Dada?

When Mike goes out of town (or out of the country) for work, a few of us in the house get a bit upset. I try to be cheerful, but usually the day he leaves I am in kind of a funk. Paige (Daddy's girl) usually cries and cries. She sometimes cries for a half hour or so before she is consoled by a movie or television show or a treat. I do try talking with her and hugging her, but it only seems to make her despair worse. This time, Mike gave Paige money for us to go out for a donut on the way home from dropping him off. That worked once the donut was in her mouth. She still cried the 15 minutes to Starbucks (We love the Top Pot donuts sold there.). Jonah and Jack don't cry, but I can usually tell Jonah is missing him. Jonah will wonder if Daddy will be home for dinner or breakfast or if he'll be able to play "bats" with him soon.
In the past, Jack hasn't seemed upset or hasn't seemed to really even notice that Mike was gone. But this morning was different. Immediately when he woke up (in our bed, lying on top of my arm), he looked for Daddy. "Dada?" He hopped down off the bed and ran down the hall in the dark (It was 7am and I hadn't gotten the lights on yet.) calling "Dada! Dada"! He then ran into the dark kitchen, where Jack expected he would be, making lattes or breakfast, "Dada? Dada"? No Daddy. I told him that "Daddy went bye-bye. Daddy's in Brazil." Well, I don't think he really understood the "Brazil" part. He ran to couch, climbed up and started waving "bye-bye Dada"! out the window. He didn't see Mike, obviously, but this seemed to comfort him and answer his question of where "Dada" was. I just thought this was a sweet story. I hope you read this Mike. Your babies love you and miss you! Me too, of course!

Jonah's Peanut butter Spoon

And spoon and spoon and spoon......

How does Jonah maintain his muscular almost 30 pound body? He eats peanut butter by the spoonful!


I know! None of you will want to eat peanut butter at our house anymore. I have actually never let him do this before. Really! I mean, I let the kids have a "peanut butter spoon" but I don't let them dig in the jar to get more. He just double dipped so quickly and then since he did, I figured his germs were already in the jar so I let him continue. I don't know how many spoonfuls he had. It was a LOT though. I was pretty impressed. He was happy and full.

Jack-Jack Attacked!

Okay, so he wasn't really attacked. He just has Jonah's underwear on his head (complements of Paige). Our children find underwear on heads hilarious. Jack does look pretty funny. What I see in this picture are a bunch of teeth that are coming in and attacking Jack's gums. It seems that Jack has gone from having 6 teeth to 12 or so in a few days. Poor guy. He doesn't usually complain or whine during the day, but he sure sleeps horribly at night when he is teething. It's like he's a newborn again. The other night he woke up at least 8 times.... Last night was a little better.

Making Valentines

Last week, Paige said, "Mommy, we should make Valentines and then send them out the day before we leave for Antarctica!" I was taken back a bit by this statement, as I had NOT been talking about Valentine's Day and I really didn't think she would even know when it was. I was kind of thinking we might just skip over that little holiday this year... Lazy Mommy. Maybe it was the quick switch at the grocery store from Christmas decorations to Valentine candy. So, of course, we made Valentines! We had to go to the store to get more glue. Did you know that Elmer's glue bottles (with the glue in them of course) are only 22 cents at Target? It just seems cheap. I bought 4 bottles, which was a good number. We each had a bottle of our own. Which was good. Paige uses a lot of glue for her decorations and Jonah sometimes just seems to glue for the fun of it. His Valentines took days to dry!



Here is Paige, a perfectionist when it comes to her crafts. She spent a lot of time making straight lines with her glue. She would get upset if the glitter didn't go on just right (like if it strayed beyond her lines).
I was so surprised that Jonah wanted to make Valentines! He is usually my "I don't want to do that project" boy. He would rather just play "skunk" or something. But, he LOVED making his Valentines. He loved gluing and glittering. I am still trying to get him to write something on them though. He has no desire to write yet.

Jack made lots of Valentines too! He likes to scribble with markers, squeeze the glue bottle, and play in the glitter.

I love that ALL of my children enjoyed this together. Often I will get a project together and Paige will usually spend a lot of time doing it, Jack will try it, and usually Jonah does not even give it a shot. Yeah for Jonah!

Peck peck peck!

