The End of an Era

We bid a sad farewell to nap time yesterday.  Christian has been fighting nap time for the last couple months but I've won the battle most of the time simply by putting him in his crib and letting him scream until he fell asleep.  Then the last three days he's screamed for over an hour an never fallen asleep.  Finally yesterday as I listened to him scream, it suddenly got quiet much earlier than I expected.  I thought that meant he'd fallen asleep, but the next thing I heard was the click of his door and the triumphant cry of "I get out of my bed!" That's when I knew it was truly over.

I count my blessings that it took this long.  Benjamin was only 11 months old when he learned to climb out of his crib.  Bella about 2.  Christian took the longest and for that I am grateful because now that he can, he will never stay in there.  I tried many things to get him to go to sleep and none worked.  Today again we tried, and every time he simply climbed right back out.  Many times during the day he admitted, "I tired!" as his head lolled to the side.  Each time I encouraged him to go to bed and rest.  I promised special rewards afterwards and I promised we'd do nothing interesting while he was sleeping.  "We are just going to sit on the couch and stare at the wall and wait for you to wake up!"  Nothing worked.  We slugged through a very long, difficult day with cranky, tired Christian.  I don't know why he goes to bed at night.  I guess he's simply too tired to put up a fight after being up for so long.

On a different Christian related note, have you ever seen those stuffed animals that look like germs in stores?  I've seen them in museum gift shops and whatnot.  They have little plush versions of staph, salmonilla, etc.
 Like this: http://www.giantmicrobes.com/
I've seen these and never really understood the appeal.  The idea of hugging something that reminded me of something that could make me violently ill just didn't appeal to me.  However, Christian received one as a gift and has loved it!!  His generous gift giver is a veterinarian and she gave him a toy flea.  Which I guess isn't a germ, but is right up there with things I wouldn't want to cuddle.  I spent too many months scratching flea bites in Madagascar to ever spend a single penny on a toy version of this dreaded pest.  Never in my life would I have thought he'd like it either, but Flea has become a member of the family around here.  Flea goes everywhere with us now and I about laughed out loud as I heard him say today while hugging the little blood sucking pest, "I love you Flea" with the sweetest little boy voice you've ever heard.  Hats off to you, inventors of plush germs and vermin.  You know your audience.

Christian - never without his flea and his blankie.

Christian is 2 and a half

That half a year makes all the difference when you're young, doesn't it?  I remember so eagerly waiting until I could add that 1/2 to my age.  My kids are no different.  Christian added the 1/2 on Valentine's day and he's been reminding me and everyone he meets ever since.  "I not two!  I two and a half!  I big boy!"  For his 1/2 birthday we made blueberry banana muffins and sang to him as he blew out 2 and 1/2 candles.  Then we had friends over and built a couch fort they could play in.  Everyone had a great time.  This was the only view I got of him most of the afternoon:

Or occasionally this:

We also followed our tradition of having pink cream of wheat for breakfast and making personal mini pizzas with heart shaped pepperoni for dinner.  I was going to make heart shaped pizzas but decided to let the kids roll out their own dough which led to some very creative looking pizzas.  "I made a dinosaur pizza!"  But when you make it yourself, you love it and that's the key.

Christian continues to crack me up all day long with his growing personality and imagination.  Today his secret animal was a dog which he called "Sprinkle Doggy."  He spent long periods of time telling me all about Doggy's habits.  "He bark a lot. When I brush his fur, he bark. When I play with him, he bark.  I tell him he need be quiet because people sleeping, but he happy and he bark a lot."  "So, it's always a happy bark?" I asked.  "Yeah, always happy.  Except when he hungry.  Then it a hungry bark.  Then I feed him.  Then it happy bark."  This went on and on.

His other thing now is he loves the word "squishy" but he can't say it right, so he says, "wooshy."  So everything is "wooshy."  Jingle Bells is now sung daily as "Wooshy Bells, Wooshy Bells, Wooshy all the way!"  And the sippy cup with the soft straw is the "cup with the wooshy lid."  So funny.

Since it was Valentine's Day last week, Bella also had a little party at school where the kids sang while in a box they decorated to look like a package sent to us.  Benjamin spent quite a bit of time afterwards hypothesizing how a kid could actually send themselves somewhere.  He had all the logistics figured out except for that tricky little business of it being against the law.  We did, however, read together the story of the slave, Henry Brown, who managed to find a way to mail himself north to escape slavery.  That was a cool story!

Here's a little bit of Bella's valentine's performance.  I thought it was really fun to watch her and she participated much more than I thought she would.  She's very outgoing and showy when she's home or just with friends at school but she gets very intimidated in front of a lot of adults.  Her ballet recital was a disaster because she completely froze when she saw all the parents watching.  I have 15 minutes of video showing Bella standing, staring, and pulling on her tights while the rest of the class dances around her and her teacher makes encouraging remarks with no success.

Benjamin has become a jump rope fanatic.  Two weeks ago I had him jump rope while doing his spelling words like in the movie Akeela and the Bee and it's completely taken on a life of its own.  Now he's jumping all the time.  At first he couldn't do more than 4 or 5 jumps in a row, but now he's up in the 30s and he loves it.  I love that he gets rid of excess energy while getting his school work done! :)

He's also got his first loose tooth!  He's so excited.  His adult tooth has already started growing in behind it which freaks me out a bit because he's had such perfectly straight cavity free teeth and I was starting to believe he'd never need braces.  Seeing this adult tooth coming in screwy from behind has been discouraging.  However, the baby one is on its way out soon, we hope.  Benjamin prays every morning and night for it to fall out.  It's been 2 days so far, so we'll see how long it lasts.  I'm excited for him.  I still remember loosing my first tooth.  I remember it better than I remember my baptism or several other events that theoretically should have been much more significant in my life.  However, that first tooth will never be forgotten.  I called relatives to inform everyone and I still remember finding that silver dollar under my pillow in the morning.  So exciting!  Well, so exciting once my dad explained to me what this large heavy coin was and agreed to exchange it for some "real" money. ;)  Bella's been avidly testing the solidity of her teeth for days as well now.  No loose ones yet, much to her dismay.