Tiny changes.

I always thought it would be the big, noticeable things with my kids that would mark the time passing for me. You know, birthdays, lost teeth, school starting.

It certainly is the big things that make me notice the time passing with my friends and family. She lost her tooth? Can you believe you have a seven year old? She's old enough to be in school already?

But with my children, the big things haven't fazed me yet. It's the little things that make me pause, startle, and sometimes tear up a little bit.

Like the moment a few months ago when I took Hannah to get some new shoes. There was a small selection and the only choices she had in the kind of shoe we were going for (fancy shoes) were sparkly Disney labeled shoes or sweet, grown-up ballet shoes. Now I really dislike branded clothing, but for half a second I caught myself hoping that she'd pick the glittery shoes and stay so young just a bit longer. She chose the ballet shoes. I was very happy about it, once the decision was made, but for me it marked the ending of a period in her life.

And there was the moment a few weeks ago when I realized that my three year old was running to the bathroom with her pants pulled up. Not something *you'd* notice if you were visiting, but for me, it was a big deal. See, I've been trying to convince her for six months that when she realizes that she needs to go to the bathroom so bad, it would be more efficient to run to the bathroom and *then* pull down her pants instead of immediately pulling them down to her ankles and running to the bathroom (at full speed, no less) like that.

Oh, and the moment yesterday when I was chasing my 18 month old around the house, tickling him and he was giggling that hysterical happy-baby-giggle so hard and I startled a big boy laugh out of him. He didn't understand why I stopped chasing him and it took me a second to understand it myself.

Changes that are small are the sweetest and most telling.

Sometimes they're not so sweet, though. I turned 32 this year and didn't even notice. Age is just a number and all that. I'm enjoying my thirties more than any other stage in my life. And then yesterday a kinda hot guy in his early twenties almost ran into me in the store. He said "Excuse me, ma'am." Did you get that? He said "Excuse me, ma'am." I think that at this point I should call him 'a nice young man' instead of 'a kinda hot guy.' *sigh*

It's the little things.

Dr. Dropo

A few weeks ago, Matt took the girls to a restaurant where a local college student was earning money by folding balloons for kids. Both girls came home with a kitty. Hannah stuck hers on a dresser where it would be safe ...

but talked Ains into letting her 'see how yours works'. Then Ains had a snake and Hannah was hooked.

The next time we went to town, we checked out "Dr. Dropo's Balloon Sculpturing" from the library and bought a big ol' bag of balloons and a pump (I am not signing up to blow up all of those balloons, thank you very much).

When we got home, we went to work.

Hannah wanted to make her daddy a dog. She worked and worked at it, and after seven minutes of frustration - we were still working the kinks out - she told her daddy "I think you get a worm."

But then it clicked, and she had it.

Her first balloon animal.

I was having to hold the twists for her while she made the next twists in the chain, but she was following the pictures herself and doing all of the work.

Then it was a squirrel.

Then a swan.

We got stuck on swans for awhile.

By then, all I was doing was blowing up and tying off the balloons.

Then she made her sister a giraffe - which was well-received the next morning.

And the easiest of all - swords.

These were also *very* well received by her little brother the next morning, but I don't have a picture of that. If a child moves even slightly while I'm taking a picture, it's blurry, and folks, that kid holding a balloon sword was moving more than slightly. He had his sisters on the run.

It's been a week now, and Hannah's used up the first bag of balloons and is working through her second. She's made flowers, fish, planes, lots of swords, variations on different four legged animals, and wants to do a parrot on a swing next. Ainsley made a collar for a cat. We had to have a talk about that one. Cygnus has learned that balloons pop if you bite them - as did Grayson. Mother has learned that a popping balloon isn't the end of the world (my leaning six inches away while she twisted the balloons was a never-ending source of hilarity for Hannah until I learned that). Father has learned to relax about finding balloon creatures everywhere and Hannah has learned to work with a trash can beside her for popped balloons.

And, thankfully, Hannah has Dr. Dropo to learn from - because I couldn't do more than a fish when we started.

All she wants for Christmas.

Hannah's been wanting to lose her 'two front teeth' before Christmas so that she can sing "All I want for Christmas" more authentically.

This meant that she was extra excited this morning when this happened -

It's not one of the top teeth, but it'll do.

She spent thirty minutes with Seymour Skinless learning more about her teeth. We love Seymour.

Then we made a pillow for her tooth to sit in while it waited for the tooth fairy.

She sang "All I want for Christmas" the whole time.

Now she's asleep and the tooth fairy's already come, collected the tooth and the note that she left, and left a note, a bit o' money, and an extra special present (it *is* the first tooth, after all) by her toothbrush.

