30 November 2009

Also, this weekend, Nut Brown learned how to use "what" and "who". He has a much more effective way of gaining information now, which has exponentially increased the number of questions asked.

We got out the Christmas decorations, including our plastic Nativity set. Rose Pink has been asking about it for weeks now, and she played with it for three and a half hours straight that afternoon. We invited her to other activities, but she declined in favor of the nativity set. For all those people to whom I suggested "figurines of any sort" as a gift idea for her - here is the proof what a great gift that would be!

thanksgiving 2

Our thanksgiving highlights include the easiest Thanksgiving dinner we've ever prepared, and listening to Nut Brown play with blocks in the living room as we made mashed potatoes. He was singing to himself, "Ice ice baby! Ice ice baby!" I don't think Mr. Brown's brothers will ever let us live that down.

I am thankful today for my lack of experience with the terrible twos. Neither of my kids has come anywhere close that temperamental stage, and I am grateful for such sweet, obedient children.

thanksgiving

Tomorrow Mr. Brown and I are going to coordinate Thanksgiving dinner at his brother's house in Iowa City. One of the things that I am grateful for is the fact that his brother and sister-in-law are our friends. Really, I am so lucky to have married into this family, and I'm glad for their friendship and glad to know them so well. Rose Pink insists that her cousins are mean to her, but really, they spoil her in a lot of ways. I am also grateful for the opportunity for her to really know well at least part of her extended family. Last time we were out there, their oldest daughter coordinated this nonsense. They even trucked leaves from the front yard around to the back for this activity. They're burying one of the boys, and then they all run off and hide and shout, "Mummy mummy arise for the dead!" and he climbs out of the leaves and chases them. Nut Brown came out once after the burial but before the resurrection and was he startled to see his cousin climb out of the leaf pile!

And here's a shot of me in their kitchen. (So you don't forget what I look like.) I love the color of the walls. It's so soothing.

Happy Thanksgiving!

oklahoma city zoo

While visiting Gia earlier this month, we spent a morning at the Oklahoma City Zoo. We brought it up at breakfast and Nut Brown made a beeline for his shoes, repeating, "animals. animals." The zoo residents were surprisingly active that day as well, and we got to see all kinds of animals up and moving around and interacting with each other. Mr. Brown's favorite part was the night barn, which they kept dark so that visitors could see nocturnal animals, like bats, skunks, owls and flying squirrels, active. Instead of going to see exotic animals, we ended up in the local Oklahoma section of the zoo, and that was just as interesting. We saw things like raccoons and possums and badgers, as well as bears and buffalo and mountain lions. It was so much fun!

20 November 2009

Nut Brown has learned the magic of Mom's kisses. When he has a minor injury he comes running to me, crying this sad little cry and holding the injury up for me to kiss. When I kiss it, it is like magic- the crying stops and he runs off to play again. (Note: this medicine is less effective for real injuries.) Rose Pink outgrew having her various bumps kissed a year or more ago, and I had forgotten how rewarding it is to be able to instantly heal an ouchy.

Halloween with Pictures

Rose Pink this year for Halloween said that she wanted to be a house. So I made this really awesome fun haunted house costume. The roof ties under your chin (Mr. Brown made it) and the dark outlines and vines are pipe cleaners. The windows are construction paper and with foil ghosties, and there are windows on the back as well. Here's what she would have looked like if she'd worn it: Here we are on October 31st:

Nut Brown is a ghost, so he can haunt her house. But she decided to be a witch instead. If the costume she's wearing in this picture looks familiar, it's because it's the same dress and hat she has worn the last two years. Oh yes, this is her third year of being a witch. And Nut Brown is a ghost made out of a bedsheet with holes cut in it.

Having gone to the trouble of making really good house costume, I wore it to take the kids trick-or-treating.

And since everyone else had tried it on, Nut Brown wanted a turn too.

