Monday, April 18, 2011

Weekend With Daddy

Last year, I went away to a bachelor party weekend and Angie wrote a post about what she and the kids did while I was gone. So, I thought it only appropriate to write a post about my weekend with the kiddos while Ang was away for Aunt Abbie's bachelorette weekend. I took pictures and videos with my phone along the way to send Ang (don't worry, she asked me to, I wasn't just interrupting her relaxing weekend with reminders of home life) and thought I'd use those. Here's what went down...

We started out Saturday morning the way any good Saturday morning starts: at Dunkin' Donuts.


After breakfast, we went to the store to pick up supplies to make Mommy a present for when she got back and some bread to feed the ducks at the playground. We met Uncle Mark, Nora and Audrey at the playground and did a lot of swinging and duck feeding. Mark and I even got to play a round of "Goose Punting" when a few of the larger geese got a little too aggressive with the kids. Who knew you could kick a goose and they'd just come back for more? Here's a video of the kids on the swings. 4 swings and 4 kids means somebody's gonna end up in the special needs swing. It ended up being Madelyn because she was wandering around while the other kids were saddling up. You can barely even see her in there but she didn't care. She thought it was awesome.

 

After the park, we came back home with two very exhausted kids. They both took awesome naps and I got to work prepping the gift-making for Mommy and taking care of some stuff around the house.



Before we got down to the present-making, Patrick wanted to play a few pretend games. This picture was taken when they were pretending to be moles. Patrick thought the dryer was the closest thing to something a mole might go in ("because it's soooo dark, Dad.") so he jumped in and Maddy followed. Patrick kept telling me "we're two moles playing in our laundry hole." Which I went with because it actually kinda sounds better than "the kids are playing in the dryer."


Then we jumped right into making Mommy's present. It's a coupon holder that she can hang on the refrigerator. These pictures were close to the end when most of the mess was cleaned up already. Also notice Patrick wanted an audience and setup Baby Jaguar on the table to watch him. "I'll teach him how to make coupon holders, Dad. He can play with these fuzzy sticks while I'm teaching him."



Cleaning up from craft time got the kids in a cleaning mood and they both started vacuuming (or, going by the first picture, jousting). I love in the second picture that Madelyn is holding her baby doll and vacuuming just like she's seen Mommy do a hundred times (although, she's the baby being held in that case).



Then we made cookies and played and ran and tackled and read and danced.


Madelyn recently started making a scrunchy face that we think is hysterical. It started with just furrowing her brow but has spread to involve her whole face. Because we're super clever, we call it "The Face." I worked this weekend on getting her to do it on command. Yea, I know, I probably could have worked on things like learning a couple more letters and their sounds or saying peoples' names or whatever, but this was way funnier. Here she is in her bath Saturday night doing The Face...




The next morning, Madelyn woke up bright and early so she could spend time squealing at the birds. She does this pretty much every morning. She wakes up before the birds (or any other living thing) and then as soon as the birds outside wake up and she hears them tweeting, she gets really excited and tries to make the highest-pitch tweeting sound she can at them.


We spent the morning and early afternoon at Grandpa and Grandma's for brunch and Grandpa's birthday. It was a beautiful day and the kids had a great time running around in the yard with the big rubber balls and bubble wands Grandpa got. The Beans brought over their fold-up slide and the kids had a blast climbing all over it. Patrick also adopted a caterpillar he kept calling "my chubby little worm" and brought it with him on his shirt or hand wherever he went (including a diaper change) for a good part of the morning.




Judging by the ride home to see Mommy, I'd say they had a good time...


Sunday, April 10, 2011

Brother and Sister

This little girl has been known to...

  • run up to random kids on the playground to smother them with hugs and kisses. And on more than one occasion take their food.
  • bust a move to anything that sounds remotely like music (the coffee maker, garbage truck, roofers hammering shingles, etc.)
  • fall asleep while eating lunch
  •  insist on going down slides head-first
  • eat any kind of meat or vegetable set in front of her but shutter at the site of fruit



  • wake up early (sometimes 4:00 am), thus her nickname, Birdie
  • call for her Daddy to chase her around the house; especially if she thinks he's not paying attention to her.
  • climb everything
  • love her big brother more than anything in the world



This little boy has been known to...




  • have quite the imagination
  • love bugs and lizards and every kind of creepy crawly known to man (and wants to collect them  ALL)
  • tell stories and sing in his bed for hours when he should be napping





  • give Daddy his treasured stuffed T-Rex from Fernbank to sleep with at night so he won't be lonely
  • have a killer sense of style (ties with T-shirts, pirate leggings on his arms, rain boots with, well, everything)
  • name a dinosaur or two
  • confuse his Mommy by mixing Spanish words in with English
  • climb everything
  • love his baby sister more than anything in the world




Since the weather is warming up, we've been spending most of our days outside and many of them at playgrounds around the area. One particular morning the kids were playing with a boy about Patrick’s age who wanted a shovel that Madelyn was holding. The boy moved to push Madelyn out of the way and take the shovel. Without hesitation Patrick leaped in his path and called out, “You can’t push her! That's my baby sister!” He wasn’t angry and didn’t use physical force. He just said it matter-of-factly, made sure the boy didn't push Madelyn, then went on playing. And that was the end of that. My heart is full knowing they will be looking out for each other when Toby and I aren't around.
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Sunday, April 3, 2011

Girl's Got Some Moves

Oh hey, we have a blog. Sorry about that few week lapse. Things have been crazy busy lately and, well, nothing you haven't heard before. To make up for the lost time, I'm going to give you a taste of some pretty sweet dance moves courtesy of our little mover and shaker, Madelyn. She's always loved dancing when music is on but lately has started this new little dance where she moves her hips back and forth. The other thing she does now that's funny is stares at her feet while she's dancing sometimes. She usually runs around and climbs and tumbles all over non-stop, but when she starts dancing, she slows down, and walks around staring at her feet. Which, honestly, is pretty much how I dance so it's probably my fault.

Our kids have always liked latin music for some reason. I guess it's just fun music to run around and dance to. So, if you have your volume on, you'll be treated to some fun latin music along with the dance moves. This is another one of those things where she's been doing this a ton but only for a few seconds at a time so we never get it on video. Capturing it on film is like getting video of the Sasquatch or Loch Ness Monster or a Blockbuster location that's not going out of business*. Here's the video. The new dance starts around the 30 second mark but the feet-staring kicks the whole thing off...



As a bonus, here are two of my favorite pictures of Madelyn over the last couple weeks. They were both taken with my phone while she was playing peek-a-boo behind the curtains...






*If the kids read this blog in 10 years, that joke will make no sense since Blockbuster probably won't exist at all. I might as well start making jokes about VHS and cassette tapes. Or just making things up altogether and telling them they really did exist in a time before they can remember. "No, I swear, we used to have moving sidewalks that took us everywhere. We never walked. Then some kid got his shoelace caught in it and messed it up for everybody. And that's why you always tie your shoes!" Every made up relic would, of course, have a moral to the story. I wouldn't just flat out lie for lying's sake. This is the longest footnote ever. I should have just written another post.