Inky Imp

When DH got up this morning, he peeked in Jillian's room to see if she was awake. She was still sleeping so he left her door open a crack and came on downstairs. When I got up, I peeked through the crack, she was still sleeping, so I came downstairs to have breakfast.

Half an hour later, I mused to DH that it was odd for Jillian to sleep that late but we didn't think too much of it. Five minutes after that, we heard the telltale rattle that lets us know that Jillian's Dolla is on the way down the stairs. As she was coming we took bets about whether she was going to be cheerful or grumpy (lately it can go either way in the mornings) and DH said that if she wasn't crying, she was likely cheerful.

When Jillian wakes up happily she normally runs giggling into the room squealing things like "Good morning!" or "I wakin' up!" or "Hi guys...what you doin'?". This morning when I heard her feet hit the hardwood I was surprised that her footfalls didn't speed up in preparation for her grand entrance. But she wasn't crying either. We didn't know what to think anymore.

Moments later, Miss Jilla appeared in the family room, walked straight up to me and said "Mommy, I have marks on my arms and legs". I automatically started having visions of measels and chicken pox but tried to keep my cool. I took a couple of deep breaths and asked her what she meant. At that point she lifted the hem of her nightdress to show me her legs.

When I saw what she had done I wasn't sure if I should laugh, or cry, or yell. The child had found a black ballpoint pen in her room (I have no idea how it got there), uncapped it and had some fun doodling on her legs and arms. Her arms didn't get too much attention - I think she was having trouble keeping her sleeves up but her legs.....well.....look at this:


Here's a closer look:

Wow.

I tried not to laugh out loud at her for fear of her repeating the performance on a daily basis but I didn't yell or cry either. I just calmly got the camera, took some pictures and wondered if she'll be 16 or 18 before she gets her first tattoo and whether it will be an homage to her father or myself (snarf). There's never a dull moment in this house, that's for sure.

By the way, baby wipes will take the ink down to about half strength with almost no elbow grease. I'm not sure how I'm going to get her completely clean yet but that's a good start.

ETA: Bloglines hates me. Doing little experimental edit to see if it will pick me up if I change something.

It's A Boy!

Boy, oh boy! Here's the newest addition at our 19 week ultrasound (he's a thumb sucker like Jilla). We had a really nice technician this time and she very patiently gave us an anatomy lesson on the little person at the end of her routine examination.

When she was all done I asked her if she had gotten an idea of whether it was a girl or a boy and she simply said "yes". I then had to ask if she was willing to share the info with us and she said "you both want to know?". We had a little chuckle then because, obviously, this woman has had issues with people not reallllllly wanting to know the sex of their baby or one parent wanting to know and the other not. We told her we both really wanted to know and then she finally told us that it was a boy. DH, ever the skeptic, asked how sure she was and at that point she gave us an another anatomy lesson that left us with little doubt.

I can't say we were surprised, really. This pregnancy has differed so much from the other two that we were sure from very early on that it must be a boy. I didn't ever have bad morning sickness but with the girls I definitely went through bouts of nausea and full days of just feeling gross. When I was newly pregnant with Jillian I spent many a morning dozing in front of the fireplace (the only real danger in the house) while 11-month-old Claire frolicked in the family room. This time, aside from my terrible allergies, I've felt healthier than ever. With the girls I had a thing for sweets (if I had a nickle for every peanut M&M I ate when I was pregnant with Jillian, I could buy a Maserati) but no major hunger. This time, I'm a hungry mama and I get urges for the most unusual things. A couple of weeks ago I asked DH to stop by my favourite Thai place on his way home from work to get me a curry. When he got home, I looked in the bag and asked what he got for himself. When he replied that he thought he'd just eat whatever I couldn't I laughed and laughed and laughed (he heated up leftovers and let me snort down my Golden Pineapple Curry and Shrimp Chips all by myself...om nom nom nom). I have very little time for sweets but anything a touch spicy or crunchy or tart is on my list. If there is no lemonade in this house (which I normally can't be bothered with) I'm very unhappy.

