Be It Ever So Humble...

There's no place like home, even if that's just an inflatable house with two comforters over it. Benjamin has become obsessed with his little house. From the moment he wakes up in the morning until we're carrying him into bed at night, the plea of "house!" is heard non-stop around here. Playing house means mommy crawls inside, Benjamin hands her several puppets to put on, and then he runs in and out of the house bringing the puppets various things to "eat." These include soccer balls, trains, etc. Size is not important, the key thing is that the puppets make lots of chomping and smacking sounds and thank him profusely for the delicious offerings. When that gets boring, he likes to jump from the futon onto the house, kneeing me in various sensitive places and smothering me inside. That's always good fun too. Needless to say, I tire of this game quite quickly and now that we've been playing it day and night for 2 weeks, I'm downright sick of it. Just the word "house" fills me with disdain and makes me want to hide behind the couch. Luckily he also enjoys reading books in his house. Unless I've read the book 300 times already, I never tire of reading with him.


Bella seems to enjoy watching her brother play house, as long as he doesn't roll from the house onto her. Yes, it happened once. Not a happy moment.


He also still loves his train set and so do I. It's the engineer in me, I guess, but I love trying to come up with the most elaborate train track configurations possible. Not easy when you have a toddler tearing them down as fast as you're building them up.


In any case, it's been fun around here. The weather has been gorgeous and when we're not holed up in the basement in our "house" we've been going to the beach, various playgrounds, climbing trees, and even accidentally ended up at a community party hosted by Westland City. I just thought I'd check out a new playground and discovered they were have a huge party there. They had fire trucks, police cars, police dogs and horses, construction vehicles (that they allowed the kids to drive with help of the worker), bounce houses, remote control car race track, tons of free food and of course, the playground that we originally came to see. Benjamin was in heaven. We had such a great time. He was too scared to drive the construction vehicles, but he would climb into the firetruck. He LOVED the firetruck. He didn't want to get out. He would reluctantly get out to give others a turn, but he'd just get right back in when they were done. We spent nearly 30 minutes there.


We played on the playground for a bit, but all the other things were so much more fun. We petted the police horses and dogs, we jumped around in the play houses, and we also watched the remote control car races for a while and he LOVED that too. "WOW!" he kept exclaiming as they flew over ramps and crashed into one another. He was joined by another little boy that looked about 18 months old and the two of them stood riveted, gripping the safety fence, shrieking with delight at the stunts and crashes. I have to admit, I thought they were pretty cool too.


As for Bella, what can one say about such a sweet little girl? She is smiley and happy. She is behind where Benjamin was physically at this age - can't push up on hands, can't roll over, can't reach for or grab toys, etc., but she is far beyond him in verbal ability. She's truly a girl. She coos and giggles and baby-babbles all day long. It is so much fun to sit and talk to her. She really seems to be talking back. It's so fun to see the differences between the two of them.