Rose Pink ended up going around with her friend Macayla's parents (Macayla is the little girl with the red and black dress on) and I took Nut Brown to some houses. He was too slow from the girls. He got cold really quickly, but even though he was shivering and shaking, every time I suggested we go home, he insisted that he wanted to knock on one more door. It was really fun! They were both so satisfied and pleased with themselves.

Thanks to Mr. Brown for uploading the pictures for me!

milky way

Driving back from Oklahoma, the sun went down around 6 pm, when we were somewhere in Kansas, planning on stopping in another half hour or so to find a hotel. It felt like the middle of the night- it was really, really dark outside, because I-35 in Kansas is pretty unpopulated. Mr. Brown agreed to stop on an unlit exit ramp so we could get out and look at the stars. It was beautiful- you could see so many, and you could even see the Milky Way stretching across the sky. When Rose Pink got out of the car, she said that she wanted to be an astronaut so that she could bring me back a star. We showed Rose Pink and Nut Brown the fuzzy white band of our galaxy, and explained about stars being bigger than the earth but so far away that they looked really small. It was so awesome to see how beautiful the sky was away from city lights.

Nut Brown started to wander away and I grabbed him. He struggled to get away and then stopped and started to asking something- "------ go?" After he repeated himself several times, we realized he was asking, "Where hotel go?" We'd been talking about how the next stop would be the hotel, and he was stumped by the dark space around us when we got out of the car.

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Since we got home, Mr. Brown has been taking Nut Brown's boppy away from him after he wakes up, and only returning it for naptime and bedtime. It's helped Nut Brown be a lot more active- before he would just lay around and chew on it instead of playing. The first day Mr. Brown decided to sneak it away from him and tell him that it had gone somewhere interesting. When Nut Brown asked for it, Mr. Brown said, "It's gone on a trip! Where did it go?" He and Nut Brown discussed various places it might have gone- "Did it go to the zoo? Did it go to the library?" Nut Brown negatived each of them and finally suggested, "Milk Way!" Apparently the boppy had departed for a day among the stars.

Last night, getting ready for bed, he asked, "Milk Way? Milk Way?" to find out if his boppy had come back yet. I had him run up and look on his bed (sometimes it reappears there at bedtime), and Mr. Brown snagged it and had it "knock" on the front door while Nut Brown was upstairs. Nut Brown of course immediately came to the head of the stairs when he heard the knocking, and heard Mr. Brown say, "Oh, welcome back, boppy! Just in time!" Nut Brown ecstatically received his boppy and went back upstairs chanting, "Just time. Just time." I love the games we play.

Our trip to OK

We stopped at Adam Ondi Ahman on our way back. It was beautiful. And very peaceful.

At Going Bonkers in Dallas- best indoor playplace EVER. Books to draw in while driving. Indispensible. Fascination with long hair. The kids playing at a park in Norman that Mr. Brown and I helped build when we were in college here a long time ago. The kids, in Gia's driveway, writing in their journals. Are they not adorable?

pickle pants

Nut Brown loves the Skippyjon Jones books we read at Gia's house. This morning, referencing one of them, he was running back and forth across the living room shouting, "Pickle pants! Pickle pants!" Mr. Brown asked him, "Who's pickle pants? You?" and Nut Brown replied, "No....Daddy!"

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This morning Mr. Brown called me at work.

Me: How many kids are up?

Mr. Brown: How many kids are downstairs with me? One. How many kids are upstairs singing to themselves? One.

Nut Brown (in the background): Three!!

12 November 2009

I unexpectedly was approved for ten days off work at the beginning of November, so we have been out of town enjoying sunshine and warm weather with Gia in Oklahoma. I'd requested the second through the 11th off, and my leave request was approved on October 29, so it was all very last minute. We debated leaving on the 31st, but decided instead to stay home and celebrate Halloween. Mr. Brown started packing Sunday morning before church. We packed til 8:30, then rushed through breakfast and into Sunday clothes and dashed to church, arriving only two minutes late to discover an empty parking lot... daylight savings time. So we went HOME! TO PACK SOME MORE! We finished loading the car and came back exactly an hour later (yes- late again!) but then left from church and spent the afternoon in Iowa City and drove on to Des Moines where we spent the night. We were certainly eager for this vacation.