I keep saying I don't know what to do with a boy (because I don't) but I really am sort of delighted to be adding a boy to the mix. After all, I only need so many teenagers fighting over the hair dryer in the mornings. It might be refreshing to have the boy sit down to breakfast and say "my sisters are nuts".

So now we're entering uncharted territory and it's a bit daunting. We've already encountered our first big difference - baby names. Picking out a name for a girl is completely different than picking out a name for a boy. There are a lot of pretty girls names and I always found the narrowing down to be the hard part. For boys, the creation of the list is the hard part. I'm also amazed at how many men have the same few names. Seriously! Read the credits on any show on TV and see how many of the men are either John, Richard, James, William, Robert, Paul, David, Joseph or Thomas (or derivatives). If you have a favourite baby boy name (or seven), how about leaving a comment and sharing. I can use all the suggestions I can get!

Claire Turns Four!

I didn't realize how long it has been since I last posted until I sat down here to write. The last few weeks have been really busy for a myriad of reasons (I've got a backlog of posts to write). One of the big events has been Claire's fourth birthday. Be still my heart! Four? Already? Didn't I take this picture of her yesterday?:


Honestly, I remember taking this photo so vividly that it could well have been yesterday. I was trying really hard to get a pretty shot of her for her birth announcement and I went through several set ups and wardrobe changes. In the end, I got film developed from the hospital and went with one of those shots instead. This was a very close second.

Here is Her Highness the Pink Princess on her big day:

What personality this kid has! She both challenges and delights me every day and I suspect that if we play our cards right (and I can keep a grip on my sanity), she's going to make a fantastic adult someday. In the meantime, she is such a paradox, I often don't know what the heck is going on in that little head of hers.

These days, drawing, printing and learning to read are her main occupations. It strikes me odd that the girl will declare that she's "too tired of walking" to take her dirty clothes to the laundry room or declare that colouring is "booooooooring" but will spend 45 minutes sounding out words, writing them down, drawing accompanying pictures, make a mistake, crumple it all up and start again. Priorities...she has 'em.

Anyway, several months ago (probably around Jillian's birthday in June) Claire told me that she wanted a Princess Aurora cake for her birthday (that's Disney's Sleeping Beauty in case you don't have a four year old of your own). Being one of the lesser loved princesses in the lineup, there aren't a lot of instructions on the internet (or anywhere else) on how to make your own Aurora. I wasn't too sure I was up to the challenge and I told Claire that maybe Aurora was too hard for Mommy to make. Amazingly, she took that news in stride and would say "Mommy, if Aurora is too hard maybe you can make me a (fill in blank here) cake".

Something about her willingness to settle for something else made me more desperate to produce Aurora and I started reaching out to friends, neigbours and blog readers for help. A wonderful blog reader named Sue gave me some directions and armed with those, I thought I could make a go of it. I got a couple of my friends together to help and six hours, three cans of icing, and a sugar headache each later, we had this:


Princess Aurora. Right? Sort of? Next time I attempt to make anything with a face, the face and features will be fondant. Trying to make lips and eyes that don't look creepy with icing is not easy.

The main thing was that Claire, upon inspecting the cake the morning of her birthday, declared that she was beautiful and so we considered our work to be complete. In fact, once I got more than four inches from the cake (decorating can be close work), I didn't think she was half bad. Either way, we stuck candles in her after dinner and ate her up:

Make a wish!


The kid really does have reasonable table manners most of the time. Aurora just looked to tasty to eat delicately.

Jillian was in her typical form:

It isn't a birthday party unless she gets cake on both hands, all over her face and in her hair.

She got some nice gifts too:

This is her new Teacher Barbie that she insisted my mother get her for her birthday. She asked Mom for it back in September and after that would talk about her birthday as the time when she was going to eat Aurora cake and play with Teacher Barbie. No expectations there.