The tooth fairy's very excited to see how she likes it tomorrow morning.

Conversations.

Hannah and I were fixing her hair when she looked at me in the mirror and said "Are we drawings? On a tv show?"

You mean like a cartoon? I asked her.

"Yeah."

So is everything we're saying to each other right now part of the cartoon?

Big eyes. "Yeah, I guess so."

So can we say what we want to or only what is written down? Can we decide what we want to do or is it all part of a cartoon?

"I don't know... .... I'll have to think about this." Big pause. "Do you think Homer and Marge know that they're just cartoons?"

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We were sitting down for lunch with soup and sandwiches when Ainsley decided to proclaim our family a super-hero team.

Pointing around the table, she said "Gay and Daddy and you and that girl" (pointing to Hannah) "are a Us Team."

Me: "What's the Us Team?"

A: "Supah-hewoes."

Me: "Really? What is your power?" Blank look. "You need a super skill if you're going to be a super hero. What are you going to do? Fly? Walk through walls? Leap buildings in a single bound?"

Ains: "I paint buildings in one bound. With my tummy."

Matt: "You can be the Belly Blaster. What's Gray? The Super Pooper?"

Hannah: "No, that's you Daddy."

Matt: "Then what are you?"

Hannah: "I don't know. What am I good at?"

Matt: "Your super power can be charm. We'll call you Charm Alarm."

Hannah: "What's charm?"

Ains: "I BEWWY BASTTER!" Aims with her tummy.

Hannah: "Dad, you can be Super Worker because you're good at working. And Mother, you can be Super Lover. You're good at loving us."

Me, looking at Matt: "Is that my power? Super Lover?"

Matt: "Yes. But a super-hero costume wouldn't hurt."

When your husband finds a frog at work ...

They loved it, of course, and Hannah took getting him to a safe place to live for the winter very seriously.

It reminded me of the last time (two years ago) that Matt found a frog and brought it in to show the girls. Problem was, the kids and I (I was pregnant with Gray at the time) were taking a bath right then. One of my husband's wonderful(?) qualities is that he sees problems as opportunities, hence the following post I posted on a small forum at the time....

"When your husband thinks he's funny, you could just end up with a frog in your bathtub, a hysterically giggling 10 month old trying to catch it, and a 3 yr old who's yelling that she wants to hold it, so "catch it, Mommy, catch it!". And the frog just might end up grabbing ahold of your nipple as the only port in a storm. Which might make your three year old giggle for the next two days about the frog nursing.

I'm just saying. That MIGHT happen."

The punchline of that story is that the next day, my little Hannah (3 years old at the time) told the lady at the post office that "My mother nurses frogs."

You can't explain that. You just can't.

Dancing with the stars.

Dance shows are a big part of our lives these days - easily three shows in the evening every week. And three shows means hours and hours of practice, dress rehearsal, costume design ... you get the drift.

It's the highlight of my husband's day, watching these shows - and with good reason. They're hilarious.

The routines consist of the girls singing songs that they're making up on the spot while they dance. They can get very active ...

and very expressive.
I think in that picture Hannah was singing about planting, watering, and harvesting plants but not letting Colorado Potato beetles get them, after which she launched into a medley of ABBA songs. Her shows are usually about seven minutes (of non-stop flow-of-conciousness singing).

Then this one starts in.

She just likes having a captive audience.

On the night I took these pictures, I started timing her performance when I realized it had been going on awhile. Seventeen minutes later, she was still going.

Talk about flow-of-consciousness singing. We got to hear about her kitties, her dog, her brother, her baby dolls ... and fudge chocolate chip cookies. No idea where that came from which is probably why it made her dad laugh so hard when she threw it into her routine. And that made her giggle.

And after that, anytime she needed to liven things up, she'd randomly throw out 'fudge chockut chip cookie' and promptly dissolve into giggles.

Dancing with the stars in our own home.

Just Hannah.

H: "Dad, are you a big boss at work?"
Matt: "Yes, I'm one of them."
H: "Then why do you go to work? I thought big bosses just sat around and, you know, do nothing."
M: "Most of them do."

I walked in on Hannah having a discussion with one of her toys.
Duck: "I'm a doctor."
H: "No you're not. You're a duck."
D: "But I like helping people."
H: "Being a doctor is more than just wanting to help people. You have to be able to tell what's wrong with them and you have to know all of the diseases. Do you know all of the diseases?"
D: "No."
H: "Then maybe you can be a vet'rinarian."

Hannah was frustrated because it had taken so long to clean the toy room today. Since her contribution to the cleaning had been some cleaning and a lot of wandering around in circles wondering when the cleaning would be done, she was exhausted later. So exhausted that she accused me of having 'tired her bum clear out.' "Now how did I do that?", I asked. "Well, when I was walking around, waiting for you to get done, my bum was jiggling all around from my legs moving it, and now it's tired out and it's your fault."

