Every since Halloween and every time it’s dark Layla will go ‘whooooooo Halloween’. You can turn the lights out, or just go outside when it’s dark, when we go into the garage and haven’t turned the lights on yet, or she will turn the lights out in our internal bathroom after she’s gone a pond potty and ‘whoooooo Halloween!’ We haven’t corrected her yet as it makes us laugh.
Much to my dismay Hayden has started to take an affection towards Star Wars. I think it really triggered from being at Disney World and going on the Star Wars ride there. Then from there he has watched the movies, and generally just got excited about it. Now he has Star Wars pyjamas, t-shirts, socks, posters, and even bed toys. Generally he loves Darth Vader the most but also gets excited about Han Solo and R2D2 and many others.
Halloween he wanted to be Darth Vader. However a little hiccup was that he didn’t like the mask. You can’t have darth vader without the mask. Luckily Kara came across an Angry Birds Darth Vader costume! Perfect combination!
Layla is not to be left out of this. She also seems to get excited about Darth Vader. I have a key chain and every time she sees it she will start shouting Darth Vader loudly and then she’ll start doing the Star Wars theme song “der der der der……” She is so funny!
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’.
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!
Kara has mentioned that the kids are starting to play together and starting to conspire to cause trouble. Layla is 
absolutely the ring leader! Hayden’s personality is that he either wants to play by himself, or he will follow (usually girls) what others are up to. Layla just does what she wants!
As they get into trouble we will regularly hear “Mon Haddy, Mon Haddy” (Layla telling Hayden to come on, incase it wasn’t obvious). Layla instigating, and then Hadyen a very willing accomplish!
One of their current favorite activities is them wearing Kara’s shoes and trouncing around the house. Or running into the “cold room” (room over the garage and named by Hayden) and tormenting Lucy in there.
It’s fun to watch then together but I feel the trouble has just started.
Layla has her own version of things not being fair. If we make her do something she doesn’t like for example wash her hair, go take a nap, etc. then first she will try to deflect and have Haddy go first, otherwise after she has complained she will then start getting start pointing and go “Haddy wash now, Haddy wash now” for example. If she has to do, then Hayden has to do it!
ally starting to develop. In particular she is starting to pick up phrases. One of my personal favorites is when Kara leaves the room, a few minutes later Layla will turn to me “where mummy go?, where mummy go?” I’ll tell her and then off she go “oh” and then run in whatever direction I send her.
There is something about the kids and my car. Kara will tell you it’s because it is what she sees as a complete mess of stuff on the floor in the back, where the kids see it as a treasure chest of cool toys and stuff. I think for Layla is actually happened because we changed her seat to face forwards in my car first and she loved it and from then on she seemed to voice a preference for it. I can’t remember why Hayden liked it but whenever we are going anywhere they will want to go in “daddy’s car” (or “dada car” for Layla). Recently Layla has been very certain about this, just the slightest hint that we are going somewhere and she will belt out “no mummy’s car, dada’s car, NO MUMMY’S CAR” and so on. She is a girl who knows what she wants and she will certainly tell you about it too!It was about three years ago it seems the last time Kara left town and left me for the weekend with the kiddos. Well back then there was just one – now of course there is two – I thought (and considering I’ve sucked on blogging of late) it might be fun to keep track of the little munchkins.
I had to work on Friday so I had to unfortunately drop them at preschool for most of the day. That was fun for me a little though as Kara always does that. So they seemed to enjoy the change and Layla was a real sweetie when I took her in and she gave me a big kiss after i put her down. Hayden seems to like going to his class these days which is good – he had a period back there when he didn’t like it. He was excited also about me dropping him off but was also ready to go play.
When I got to pick them up it was nice to hear such nice reports from the teachers. Hayden had a new teacher there that didn’t know him very well and was so complementary about him and how nice he was, how interested and good he was at reading his books and how nice he was to the other kids. It was nice for someone to be able to see this so instantly.
We planned to go to a new place for dinner but the wait was over an hour. Hayden wanted to wait but there was no way in the world I was going to do that – so he had to put up with some tears while i convinced him to go somewhere else -it ended up being BW3s where to two of them demolished the Mac and cheese and then started to eat my chicken wings. With Kara being a veggie bw3s is not a common location but they seemed to like it. Layla stayed in her chair the whole time (something that had been difficult recently) and Hayden was just overwhelmed by the TVs! Once Layla had stolen all my wings i kept catching her trying to chew up my celery! Its funny what they eat when its not on their plate.
