To Complain A Little...

So. If I could complain a little?

Keeping the house clean around here is a little - no, wait - AWFULLY MUCH LIKE vacuuming the carpet while someone follows me around with a container and carefully pours sand in my freshly vacuumed wake. It's the crumbs all over the floor I just swept. It's the dumping out of the cars after I just picked them all up. Or the animal basket. Or the marbles. Or pulling books off of the shelves. Or dumping the markers out of their box. Or the crayons. ARRRRGGHH!!!

Gabe is old enough now that he has to endure the steely glint of Mommy's eye as she watches him pick up what he has gleefully kicked around the carpet. But Israel...sigh.

Israel is the child who will manage to spill the last teensy millimeter of grape juice I gave him to swig out of my cup thinking that there was no possible way he could get it on the floor. Hah. Israel manages to make a mess out of anything and everything. Israel loves strewing the dog food around the house and pouring that and the dog water "carefully" from formerly clean container to formerly clean container. Bury head in hands.
Israel needs his own personal man-servant to follow him around and wipe his face every 0.3 seconds. Chocolate, crumbs, snot, marker, suspicious substance, varied forms of slime - it's smeared. Shake of head.

And another thing. My children have this UNCANNY ability to sense the last few seconds that Zion is awake and barge noisily in as his eyes drift shut. Seriously, every morning, 9 times out of 10, as I'm nursing Zion back to sleep, almost the SECOND his eyes close, in comes one of the boys. And then we're all up. Again. Or if I'm nursing him in the chair in the living room, just as he has finally fallen asleep, Israel makes the noisest beeline ever in the whole entire world straight for us, attempts to climb into my lap as I whisper furiously at him, and then procedes to unleash the loudest bellow of protest you have ever heard. And then Zion is awake again. It really is quite maddening.

That Israel child is one of the more louder creations on God's green earth. Lots of loud screams, lots of loud tromping.

Ok. Back to blissful life of unhurried blissfulness...where the windows are always clean and where my children read at a sixth grade level by age three from all the quality time I spend with them after all the crafts we make together and the outdoor hikes we go on. While my self-laundering, self-cleaning, supper-cooking house does it all for me. And where we're all staggeringly healthy at all times. It's just great. Around here.

Super Heroes and the Like

Tim: (telling Gabe the story of Adam and Eve) "...but Adam was very lonely, because he didn't have anybody to talk to, just all those animals."

Gabe: (pause) Except for the parrots!!

Tim: (startled) Ah - well, yes, I guess you're probably right about the parrots.
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Zion has started intermittently sucking his thumb (4 months 2 weeks). It's so stinkin' cute I can't hardly keep from melting into a huge puddle of Mommy Mush when he does it. With each day that's gone past this week he's sucked it more, and today he put himself to sleep in his bed twice with his thumb. I feel sort of guilty for letting him suck it, since I know it can be hard to break later, but it is so handy (no pun intended ;)) and so. adorable. that maybe I'll just worry about all those things later. :)---------

Gabe FINALLY knows his ABC song and can count a good ways. He's only done those things patchily up to this point.

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Gabe: (mid-chew while gazing out the window in the dining room. Declared brightly.) "Super-Gabe will take care of that later!" (goes back to eating as if nothing had happened)

Mommy: (looking from the outdoors to Gabe, and really, really, really, struggling with a smile) "What will Super Gabe take care of?"

Gabe: "Oh! That bag that is blowing in the wind! (Mommy looks and indeed sees a plastic bag gusting along the yard.) Super-Gabe will go get that bag later!" (resumes his busy chewing.)

LOL.

Super Hero has been the game of choice lately (when Gabe is not "shooting" animals with his "gun"). I think it's a take-off of the Super Reader show on PBS. Mainly, it involve scrounging clothes off of one's shelf, out of one's drawer, or off of Mommy's shelf (sigh), placing them on one's head to form a sort of hat/swirly cape, and tearing down the hall with giggling younger brother hot on one's heels. It's pretty funny, actually, aside from the vastly annoying task of gathering loose clothes from hither and yon and restoring them yet again to their original places.

Today he said, "Mommy, I'm a he-whoa."

"A hero?" I asked.

"Yes, I'm a he-whoa. And if anybody tries to, tries to push a button on the world, I will smack my heart, and it will put my clothes on." :) :) :)

Here are the two resident Super Heroes, hard at work.
That would be a shirt of mine on Gabe's head, spirited away for the vastly important activity of world saving, and a skirt of mine on Israel's head, because, hey, that just looks like a good idea.
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...it's...a four year old with Blue's Clues underwear and a shirt on his head.
Super heroes need to brush their teeth too. And a denim skirt around your neck while you brush can only aid the process.
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The other day I was working in the kitchen and Gabe wandered out requesting juice. I informed him that he had to wait, because I was busy. He went and quietly deposited himself in the baby's purple Bumpo seat and sat there quietly. After a bit, I fixed his juice and took it to him. He accepted it with a quivering lip. My child can be a mite melodramatic, I have noticed. So, I tucked my smile inside, and asked him twice what was wrong. Finally he said, quite pitifully and with lip aquiver, "It's...it's...it's just that nothing in my life makes me sad!!!"

"Do you mean that everything in your life makes you sad?" I asked.

Nod. Pitiful sniff. "Everything in my life makes me sad!"

The poor, poor child. When chocolate doesn't come on demand, Mom makes you stop jumping off of the couch, and the juice is delayed...there's not much farther down to go. Apparently.

:)

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People often comment how alert and responsive Zion is. I hear more that he looks like Gabe right now than that he looks like Tim, which is what people really said at first.
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Israel calls me "Mom-Mom" or "Mom-Ma-Mom". I took him for what I thought was a speech evaluation but turned out only to be a hearing evaluation (sigh) which showed he had no hearing difficulties. He seems to have hit one of those verbal peaks again these past two weeks, where he is saying more.

Four Months Old

-chews on his hands a lot
-really enjoys his over-the-door jumper
-very interactive; smiles, talks, laughs
-currently has a ratty sleep schedule where he usually doesn't fall asleep until 1 AM
-weighs 14.8 pounds
-still not very much hair
-grabs at Mommy's bowl on the table
-the sight of meals on the table makes him agitated and whirly-limbed, but Mommy is not feeding him any table-food other than occasional tastes or pacifier dunks
-a happy, mild tempered baby who loves to laugh and grin and talk
-mostly over his "tummy woes"
-brightens up at the sight of Gabe
-has good head and neck control
-can roll from back to side
-really likes his bath and splashes and splashes in it
-likes to look at his baby toys
-in size 2 diapers
-tries to sit up in his bouncer