Interesting process.

It's interesting watching how reading begins with no formal training. Hannah's showing more and more interest in words and sounds and letters. As she shows more interest, I introduce things to her that I think she might enjoy and help her with things that she requests that we do.

An example of the former is Reading Eggs, a game on the computer that lets you hatch out odd creatures when you finish a reading lesson. I knew Hannah would be intrigued by the animals and would respond to the 'collecting' business, but I wasn't sure how she would respond to the very obvious lessons.

She made it through 23 lessons before she gave up in disgust because "They make me repeat everything twenty trillion and a half times. Do they think I'm stupid?" Repetition makes her crazy, apparently. When you know that the short 'a' sound is made by the letter 'a', and you're asked to tell them that fifteen times in a row, it's frustrating.

She'll likely go back to it later, when the memory has faded and the desire to get more animals trumps any bad taste left in her mouth. Then I'll probably have to pay for it for her to finish it (after a free trial period, you have to pay for the program).

An example of something that she's asked me to do is when she found the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons in our boxes of books as I was unpacking. I've had it since before she was born. My mother taught all of my siblings and me to read when we were three or four, so I was going to do the same. .... ..... .....

Anyway, she asked what it was, and I told her it was a lesson book for teaching someone to read. She said "Oh, like in Little House on the Prairie?" and next thing I knew, she was Mary to my Ma and I was 'teaching' her to read. She did five lessons straight and then declared it was recess. The book's been sitting on the desk, but she hasn't asked for any more lessons. That was a month ago.

Her interest is obviously there. Her reading to others has been amped up. She's always liked to memorize books and read them to any captive audience,



but now she's taken to asking me to read more slowly so that she can read along with me. She can read picture books to Ainsley almost word-perfect after reading them with me two or three times, which is really fun to hear.

So I play along with that, finding picture books that will hold Ainsley's interest and provide some challenge for Hannah's memorization and verbal skills.

The biggest thing I've been doing, however, is playing games with her - most of them games she makes up or games made up by my husband or myself from questions she asks. For a girl who thrives on connection and relationships, this seems to be the way to go right now.

One of her favorite games is the 'rhyming game'. It's an obvious one. Out of the blue she'll say "Let's find a word that rhymes with .... " and we do. That can go on for a loooong time.

Another game is the 'h' game. She noticed that a plastic bag someone was carrying had lots of 'h's on it, but only one 'h' was at the beginning of a word. That led us to talk about how the letter 'h' changes the sound of other letters sometimes. It can make a hard 'c' or 's' or 't' or 'p' or 'o' or 'w' into a soft, gentle sound. So "Tank You for Sopping Here" becomes "Thank you for Shopping Here." Now she loves to play with mixing letters and seeing how it changes their sounds.

The most recent game came from a group of spelling cards that she got in a fast food meal. Since the spelling itself is a bit above her, we'd ask her to tell us the beginning sound or ending sound of the words on the list as we read them. She liked that for a few minutes and then was done, but the next day, she started saying things like 'tortoise starts with tuh' out of the blue (and usually apropos of nothing we could see). So that's been fun.

It will be interesting to see how it progresses from here. Whether it speeds up and she learns to read soon or if she slows back down to let her brain absorb all of the new stuff she's learning before she starts back up again. I'm much relaxed from my pre-parent "My kids will read as early as I did" views. They seem to have gone the way of my "My kids will never do that" and "Obedience is the most important trait a child should have" views. They all flew out the hospital window when Hannah was born. Good riddance, I say.

A snake in the house.

"Look, Mother! Did you ever think you'd have a naga in your very own house?"

(The naga that we learned about here was a snake with two female human heads. We get a naga in our house about once a month, when the girls wrap up in a towel or blanket and stumble around giggling about being "a snake girl. I mean girls.")

Reunion season is coming to a close.

Our last family reunion of the year is this weekend. It's a gathering of my great-grandparent's children and their descendants. It has the potential to be a massive undertaking but as my grandpa's siblings pass away and the family gets more spread out, it is getting smaller and smaller.

Today was a long day filled with a lot of fun activities. When we got there, the first thing the girls did was the zip-line. (We tried to explain it to Hannah on the way to the reunion and after a few minutes of descriptions she finally said "Oh, I get it. It's like swashbuckling!")

Later today she told me "It wasn't like swashbuckling after all, Mother. It was like Diego." There you have it.

On Ainsley's turn, she decided she'd rather be pulled up than slide down.