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I bought a camera the day before trick-or-treating because our kids' costumes were too cute NOT to photograph. We went to Wal-Mart and purchased the hundred-dollar Kodak model, because I HAD TO HAVE PICTURES. I actually like it quite a bit. It's not perfect, but for a hundred bucks, I definitely got my money's worth. Of course, the pictures are still on the camera, waiting politely at home to be downloaded, and the computer is now on the fritz. Sigh. But I do have pictures that I will post eventually. Maybe by Christmas.

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The kids had such fun trick-or-treating. Rose Pink went out with her friend Macayla and another little girl named Ruby, and Nut Brown and I hit a few houses together. He was pretty psyched about the whole thing, and even when he was shaking from the cold bravely maintained that he wanted to keep knocking. We also attended the ward trunk-or-treat and that was EXTREMELY CHILLY, thanks to a freezing wind. It went really well, though, and it was really fun to hand out candy to such sweetly-costumed children.

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Rose Pink had a Halloween party this year on the Wednesday before Halloween- a cakewalk, Halloween stories, bobbing for apples, and a pinata. It was a success. Anything involving a pinata is a success, right? We broke the pinata stick and had to borrow a bat from a neighbor, but everyone had fun and got to wear their costumes one extra time.

strong & scary

Rose Pink has been very into dinosaurs lately. (Nut Brown too- he makes excellent dinosaur sound effects.) Below are a few artistic representations of what she's been learning.

Prairie Home Companion

Hooray! Mr. Brown & I have tickets to go see A Prairie Home Companion in Des Moines the first Saturday in November. I am so excited!! Thank you to the Iowa City Browns for agreeing to watch the small ones for us while he and I drive out to Des Moines.

mosaic

On cold days, Mr. Brown makes up a travel mug of fruit tea for me to take with me to work. I forgot it on the table the other morning. Nut Brown & Rose Pink both love tea, and they know what the travel mug is for. That morning Mr. Brown was finishing up his video game level after Nut Brown got up, so Nut Brown went up to the kitchen by himself to scavenge for breakfast. Mr. Brown heard a little voice shouting, "Daddy? Daddy?" He came upstairs and discovered that Nut Brown had dropped the travel mug full of hot tea on the chair he was standing on, and was now standing on his tiptoes at the back to avoid the puddle of hot liquid on the chair! We were very pleased that he could use words to get the help he needed instead of just crying or screaming.

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Yesterday, Nut Brown was left alone in the basement momentarily, and he started to shout, "Clean up! Clean up!" When Mr. Brown went down to see what needed to be cleaned up, he found that Nut Brown had gotten into one of his containers of D&D miniatures and dumped the whole thing out. He was asking for help to clean up.

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Nut Brown has also learned to count off the members of his family. He says, "Mommy, Daddy, Rose Pink, Nut Brown!" in a cute little voice. So fun!! He has finally learned an understandable pronunciation of his sister's name. (He uses the last two syllables.) For a long time we knew he had something he called her but we couldn't tell what it was.

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This morning Nut Brown demanded milk for breakfast.

Nut Brown: Milk!

Mr. Brown: Milk, please.

Nut Brown: Milk, please!

Mr. Brown: You bet! (pours milk)

Nut Brown: Milk please you bet! You bet!

21 October 2009 (2)

Rose Pink has a variety of superhero identities, some of the standard issue such as Batgirl and Kim Possible, and some of the imaginative sort, such as Captain Nauvoo. The other day she came downstairs and announced, I'm HANDICAPPED GIRL! A superhero! Seeking to teach sensitivity to others, we asked, "What does handicapped mean?"

She said, "It means that I have superpowers!"

