Keaton, in a nutshell

Keats is 4 and a half years old and is so much fun to hang out with now. I feel like I don't get to see much of him since he's in school all day so I am excited to have him home for a month. :o) He still has the occassional tantrum but for the most part is an easy kid. He is learning to be a clown to get the attention away from his baby brother so most pictures I take of him lately are him saying "Mom, take a picture of me doing ____!" We end up with a whole bunch of silly expressions and some interesting body language in the photos.

He spends his life living in some fantasy superhero existence. All roads lead to Spiderman in Keaton's world! He has superhero underwear and fully informs everyone he sees just exactly whom is on his butt that day. Lol. He changes his name every few weeks. Usually he is Peter Parker or, lately, Megatron. Once he changed his name to "Knight." ;o) He also loves Legos, Bionicles, and his Magnadoodle.

He is learning so much in school. His teacher says he is definitely ready for kindergarten but we'll wait until the 2009-2010 school year; no point in making him grow up any faster than he already is!! He can write the whole alphabet and can spell lots of names & objects from memory, knows how to read quite a few words, and can count to one hundred; he can even count by fives & tens! He blows my mind with the big words he throws out now & then. The other day he told me his shadow was "humongous" and, when he had an itchy ear, he thought perhaps there were "chemicals" inside that were causing the itch.

Mostly I just love him for who he is. He's silly & smart & sweet to his baby brother & I'm happy he's all mine! :o)

Senioritis

It's like we all have a bad case of Senioritis in my house. Keaton's last day of school (until September 1st) is today. All week we've been getting him to school at ten or eleven. Keats hasn't been interested in getting dressed so I keep half-heartedly telling him to get dressed...sort of with the same urgency as Willy Wonka when he says "Don't. Stop. Come back here." in the movie. I haven't had the energy to tell Keats to hurry up so we've just been getting to school late.

So in all of this I just realized that in just over a year I am going to have to do things like set my alarm, make sure Keaton has school clothes & lunch at-the-ready, and get him to school by a certain time. Yikes!

While he's out of school I plan to take him & Sully to the beach (staying overnight the 12th-13th of August), a very neato park in McMinnville, and just have fun hanging out with both my boys. I am hoping to get a 'sitter for Sully so I can take Keats to the zoo & OMSI on our own. Oh, and I'm going to take him to a real movie in a real theater. I've not tried to take him to a movie yet so I'm interested to see how he does and if we will last for the whole show.

Centered

I'm sitting here at the computer, both boys are watching tv and eating their Eggos. Sully very-noisily gets down from the couch, runs over here, feet stomping the ground all the way, breath coming in gasps. What's the rush? He needed, apparently quite desperately, to leave the very center circle of his waffle next to my keyboard. Then he runs, runs, runs back to the couch to watch tv.

What a goofball. And I wish I had a quarter that amount of energy...not to mention that I'd love to know what he was thinking..."I must run this waffle center to my mommy STAT!" ?? Lol.

Very Late Spring Cleaning

I am a cleaning-out, throwing-out, organizing, stacking, coordinating FANATIC lately. If I didn't know myself I'd think I had a meth problem...all this nervous energy.

Maybe I really want to clean out my mind but since I don't know where to start...I started in my craft room? Lol.

So far, my van is sparkly, my bedroom immaculate, and the garage is, well, you can see the floor in the garage which is a huge improvement.

I have things posted on Craigslist: barstools, dog crates, car seat, backpack, tire chains...everything. I'm using the rule that if it hasn't been used in a year, out it goes.

If only I could do the same thing for my head, huh?

what the....

Today we took the boys to The Bite. Keaton wanted to ride the ferris wheel; the big wheel, not any baby ride. I'm so shocked that he says he wants to do this (usually he needs the world firmly planted under his feet) that I hurry to buy tickets. I bought four, thinking it was a ticket-per-ride. Not so, not so. It was four tickets per ride, per-person....no matter the age or if you are the parent who is stuck going with the kid who wants to ride.

It was eight bucks for Keaton and I to ride the ferris wheel. He loved it, so money well-spent in that regard, but really? Eight bucks??? If minimum wage is only like $7.50-ish, how are people supposed to afford to take their kids? I loved fairs as a kid and remember riding until I was, quite literally, sick. Today I was feeling sick, it was just for a different reason. ;o)

So Keats wants to ride everything and we had to severely limit his riding. I suppose we could have taken more money out of the bank to let him ride to his heart's content but Daddy-o and I were going off of principle: we didn't want to support such price-gouging. Keats rode a roller coaster, on his own so this ride was only four bucks, and that was that. Home we went.