Jack, Jonah and I went to a mall today in search of sunhats (which we did find after shopping in about 100 different stores this week). When we walked into the mall, Jonah noticed that his voice echoed, so he kept making a "Whooo"ing noise (I think he was pretending to be an owl.) So anyways, these older ladies were sitting at a table, talking and drinking their coffee or whatever, and one of them starts talking to Jonah and "whoo"ing along with him. She then tried to talk to him, but Jonah kept answering her with "whooo"s. I tried to distract him from the "whoo"ing, so I asked him about woodpeckers. While we were in the parking lot, Jonah kept asking if God would turn him into a woodpecker so I thought that that would get him talking. The lady asked him what a woodpecker said. So, Jonah quietly walked up to the lady's arm and "peck peck peck!". He just hit his little nose on her arm (while saying "peck peck peck!") and then he was on his way. No goodbyes. He now turned back into an owl...

My first post of 2009

Wow! I know I haven't been very good at blogging lately, but jeez, I just saw that I hadn't posted since New Year's Eve! What day is it today? The 13? Nope, even worse. It's now January 14th. I guess I have been pretty busy. Not with big things, just kids and house stuff like our never-ending laundry. So that's my excuse. Blame it on the kids and all of their messy clothes and all the crumbs and goopy stuff they get on everything.
Really, nothing huge has happened here (Except that our friends Jamie and Jake had their 1st BEAUTIFUL and big-10lbs. 9.5oz baby!). We are pretty routine. Everyone who is awake at 6:45 eats breakfast together, we say bye-bye to Daddy at 7:15 and then the kids and I work through our morning chores (The kids' chores list: Make bed. Get Dressed. Pick up Books. Brush teeth.) while taking breaks to read books, do painting projects, puzzles, and eat again. My kids seem to need 2 or even 3 breakfasts some days! Some days after we do our morning chores we run an errand, but not often. I think I am pretty good at consolidating. I only need to go to a big grocery store every couple weeks or so, with a trip to our fruit/veggie market every week. We love having friends over for playdates before Jack's nap too.
Today we had a friend of mine and her 2 young children come over. The baby, Eva, is 4 months old, chubby and smiley, so cute! Anyways, I was surprised at Jack's reaction to her. I picked her up soon after they got here. I thought he might get upset that I was holding another baby and get jealous (When Paige was this age, she would say, "Baby night-night!" and point to their carseat. She got very jealous and upset!), but that was not Jack's reaction. Immediately he came to me and motioned that he wanted to hold the baby! Jack sat down right in front of me on the floor and held Eva many times through our visit. He was so cute. He just kept smiling at her and kissing her. And when he was running/dancing to music, he would do a little loop and every time he passed Eva, he would kiss her again and go on her way. I loved seeing my boy act so sweet and gentle.
Hmmm.... Let's see. Paige is still her sweet self. She helps out more and more around the house and LOVES doing worksheets in the afternoon. She loves dot-to-dots and math problems and color by numbers. She's starting to just know what the sums of numbers are now, rather than always having to count on her fingers. We are also realizing that she can read a lot more than she or we think. So that is exciting. Her goal is to be able to read a page in an "American Girl" book when she is 6. I think she will definitely be able to do this.
Jonah is just the goofiest kid ever. He still loves skunks and possums and other weird animals. My friend Ingrid was here yesterday and told us about the possum that is in her garage that she cannot seem to get rid of. Well, Jonah heard "possum" and kept asking Ingrid about "her" possum. He wants to know all about her possum and wants to see it. We'll see... Jonah is also very interested in learning Spanish. We are all learning it, with the hopes that we'll be able to speak like toddlers in South America. Jonah asks constantly, "How do you say ________ in Spanish". Sometimes he wants an answer, but other times he has made up his own word to share with everyone.
So, hopefully you feel a little more connected now. I'll try to get back into the (blogging) swing of things!

A Crazy Hike

This post starts like most of the ones I have written. Paige, Jonah, and I decided we would go geocaching. So I picked a spot to go and we headed out. The weather wasn't bad, it was a little cold and overcast, but it is winter, so what would you expect? Anyway, I picked what looked on the map to be a small hike, about 1 mile in, so I figured even with the trail not being direct it would be a maximum of 2 miles in and 2 out. We could do that, right? Plus there were 3 geocaches on the way, and another if we wanted to go just a little bit further.

