Braggart

I overheard Dylan talking to his cousin, Jake, the other day. He said, "Yeah, I'm the funniest kid in the whole first grade at my school..." I chuckled to myself.

Root Beer

Sadie calls root beer, "root beard." I love it.

Covering Up

Dylan manages to make 30 minutes of homework stretch into an hour. He will purposely write his answers illegibly, so that I have to tell him to erase them and write them again. He'll write the wrong answers (on purpose. I can tell), then look at me with this annoying grin on his face. Again, I have to tell him to erase his answers and write them again. He'll insist on getting a drink in the middle of his worksheet, or some food. He'll suddenly need to use the bathroom. He has to read for 15 minutes per day, and he will ask all kinds of questions while we read: "Why did she do that?" "Where is she going to go?" "Why does she have red hair?" All kinds of stuff. Some questions are legitimate, and it's important to train him to pause and ask questions of himself. This I know from teaching reading. But a lot of the questions are really silly, meant to just drive me nuts:

Dylan: Do you think he has ten toes?
Me: Dylan, he's a person. So probably.
Dylan: Well, what if he just has nine toes? Why doesn't the writer tell us how many toes he has?
Me: Dyls, this book isn't about the kid's toes. It's about how he likes to play soccer.

Dylan will start fights with Sadie while he's doing his homework. All I say, over and over again, during homework time, is, "Focus, Dylan. Focus." It's frustrating.

His new thing to drive me nuts is to write his answers while covering his work with his hand, like I'm a little kid who's trying to cheat off his answers:

I have to keep telling him that I have to look at his answers to make sure he's doing the worksheet right, and to make sure he's not messing around and writing illegibly again. So then we have to fight about that for five minutes. The kid is killing me.

Poor girl.

One of the requirements for Headstart is that you have to get your kid in to see a dentist and a doctor and have them fill out these forms to show that your kid is healthy. Part of the doctor requirement is a test to see if there's lead in your child's blood. Wow, was that traumatic for Sadie. Me and a nurse had to hold her down while the phlebotomist drew her blood. I felt bad. They are really sweet at the lab - they give each kid a teeny teddy bear after their trauma. Sadie chose a purple one:

See her little inner elbow. Poor gal. I hate having my blood drawn, too. I used to faint every time, but I do better now. That's what having thyroid disease will do for ya. I'm getting my thyroid tested this Wednesday and I cannot wait. I have been so exhausted lately.

I had to take my two other munchkins with me when Sadie got her blood drawn, and when Dylan saw that Sadie got a teddy bear, he started crying. He wanted a bear, too. I told him that he can only get a bear when he gets his blood drawn, which made him cry even harder. The lab people felt badly for him and offered him a bear, too. He is such a punk:

Look at that satisfied look on his face, like, "Aw yeah. I got this bear through the sheer force of my tantrum. Sa-weet." Little stinker. He is a really big fan of stuffed animals. Sadie and Micah don't care about theirs, but Dylan plays with his constantly. It's interesting.

A random picture of Micah from that bloody day. :)

He didn't realize that he could have thrown a tantrum to get a teddy bear for himself. Which is fine with me.

A Very Industrious Boy

Micah's new thing. Getting bibs out of the kitchen hutch...

...and chucking them down the stairs.

If any of the bibs has landed on the top stair, he will carefully reach down and pick it up....

Then chuck it down the stairs again.

He is all boy.

P.S. My mom found an old gate for the top of my stairs. I'm going to set it up tomorrow. These bib-flinging escapades make me nervous. I don't want another falling incident.

Men need to learn...

...that nothing makes us love them more than when they clean. At least, that's how I feel about it. Can I get a what-what, girls?

Ben cleaned our nasty basement a few weeks ago, and I was more in love with him than ever. Look at his handiwork.

Organized, kitten poop and urine-free closet:

Kitten pee-saturated carpet square is gone. And the floor has been hand-scrubbed with bleach water:

The washer and dryer have been wiped off. All the dirt and laundry detergent kernels have been swept up:

And he organized his dang tools:

Nothing makes a girl happier than a clean house. Especially if it was cleaned by someone besides her.

The Wall

This one should be relatively easy. Which 70's band had an album titled "The Wall"? Ten points, baby.

Megan wanted me to post a picture of the kids' new pictures on our "feature wall." I just found out that's what these walls are called. Ben likes the pictures to be hung randomly. I'd rather them fit together nicely, at right angles, a la this:

I think I'm going to study the above picture and try to make my feature wall look a little more like that. I'm digging that.