Hayden’s Family Drawing August 29, 2012

Hayden brought this drawing home from day care last week, and I just LOVE it!  He’s managed to draw all of the people in his family and even included Lucy!  It’s easy to tell it’s Lucy because it’s so skinny and has a thin long tail.  Not sure where Mimi and Abbey are, or why none of us have arms, but I’m happy that we are all smiling and I managed to get eyes which John would be jealous of if he had any to see.  Layla has an uncanny resemblance to R2D2 – Hayden is pretty into Star Wars now (to John’s delight) so I can’t say for sure if this is a coincidence or not.

Why do we have to sleep? August 16, 2012

Hayden likes to procrastinate at bed time. Sometimes he will try anything to stay up longer. It will start with complaining he can’t find one of his bed toys, then his owl blanket won’t be on properly, then abbey be in his room and purring too loud, and then he will want a drink and then need the toilet, then need some help to wash his hands, then he needs owl blanket or car quilt back on after getting out of bed. I am a complete sucker so I just run ups nd down the stairs until he finally goes to sleep!

One of his favourite discussions to keep bedtime alive is to ask me why do we have to sleep? I will make something up about how you have to sleep to get enough energy. He will not buy it and ask what if I don’t sleep? I will tell him that you get too tired to play toys if you don’t sleep. What if I forget how to sleep? Or I won’t sleep and so on :). Despite all this he is actually a really good sleeper.

Tormenting Lucy

Recently the kids have started to pay a lot of attention to the dogs. While we like that they are interested in the dogs wI think Lucy in general is on the bad end of it. Lucy will be taking a nice nap and then suddenly for no reason Hayden will decide it’s time to go and give her a kiss and lie on top of her and then grab her by the collar and have her follow him around. Layla is the same and if the dogs are around she will go and snuggle up to one of them or start climbing on them. The kids mean everything with the best of intentions but I feel the dogs are feeling a little tormented. I swear Lucy looks a little sorry for herself these days!

We have had to tell Hadyen to calm it down because he can get a little over zealous. He knows sometimes that he is supposed to be giving her a break, but I swear he watches us to see if we are watching me then when we are not looking and he will go in and give Lucy smoother her with Hayden lovin’.

Bad Guys August 15, 2012

Hayden is really into who is a “good guy” and who is a “bad guy” right now.  He’s loving Star Wars and Batman and things like that now, and he always wants to know if so-and-so is a bad guy.  Layla, of course, has picked on this, so she will refer to things as bad guys.  I mentioned recently that she is scared of a lot of things right now.  Sometimes it will (usually temporarily) help if I tell her the thing she is scared of is a good guy.  She’ll say, “Good guy?  Ok.”  She’ll still act a little unconvinced about it, but she does seem to *try* to warm up to it once she knows it’s a good guy.

Potty Time

Layla has been making some good progress with the potty.  We haven’t pulled the trigger on properly training her yet (didn’t really feel that would be fair on a high school babysitter), but I think she will be ready really soon.  She’s done quite a few poo poos on her Minnie potty before bath time.  John must have some sort of magic touch because I haven’t been able to get her to go on my watch, but he gets pretty consistent results (which really is ok at the moment since the person on potty patrol is naturally the cleaner-upper – ha!).  She also pee pees every couple of days on her potty.  I predict (and HOPE!) she will be good at proper potty training.  We had a long struggle with Hayden in this area, so I am hoping we paid our dues! 🙂

Fall Schedule

So the kids weren’t going to day care over the summer; they stayed home with a baby sitter on the days I worked.  That went well and really flew by.  Somehow, school for the older kids started today, and Hayden and Layla went back to day care this week!  Hayden was actually really excited to go to day care, which is not always like him.  He gets to be in the “kindergarten” room.  He’ll do the kindergarten program there for the 3 days/week he’s there, then when he starts public school next year he’ll do “full time” kindergarten.  Hayden’s best friend at day care started public school kindergarten, so I know Hayden will be missing him, although Oliver will be doing after school care there so they will get an hour or two to play together a couple of days per week.

Layla was not happy when she started on Monday.  She has a new teacher, and all the kids in the class seemed to be new.  It was hard dropping her off Monday and today.  She was clutching me so hard and screaming – it was really all I could do not to cry with her but that was the last thing she needed to see.  When I picked her up on Monday though she had had a great day and didn’t seem to be in too big of a rush to go home, really.  Her teacher said she’d eaten loads (2 meals in fact – someone didn’t show up so they had an extra and she worked her way through it!), slept well, played, and gotten lots of hugs from teachers who passed by the room and came in to welcome her back.

