved running around in the backyard of the house we rented. Watching him run around in the backyard broke my heart just a little bit, of course, since we have no backyard, and no place where he can run around crazy with only minimal supervision. (But at home we see buses and cement trucks and fire engines on a daily basis, and that never gets old either. Am I rationalizing? Ack). Anyway.

This is the only picture I took with my camera. There's nothing like running around with an uncle, in the dark, in your pajamas. It was just Jett, Will, the fireflies, and a whole bunch of Crazy. Can't you just hear Jett's squeals of delight?


Those crazy kids. What a great week.

Pictures

I haven't been in the writing mood lately, but I'll post more soon. After all, I still have our vacation to reflect on, and preschool to obsess about, and I can always waste a post or two complaining about Main Street. All that is coming up. In the meantime I've got pictures.

Here is Kai talking to Grandma while at the Green City Market


Yep, he's still a book worm.


Ice cream cone. Jett insisted that I take a picture of Kai being so messy. Don't you just want to slurp him up?