Everything was going good. Jonah was really happy to be outside. He ran up the trail with Paige following after him. I had to walk pretty fast to keep up. As we were going we saw a little snow here and there on the side of the trail. Not a big deal though. After about a half mile of running we got to our first stop. The problem was when we stopped I realized there was now a little more than a little snow. The trail was still all dirt, but the rest of the ground was about half green and half white. Luckily, we were able to find the geocache though, and we were feeling pretty good. Jonah was now tired from the running and asked that I carry him. I had prepared for this also, and had our Ergo with us, so no big deal. Anyway, as we kept going the snow seemed to get thicker, and a split tree for a bridge over a creek was covered in ice also. Paige walked slowly but perfectly across this, and I felt proud, and again overlooked the amount of snow around us.

It was about this time that we found a small cave on the side of the trail. Jonah loved it!!! I am pretty sure his favorite animal right now is a bat (although the skunk and opossum are close seconds) and he wanted to fly into the cave and to live there.

Once we got hiking again Jonah wanted to walk for a little bit, but when the snow started to completely cover the trail, he wanted to be carried again. By the GPS we were really close to the next Geocache and Paige was excited. However, this was the part of the trail that climbed the most, so it was actually quite a ways further. We kept going though, because the GPS said we were close...

Once we finally got to the second Geocache I finally realized how much snow we were in. I could not find the cache at all. As a matter of fact, everywhere I stepped trying to just get close, my leg would sink in at least a foot of snow. I knew we were close though, because I had read the hint on the site where I downloaded the coordinates, and it mentioned being at the base of a fallen tree. I could see the fallen tree, I just couldn't dig very well to the base of it. Remember, we didn't intend to go hiking in the snow, so we didn't have gloves or snow pants or hats or really most of the stuff we should have had as it turns out. We did have coats though, so that was good.

Paige was upset with me when I gave up looking. She really wanted to find 4 caches. So far we had only found 1 and I has already told her we would not go the extra trail looking for the 4th, so she was now down to only the possibility of 2. Jonah was ready to go back as he was getting cold. We was on my back and not moving, so he was the only one cold. The trail was more or less a loop and we were close to the mid point. My GPS now read 3.8 miles, and 900 feet elevation gain.

So here was the problem. We were 3.8 miles in, the trail wasn't that long, but all the extra walking around looking for the caches, and playing in the cave, etc. added up. We were up quite a ways so going down shouldn't be as hard. However, it was now 3:30 and gets dark at about 4:30 this time of the year. But Paige really wanted to try for the final cache. Well if you don't know, I would do almost anything for my baby girl, so I put Jonah in the backpack and we kept going. The final cache was at the peak of this hill and then we would go back down the trail around the other side of the loop. This picture is just a little way along after I made the decision to keep going, notice how high the snow is on the sides of the trail. Oh yeah, we haven't seen the dirt for a while now...

When we finally made it to the peak, I kind of laughed at myself. There was of course even more snow there than at the last cache. I guess I was hoping it would be under some tree canvas or something and not so snow covered. In any case I barely looked at all, it was pointless. Paige actually understood, which was cool. But now a real problem was developing. It was getting dark. It was 3:50 and we were still almost as far from the car as we had been all day. Just for reference it was around 1:30 when we started our adventure. We were 1200 feet higher than where we started and had hiked 4.38 miles. The furthest Paige had ever gone before was 4 miles so this was already a new record. So we started down. I asked Paige to go a little faster but to also be carefully, she was walking on the snow in her regular shoes. To top it all off, this was the point when Jonah decided he had had enough, and we starting to lose it and cry.

After about 10 minutes I noticed my phone had reception so I called Julie to tell her we were on the way back and that I would take us all out for dinner to celebrate Paige's longest hike to date. I didn't mention that we were still almost at the top. Anyway, you won't believe this, it started to snow. Not just a little either, it really started to snow hard.

So we finally made it to the car, at about 4:35. I was totally impressed with how quickly we came down. The trail was completely covered with snow except for the last mile. It was completely dark, our car was the last in the parking lot, and we had just hiked 6.2 miles. It snowed about 4 inches in the next 3 hours at our house, I am sure it was more where we were hiking. Totally crazy, but totally fun. I think Paige still wants to go again; Jonah not so much, but he will soon.