The Things They Say

I know this is a common theme in my posts (what are you going to do, stop reading?  Wait, come back!), but the kids just crack us up with the things they say.  They sound so grown up sometimes without even realizing it.  I thought it was funny enough that Hayden throws “actually” into his stories regularly, but I was floored when Layla started doing it.  “I walk down stairs.” “Oh, you want to walk?”  “Actually, carry me.”  She says actually quite a lot, actually.  Funny.

When the babysitter was here while I was working and she couldn’t figure out how to get a DVD to work, Hayden would come into the office and tell me that Natalie was “having a hard time with the movie,” and I needed to come help.  Or he’ll tell me he’s “having a hard time” buttoning his pants.

Layla has been sticking her fingers in her mouth and biting them a lot lately, so we think her last molars are coming through.  Yesterday I gave her some pain medicine, and I put it in a little medicine cup like what Hayden gets his allergy medicine in every day.  She was pretty excited at drinking out of it like she sees Haddy do every day, even though she didn’t like the taste.  Well, I could have written the script myself this morning at breakfast.  I gave Hayden his medicine and no sooner had I set it on the table than Layla is telling me, “My teeth hurt.”  What a little rascal!  (I am impressed, though, that her language is so far advanced that she says things like, “My teeth hurt,” “I’m thirsty,” “I’m hungry,” instead of directly saying what she wants [medicine, drink, food].  She makes the connection between those feelings and what they are associated with.)

Hayden’s also been calling Layla “Lay” a lot which I love.  John and I (and many others, “actually”) call her “Lay” for short, and I think Hayden has really been enjoying using her little nickname lately.

Bot and Boots

Layla has a huge obsession with Minnie Mouse as we have probably discussed many times. Every time she see anything Minnie she must have it. You have to fight her to get her Minnie pajamas off and usually involves a trade of having to swap it for Minnie top.

However this post wasn’t about Minnie, it was more about her favorite characters from the other shows she likes. She likes Dora, but her favourites character is Boots, and she likes Team Umizoomi but where you would think she likes Mili, it’s very clear that Bot is her favourite!

She gets so excited when Bot comes on the screen and if you ask her what cartoon she want she will say bot instead of team umizoomi. Similar with Boots if she sees her Dora cup she will just ignore Dora and point excitedly to Boots. Also with her band aids she only wants the ones with Boots!

That Scare Me August 13, 2012

Layla is scared of a lot of things right now.  We hear frequently from her “That scare me,” or, “No like that.”  There is a growing list of things that scare her, including barking dogs (a frequent occurrence at our house, and one which requires being held every time), the big giraffe (Josie) in Hayden’s room, and any large characters in costume (Halloween might be hard work this year!).  Here are a couple of pictures which illustrate my point.  Monkey Joe enters the party room at Hayden’s birthday party.  Layla puts on the bravest face she can manage while observing from the furthest corner of the room in Mommy’s arms.   The day after Hayden’s birthday we went to Cincinnati for a fun weekend of playing at the aquarium and taking in a Reds’ game.  At the game there were these mascots dressed up like giant baseball people.  Our seats were way up at the top of the stadium, but Layla spotted the baseball characters straight away and told me they scared her.  She was a little better when I told her they were really far away and she was fine, but then later I was waiting in line for ice cream with the kids and one of the characters made a bee line for us.  I saw him before Layla did and I tried to gesture for him to go away but he didn’t seem to notice, so she saw him approaching and started screaming and trying to climb my leg, bless her.

Although I know that some of these scary things really are scary for her, she does play it up when it suits her. 🙂  There have been a couple of times when we put her to bed and she’ll start calling for us.  We’ll eventually go in and ask her what she needs and she’ll say, “froggie towel scare me” or “horsie scare me” (rocking horse).  These are things that don’t seem to scare her at other times, so it’s hard to take her too seriously although she has seemed to go to sleep once they have been removed.  My guess though is she just wanted a little more company before calling it a night. 😉

3-2-1

Layla is doing really well on her counting.  She can get up to 12 or 13, and really she can do more but we usually are helping her at that point.  We say it with her but kind of let her say the number a little ahead of what we say if that makes sense, and she gets up to about 20 that way.  Sometimes she’ll get off to a funny start though, starting from 3 and counting down.  Oftentimes its: 3-2-1-3-2-1… if we can get her out of the 3-2-1 cycle and/or start her off with 1 then she is off!