And then there was the 'train', a contraption that we made for Matt's father a few years ago and brought in to the reunion.

It was fun.

A lot of fun.

There was independent play while parents were involved in what seemed to be never-ending chatter.



Homer the Clown came. He came to our smaller family reunion also and Hannah fell in love with him. His show had some new stuff in it and most were amused.

I say 'most' because I couldn't tell if Grayson liked it. He never looked away and his face looked like this the whole time.

Hannah was completely twitterpated and wanted a picture of him to put up in her room.

After Homer left, we had a family auction with donated items to fund the next year's reunion. I won a fantastic quilt (which Ains promptly fell asleep on) ...

and these absolutely darling cow tea towels.

I say 'won' because I don't want to admit how much I spent. So don't ask.

Our puppy was endlessly fascinating to this little guy (who is my third cousin twice removed - or something).

Meanwhile, Hannah found out who'd won the kitty cat embroidered tea towels that *she* had wanted ("One of them was planting flowers, Mother!") and went to go look at all seven of them.

Then it was time to go back to my husband's parent's house to do milking duty so Hannah did one last activity before we left - she got a Super Soaker.



And then she got in the truck.

So now we're 'home', Daddy's milking, and children are screwing around.



We'll see you tomorrow for Snapshot Sunday!

There be monsters here!

My sister's been here for the last two days to help with a doll making project.

This morning Hannah asked if *she* could do a craft. Because I'm brain-dead from making too many dolls, I asked her if she had any ideas. She suggested painting on wood with acrylic paint. I revived my brain long enough to come up with another idea. I do *not* need to be wrangling acrylic paint while I'm stuffing doll legs, thank you very much.

"Draw a monster," I told her. So she did.

And so did Ainsley.

While they did that, I rounded up some supplies. Felt, the button jars (of course), thread, stuffing, yarn ... And then we set to work 'interpreting' the pictures.

Since we've never done this before, the girls had drawn without picturing their monsters off the paper. Now they got to pick a color, add texture in the form of buttons, embroider expressions, and pick yarn out for hair. It was such a fun process and we have lots of ideas for more texture we can add to future monsters.

I folded a piece of felt in half and cut out the front and back of the monster together. Then I laid out the top piece and had the girls match the fabric up to their drawing/imagination.

When they'd decided how they wanted their monsters to look, we started sewing them. Hannah could do a lot of the work herself - the buttons, the ribbon toes, and the smile - and I did what she couldn't.

Ainsley couldn't do much but explain to me what the different parts of her drawing were ("It's a COWBOY monster, Mommy!"), but every so often, a set of little pudgy hands would try to help me sew a button on here or do some embroidery there.

Once we had all of the embellishments and expressions added, we stuffed them. First we used all of the felt and thread scraps and then we added in stuffing.

Hannah's monster was fairly straightforward and easy to translate from paper to felt. Here's her drawing again ...

And the finished project (which is cuddled up to her as she sleeps right now) ...

She had an absolute blast doing this project and has three more monsters (and another one 'just for GrayGray') laying on the counter, drawn up and ready to go.

Ainsley's finished monster is true to Ainsley Style, with a diamond necklace, a bow in her hair (between two of the three eyes), a flower in her hand, and a cowboy hat and boots - most of which I wouldn't have understood without her explanations. I cut the monster out using the outline of her drawing - I thought about embroidering the many circles and then, thanks to my ever-sensible sister, decided not to. I'd still be sewing.

Here's her drawing again ...

And the finished project ...

"She so coooot!" was what Ainsley said when she'd inspected the final project.

She wants a ballerina monster next.

Their cousin wanted a monster too. Her drawing was a bit more ambitious.

And her mother, for all of the sense she talked into me over Ainsley's monster, did a heckuva job making a patchwork monster to match the picture.

Think 'monster bird. It's so fun. Very tactile. The ribbon hair (above the black face) is so sweet - little pigtails.

When I was discussing the picture with my niece, trying to decipher heads and tails and legs and eyes (she's got several by the way - some on her head and some on her tail), I pointed to the line on the bottom of the monster and asked "What's that? Is that it's leg?" Because, you know, if it had been Ainsley's monster it would have been a leg. Or possibly a penis. "No, it's PEEING." she said. She seemed irritated that I even had to ask.

So my sister - because she's awesome - put it on the monster. When I was taking the picture of the monster, my niece asked "What's this thread?" pulling on the yellow thread. "That's the pee, of course," I answered. She dissolved into giggles.

I wonder how many more of these monsters we'll make - I have some drawings waiting on the counter, a ballerina monster in another daughter's head, and my sister has another drawing that her daughter made.

Easy, fun craft - and cuddly to boot!