Okay, good enough.

Mr. Brown says that Handicapped Girl seems to be linked to wearing especially awesome clothes, like her pink pants with giant purple roses on them.

knock knock!

When Nut Brown wants to come in from outside, he stands outside the door and yells, KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK! at the top of his lungs instead of knocking. This was funniest to me over the summer when he was on the back porch at Grandma's house and started hollering, rather than bang on the door. We didn't even realize that he was outside, when a loud little boy voice suddenly shouts, "KNOCK! KNOCK!"

Jammas

Sunday night, we were getting ready for bed and I changed Nut Brown's diaper and then absent-mindedly started to put his pants back on. He grabbed the pants and laughed and said, "No! Jammas!"

banana

Nut Brown tells a knock-knock joke now.

Nut Brown: Knock knock!

Mom: Who's there?

Nut Brown: BA-nana!

Mom: Banana who?

Nut Brown: Knock knock!

Mom: Who's there?

Nut Brown: BA-nana!

Mom: Banana who?

Nut Brown: Knock knock!

Mom: Who's there?

Nut Brown: Oinge!

21 October 2009

I was going through some photos from when Nut Brown was a newborn yesterday- he sure looked funny, and not at all like the cute cherub he's grown into- and I was remembering how we got a visit from a social worker a couple days after we came home from the hospital. I was all groggy from hormones and lack of sleep and a nicely dressed young lady came into our living room and asked us why our new baby's stool had tested positive for marijuana!

We were highly alarmed, mostly because it seemed to us that she didn't believe our assertions that we don't use marijuana, we never have, and we're never around people who do. She kept saying things like, you can tell me if you have in the past, and when we kept saying that we had nothing to confess, she intimated that it would have been better if we had.

So I'm all freaking out about the state taking my baby away based on his poop testing positive for a chemical we don't keep in the house, and fortunately Mr. Brown leaned over and looked at her papers, and then asked, "Doesn't that say that you're looking for an African-American female baby?" She says, Yes. Not to be racist, but Mr. Brown & I & Nut Brown don't really look African-American. And I know the fact that we'd dressed the baby in blue is not a final determination of gender, but it might have merited further investigation. She, however, did not seem to think that this was worth looking into at all, and after pressuring us further for another few minutes, she took her leave, promising or threatening to talk to her supervisor about our case.

Mr. Brown immediately got on the phone to the hospital to ask for more information about the stool tests, how they're done, what sort of accuracy rate they have, and so on, and he told the hospital that we'd been visited by a social worker. The hospital did some checking and it turns out that there were two babies born that afternoon- both to mothers named Brown. And the other baby was an African-American female.

The hospital apologized profusely. The social worker's supervisor apologized profusely. I'm glad that Mr. Brown was clear-headed enough to get things sorted out. I was dithering in a hormonal nightmare of having my baby taken away, but he got everyone straightened out and nothing actually happened. Hooray for him! Hooray for the tender mercies that let everything work out so well.

19 October 2009

Mr. Brown has developed the charming habit of falling ill on Thursdays so that I have to stay home from work on Fridays. Two weeks in a row-- I'm crossing my fingers that he'll be sick again this Friday. He and I have been busy planting bulbs to get ready for next spring. I went a little crazy buying them, so he planted sixty crocuses, and I have planted six hyacinth, six pink irises, five narcissi, twenty snowdrops and about sixty daffodils. I started with a hundred daffodils so I still have forty to go but I've run out of places to put them. I'm thinking maybe I'll take them back and put them around the roots of the trees back by Mr. Stump but I haven't been brave enough yet. It's supposed to be in the sixties for the next couple days (a bit of a warmup after the frosts we've had) so hopefully I can get them planted SOMEWHERE.