DH and I decided to try and be practical with her gift this year. Claire had a growth spurt recently and I wanted to get her some new clothes. One day, DH and I went out shopping and when he saw this getup, he had to have it for her:

So much for practical. She loves it though!

I still can't believe she's four. Tomorrow she'll be sixteen. Sigh.

Halloween Post Mortem

Halloween was a lot of fun at our house this year. Claire has reached an age where she can hold a concept in her head and think about it on her own. We tell her things once and she will bring them up to us later. Also, it seems that her concept of time is developing so that if you tell her that something is happening in "two sleeps", she will keep her own running countdown to an event.

As great as these skills are, they are also the ones that make my life difficult sometimes. Gone are the days where we could distract her out of a bad idea by saying "maybe later" and substituting a better idea in its place. If she decided she wants a glue stick (which is a very messy endeavor in this house), well, she isn't going to let the idea go unless you a) give her a glue stick or b) present her with a reason that she understands and will accept about why it isn't possible. Option B sound quite reasonable but the catch is that she has to understand and accept the reasons - "because it makes a big mess", "because we are about to have dinner" or "because I can't find it right now" are NOT good reasons for her. Anyway...I'm digressing.

For most of October, Claire knew that Halloween was coming. She talked about it once in a while and knew that she was going to be a witch but she didn't ask how long it was going to be till the big day. On Wednesday of last week I told her that Halloween was in two sleeps an it was at that point that she went into high excitement mode. I was out teaching a class on Thursday night but DH reported that when he told her it was time for bed she exclaimed "Hurray! I can't wait to go to bed because tomorrow is Halloweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen!".

Jillian knew that she was going to get dressed up and go trick-or-treating. Unlike Claire, it didn't seem real to her until we actually put her into her black cat costume. Then, when she discovered that she had a tail, she was all for the occasion.

Claire's school doesn't observe Halloween but they did have "Black and Orange Day" on Friday. My mother bought them cute Halloween shirts and I got her a nifty hair elastic with a witch hat on it and she thought she was pretty spiffy going off to school like that. Here they are (they weren't in the mood for photography so this is the best I got):



While Claire was at school, I dressed Jillian up and took her to the mall trick-or-treating with a couple of her little friends. After her nap, I dressed her up again and took her to her babysitter's place for a short Halloween party. She really got into the spirit of the thing.

When Claire came home from school she wanted to go trick or treating immediately. It was a bit hard to convince her that she had to wait till after dinner before she could go and preferably it would be a little bit dark too. That being said, you can really motivate a kid to eat if you say "as soon as you are done your dinner, we'll go trick or treating".

We had great weather for the event. When I was a kid, I remember trick or treating in the rain at least once, in snow several times and definitely in snow pants a couple of times. Since we've had Claire, every single Halloween has been downright balmy. It's amazing really. Especially since last Wednesday it was 1 degree Celsius with a wind chill of -12 degrees (that's somewhere around 10 degrees Fahrenheit if you are on the imperial system).

When we got home the girls sat on the front step and had some treats:


Witch Claire making a decision (the turtleneck under her dress was much closer to the purple in her dress in real life).

Jillian chowing down (she didn't really stop and make a decision, she just wanted whatever her hand hit first):


They were both very good while we were out. They remembered to say "trick or treat" and "thank you" and didn't push other kids down in search of the next house with a porchlight on (it's amazing how many rude kids were out there). Jillian was hilarious. A couple of times people came to the door with lollipops in their mouth and Jillian would look at them, look at the stick in their mouth and say "what you eatin'?". One man dug all the way to the bottom of his huge bowl of treats just to get a lollipop for her.

After they had their first treat, I told them it was time they pose for a photo and they were nice enough to cooperate.


A witch and her familiar. Who could ask for cuter?

After the group shots I took photos of them by themselves. We thought it would be cute if Claire pretended to ride her broom:


When her turn was over, I let her go and started taking Jillian's pictures. When I turned my attention back to Claire, she was doing this:

Cleaning the porch. She did tell everyone that she was a good witch and not a bad one. I wonder if I can get her to do that indoors?