Move It

Anyone who has visited has probably noticed that there is music on in our house pretty much every waking moment. If it's not "real" music from a playlist, it's something being created by one of the kids or one of their toys.

While it's normal to hear the girls playing piano, guitar, ukulele, flute (i.e. recorder, or legos), or just making up songs and screaming them out, lately Catherine has been zeroing in on percussion.


She disassembled my Swiffer handle so she had two sticks, and lined up a board game box, a lego box lid, and an upside-down diaper-box-turned-toy-box as her drum kit.


She was excited to discover that each of the boxes made a different sound, and of course made up some songs to go along with her drumming.


And then there's this. Thanks Gigi.



Michael Jr is clearly as enthralled with music as his sisters. When he sees you pick up an instrument he starts following you with his eyes even before you start playing. This picture doesn't actually have anything to do with that, but he's stinkin' adorable.

Two Firsts

After months of drooling like a St. Bernard, Michael Jr poked out his first tooth today! It is one of the middle bottom teeth, and the one next to it as well as the middle top teeth look to be not far behind. This explains why he has been attacking anything that gets anywhere near his mouth, and hopefully it explains (and resolves) his recent inability to sleep more than two hours at a time at night.

For weeks now Michael has spent every family meal locked in on whichever fork at the table has food on it and is traveling to someone's mouth. I have mostly been avoiding starting him on solids simply because it takes so much time to prepare, feed, and clean up after the early feeding episodes, but I was mysteriously motivated to take on the challenge this evening so Michael had his first rice cereal. He was pretty much an expert from the first spoonful: very little spitting the cereal back out, although he did get the shivers with each of the first few bites which I found entertaining. Catherine of course wanted to feed him, so I let her give it a try, but he was diving after the spoon pretty quickly and the first spoonful she had went directly into his eye.

Unfortunately I have no pictures of this. The thing I dislike most about the cooler months is not actually the temperature but the lack of light. It's already dark at dinnertime around here and that means no good pictures in the evenings (I mostly think flash pictures aren't even worth taking - I end up deleting all the ones I try). Plus I was a little busy what with Catherine on my lap grabbing for the cereal and spoon, Michael in his high chair diving for the cereal and spoon, and Mary climbing on Michael's high chair just for the sake of climbing and being in on the action.

So here's a random picture of Catherine from sometime last week. I have no idea what combination of light and camera settings caused it to look like this. Photography is mostly still a mystery to me.


And Mary likes hats.

The Last Days of Summer

It has been down in the 40s here the last couple nights, but Sunday afternoon was clear and sunny and at least in the 70s so we stole a quick trip to the beach. The tide was way out and had left a sizable pool on the beach where the girls decided to play instead of going all the way to the ocean, which was fine with me: the water is much warmer and there are no waves to knock Mary over.

They each had at least a gallon of sand in their bathing suits after they discovered this fun game.



More attempts at a silhouette. I do not know why I can't get that right.


Chasing little fish in the pool - they were extremely quick.


We also had a great hermit crab rescue. I think Catherine and Mary collected every hermit crab in the pool, probably about 20 in all, in their sand buckets and walked them back to the ocean and tossed them in (literally). I'm pretty sure they all recovered from the shock and scuttled off.

I'm giving summer ending two thumbs down.

50/50

Mary still has a bit of a runny nose but has been in good spirits so we forged on with the potty training experiment Thursday. By noon I was totally doubting and regretting the decision - just more of the same, more of the same. Then, late in the afternoon, she was sitting on the floor doing a puzzle and shouted out "I'm going to pee on this floor!" I almost died laughing but did manage to usher her into the bathroom in time to make it to the potty.

I know, you're thinkging it finally clicked (and so was I) but it turned out to be about a 50/50 breakthrough. For the rest of the day Thursday and all day today, about half the time she would tell me and about half the time she would just pee on the floor.

At this point I'm not entirely sure what to do. Clearly we cannot go back to real life if she is going to randomly pee in her pants half the time, but she also seems to be into the potty training: she has no problem staying dry all night, loves her underpants, hates being wet, and is excited about the idea. I don't think I will have a lot of success convincing her to go back to diapers or pullups. What to do? Seriously, I have no idea.

Enough potty talk. Here is some laughing baby:



This was the day Mary wasn't feeling great. Watching Michael laugh at Catherine is hilarious, but keep an eye on Mary too. About 30 seconds after the end of this video she fell asleep sitting up.



Although Mary seems to be recovering quickly, Catherine and Michael both have runny noses and super crankiness today. Daddy's going to be so happy to see us all tomorrow!

The Elusive "Click"

Night 2 was perfect: dry all night, then woke up and peed in the potty! But I have to admit, whatever is supposed to "click" with kids on Magic Day 3 apparently did not happen with Mary today. Today was definitely different than Day 1. She had less frequent accidents and started running to me as soon as she started to go every time, but never got to the point of telling me before she started to go (or when she did tell me, she didn't actually have to go). She likes wearing underpants and doesn't seem stressed out at all (other than she doesn't like getting wet), and I really do think she is close and with another day or two she would really get it, but I have a dilemma: it seems Mary is coming down with something. She had a progressively runnier nose throughout the day, fell asleep sitting up around 3:30 this afternoon, and woke up a couple hours later with a 101 fever. She did stay dry through her nap and used the potty when she woke up (the only other time she peed in the potty today), and she perked up quite a bit during her bath, but if she's really sick it just doesn't seem nice to expect much from her in the way of potty training. So we could be derailed at this point. I'm hoping she sleeps through the night and I'll just see how she feels in the morning before deciding on a plan...