Mr. Brown and I went out during naptime to plant, and Rose Pink was playing by herself with her barbies. We said, We'll be down in the garden if you need us, and she said, Okay. The garden is within shouting distance. I went back once to check on her. She was in the middle of some drama with the barbies and when I interrupted her to ask if things were okay, she gave me a completely disoriented look- who are you? Why are you talking to me? I love the way she talks to herself while she's telling stories. She still talks to herself in the morning when she wakes up, too.

Reading with my children is a surprisingly verbal activity right now. Nut Brown wants to repeat every word you say, so it's impossible to read to him while he's eating dinner, because he stops eating in order to talk. (Why was I reading while eating dinner? Because I was trying to entice him to stay at the table and eat. He stayed, all right, but he didn't eat because he wanted to talk.) Rose Pink is learning to read, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this, but learning new words and practicing new sounds together involves lots of verbal repetition. She reads through a sentence, we go over and sound out the words she doesn't know, and then she reads it over several times and repeats the tricky words over and over out loud. We don't prompt her to do this, she just does, and I have to remind myself that repetition is the mother of learning and not interrupt her while she's cementing things in. She is really getting the hang of sounding things out- I've caught her doing it without prompting a couple of times. And now I get frustrated with English- she reads "One cow" and pronounces it "oh-nee cow" or tries for "people" and gets "pe-uh-plea". Oh well, it's all part of learning, I suppose. I can't change the language, so I'll just have to correct her apologetically.

Some neighbors that I grew up with sent us some questions cards for 2-3 yr olds that we have been reading with Nut Brown. They're full of questions and pictures and are meant to be conversations starters for you to use with your two-year-old. Nut Brown loves to sit and go through them with us- we ask him questions, look at colors, count the puppies, talk about fish and shopping and so on. It is a really, really great tool that helps us discuss a variety of topics with him. Last night he and I were going through a few of them, and we came to a card about the zoo. I asked him if he liked the zoo and he looked up at me and said, "Yes!" and then he said, "Monkeys!" Do you see monkeys at the zoo? I ask. "Yes!" says Nut Brown. "Lions!" and it went on like this, with him naming things that he remembered seeing at the zoo- train, elephants, giraffes...it was really amazing because it really felt like I was having an actual conversation with him, discussing what he'd seen at the zoo- a place that he remembered being. So wonderful! It was just totally amazing to feel so engaged with him, talking about something abstract like what we did two weeks ago.

He calls elephants "bumps" and generally refers to a horse as a 'nay' and a cat as a 'mow' (rhymes with cow).

At supper last night when I was through reading to Nut Brown, Rose Pink decided that she was going to read to him. We had been looking at Richard Scarry's Word Book (thank you, Grandpa!!) and she kept turning pages and naming items, and he sat beside her and repeated them. She would say, Nut Brown! Feather! and he'd repeat, feather, and she'd move on to the next word. It was so sweet to watch them together- the good part of a bossy older sister, mothering her little brother. They both had a great time.

how-ween!

Nut Brown has learned to say "Halloween!" (how-ween!) He is going to be a ghost and Rose Pink is going to be a haunted house. Mr. Brown has made the rough framework of her costume out of a box, and she and I are going to decorate it to look like a house with markers, colored paper, foil, and pipe cleaners. Nut Brown has been having a ball pretending to be a ghost. He asks for available loose fabric to be draped over his head and wanders around saying "oooooo!" He is most gratified when we shriek and run.

I went to visit a new baby the other night with Nut Brown, and the family asked how old he was. Trying to show off like any other proud parent, I said to Nut Brown, "How old are you?" Nut Brown held up crossed fingers and announced, "THREE!"

Rose Pink loves to make up stories and tries to involve us in them. Tonight as we were walking she was working on one (they're dialogue-heavy) and she says to me, "Do you want to be my mother?" Well, I had a pretty good day today, so I said, "Yes!" and she said, "Really? For real?" and I said, "Can I take you home?" It just made me laugh inside. We were at the skywalk downtown to run around because it was 1) dark and 2) cold and 3) Mr. Brown was sick. He's got some flu bug or something.