All day she has been wanting her ‘glassie’ (her sunglasses). As we were getting ready to leave dinner she wanted her sunglasses on while inside. So I obliged and she was very funny and she got lots of laughs as she strutted out with her sunglasses and snow hat combo! We got ice cream and then to bed!
The kids were cute when they woke up on Saturday. Layla wanted to play on her Rocking Lion. The lion makes a lion type roar and every time she gets on it she makes the noise “raaarrrr raaarrrr” herself. It’s very cute of course. She knows to press its ear makes the noise but she struggles with it. Hayden came in, saw her on the lion and immediately got on the rocking horse next to her. Then he realized what she was trying to do and like the nice big brother he is, he took her hand and tried to show her how make the lion roar. It was very sweet on his behalf.
Saturday was spent at the children’s museum. Kids did a great job there. They play so nice around other kids and also made it pretty easy for me as Hayden didn’t run too far away from me. They had a new Lego exhibit which Hayden loved building some cars and boats and Layla just enjoy climbing on everything.
We left around 2sih knowing that Layla was fall asleep in the car. In fact she was asleep before we left the car park! She’s a pretty predictable sleeper! She does great with her naps and also so good at going to sleep. We are so lucky with our kids on that front.
Rest of the day we messed round playing and then headed out for dinner again just to keep them entertained. This time is was Puccini’s and they did a solid job of eating and behaving. When I was getting her ready for bed, as I took off her sock she was waving her foot around and saying piggy piggy – she basically wanted me to do ‘this little piggy went to market, etc’! The weird thing is she can’t really handle it. I get to like the second toe and she is rolling over in what looks like agony! Then she laughs and presents me with her other foot!
Then of course she run off – shouted “ni ni Haddy” at the top of her lungs and went straight to bed like the brilliant little sleeper she is!
Sunday was a beautiful day. Which meant we cold burn off some energy outside! I had told Hayden that we would take them to the park. We want to one of bigger parks in Fishers as I knew they hadn’t been there in a while and I really wanted to see how Layla got on, and also how Hayden did now he is more adventurous. As we arrived he said to me “Oh yeah! I have been thinking about this park everyday”. So sweet! They played really hard, ,especially Layla who just has no fear and goes on everything.
Before the park we had headed to breakfast at Einsteins. On the way there I was changing the radio as it was some Bruno Mars song that I didn’t care for – Hayden does not like me changing the radio mid song “I like that song” he will declare in a grumpy accent. Which basically means put it back on or I will be complaining for the rest of the trip. Well I had changed it to a Lisa Leob song, a bit of retro indulgence. Well Hayden put me in my place “this a girl song!”. So what choice did I have but to change it back.
Something else important about Sunday was that it was daylights savings! The clocks sprung forward. I had no intentions of accepting it and presumed the kids would sleep to normal time which would just be an hour later than normal for them and we would deal with the clocks on Sunday morning. Well…. Hayden’s clock just happens to adjust itself automatically. He got up at 7 like normal it’s just it was 6am to my body clock! So I had to try explain to a four year at 6am about daylight savings time. That didn’t go too well so basically we just got early!
We were talking to nanny on the video later on Sunday and I had to run off and check on Layla, I come back in the room and Hayden is standing on the chair with his pants down mooning nanny on the web cam! OMG! Of course nanny was laughing and he was thinking he was the funniest boy in the world!
During the weekend anytime we were doing something cool I would try to take a picture to send to Kara. Hayden caught on to this but didn’t quite understand the types of pictures she wants. He was out into garden and Layla was sleeping and he needed to go potty so I told him to just against the fence to avoid waking her. He then asked “daddy can you take a picture of me whizzing and send it to mum!”. What do you do with him!
We were all very glad that mummy got home liked planned on Sunday night. I think Layla was the most grateful so her hair could be rescued. She had three bad hair days – I think it’s impossible for a man to do a little girls hair. It didn’t matter how many hair clips I used!
Hayden hasn’t traditionally been that
competitive. For example when we played football (soccer) this year he loved playing when he had the ball and we were doing training drills etc, but when we played games he had no interest in tackling other players, and hated it if someone took the ball from him. When he plays basketball it’s generally just running around with no real concept of trying to take the ball away from others. However when it comes to Layla he is the most competitive kid you’ll ever see. He wants to do everything before her, or better than her, or if she’s doing it then he wants to take over and do it.
Starts with when they both share my cereal each morning. Cue Hayden “I want the first bite because I was here before Layla”. Then some others that come up throughout the day:
There is no end to this competitive streak – today when he was going to the toilet he told me that he has more pee pees than Layla!!
Hayden and Layla's Place 