Of Linebackers

Yesterday, Sully had his two-year checkup. He was weighed & then measured as usual. The nurse, as usual, stated something to the effect of we're raising a linebacker here. Sully was 31 pounds (80th%) and 36 inches tall (90th%). It's not like he's gigantic or anything but I suppose they are used to very average-sized kids. What can I say? My boys must take after their Daddy or Uncle Kenny 'cuz my whopping 62-3/4 inches did not help them in the height department. ;o)

Anniversary

The 21st (yesterday) was my ninth wedding anniversary. It was also the second anniversary of the day we brought Sully home from the hospital. Mike & I met in October and were married nine months later, on 7.21.99; Sully was conceived right around the anniversary of the day we met, so....nine months after he was conceived it was our wedding anniversary. We brought Sullivan home on our seventh anniversary. :o)

Happy Birthday, Sullivan Patrick!

Sullivan turned two on Friday the 18th. We spent the day driving around Portland so we could meet Mike at the airport. Sully and I went to Trader Joe's and to Washington Square Mall so he could play on that neato indoor play structure. At TJ's he was given a balloon and the nice balloon-giving-guy also serenaded him with a funny version of Happy Birthday. At the indoor playpark Sully was about to burst open with joy. He would run over to one of the structures and then run back to me, squealing all the way, huge smile on his face, and bury his face in my lap. Then he'd run back to another piece of play equipment and repeat the process. He was filled with complete happiness.

This is my favorite picture of his sandbox birthday cake because you can see his little hand trying to swipe a gumball off the cake! I used graham crackers for the sandbox edges and crushed graham crackers and vanilla wafers to make sand to sprinkle over the top of the cake. Then I just piped some green frosting on the front-bottom to look like grass. It was far from professional-looking but I don't think Sully minded!

He actually used that green shovel to eat his cake and ice cream.

We had a candy hunt with candy buried in the sandbox. This picture shows all the kids digging for loot.

Happy Birthday, Baby Boy!!

Magic Words

Tonight, Keaton was swinging and wanted me to push him. He kept saying "Push my feet, Mama!" and I was trying to get the "p" word out of him .

Please, that is.

After many hints, I finally said, "What's the magic word?"

Keaton excitedly said, "Abracadabra!!!"

:o)

Of Barkdust

For those unaware, when you order barkdust delivered to your home, it is up to you to haul it to the backyard. You can try prayer, dance, wishing on falling stars or falling eyelashes, throw pennies into a fountain....but it is just NOT going to move itself.

I found this out the hard way. ;o)

In twelve hours...

I work just once a week. A twelve hour shift every Sunday. Six days a week I get to stay home with my little ones....and one day a week I leave Daddy in charge while I work.

Tonight I come home to find out that Sullivan (who will be two-years-old next week) now says "No bark!" and "Nigh-nigh, Key" (<-- that one translates to "night-night, Keaton.")

Last night Sully wasn't saying these things. Nope. He waited until the day I'm at work to start saying short sentences.

Last summer I went away for a three-day-weekend, my first ever time away from Keaton or Sully (overnight, that is.) While I was away, Sully started walking. Before I left he was standing around quite a bit, taking a step here and there...but I come home and he's walking-walking.

I'm not sure what all this should tell me. I feel great to be able to stay home most of the time but really treasure that one day each week where I get to hang around grown-ups all day long!! Ahhh...no Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, no Teletubbies, no snot getting smeared all over my shirt (well, to be perfectly honest, that really could happen at work, too! Lol.)

So here I am feeling good about being home for all the "big" things the boys do and then Sully pulls something like this: I go to work and his verbal abilities go through the roof.

Harumph.

I'm thinking this is a lesson, for me, in the whole "letting go" department. You know, the subject that parents are just not ever truly ready to embrace? And I suppose that it is good for Daddy to get to experience "firsts" as well. Mommy shouldn't be a Firsts-Hog, huh?

Strange milk-related conversations...

When Keaton was three, he would argue (daily!) that cows do not eat hay or grass, they eat milk. His theory was purely presumptive as he had never actually witnessed a cow eat (or drink) anything. His mind knew (and knowledge to a three-year-old is a dangerous, dangerous thing indeed) that his morning milk came from a cow, therefore the cow must eat (drink) only milk. How the heck else would the cow get the milk? It makes perfect sense.

Let us not get into the discussion that asks if the cow, then, is purely a tool to preserve the milk, perhaps we use cows for their natural sterilizing or pasteurizing abilities, which is why the cows would eat the milk and then give us that very same milk.

Let's just not go there...

Fast forward to age four and a half: this morning Keaton stated, quite matter-of-factly, that milk doesn't talk. It is crazy to even consider that milk could talk. Pure silliness. He expounded upon his hypothesis and included all utensils and foods inculded in this morning's breakfast. Milk doesn't talk, we know this, but neither does cereal, bowls, cups, or spoons. Only people talk. Only people.

And now we know.