Recent Cuteness

Here’re some recent odds and ends that haven’t made it into any blog posts lately, since we keep going out of town and leaving me with no time to tell you how cute my kids are.

Henry has fallen in love with baseball. Like, I-will-fashion-anything-into-a-bat-and-pester-you-all-day-to-play-baseball-with-me, head over heels love. Henry has made a bat out of the cardboard fan we got at the Strawberry Festival, a plastic ear of corn and a little plastic pan from his play kitchen, and, my favorite, his Keen sandals, which he will place on his hands and swat at the ball. We of course also play actual baseball with him outside using his whiffleball bat and ball. He swings left and has about a .500 average to go with his “you seem to throw awfully well for a two-year-old” good arm, and I’m trying my hardest not to go all Tiger Woods on him and force him to practice 16 hours a day so he can turn pro and pay for all my retirement Botox.

Henry and Eleanor have been interested in numbers and counting to 10. This weekend at my grandpa’s Henry actually got from 1 to 10 with no mistakes; I’ve been trying to get him to recreate the moment ever since to no avail (one digit or another always gets left out). Henry and Eleanor try to sign their numbers as well. They get excited to hold up fingers for 1 and 2, and then it’s just a flurry of fingers signing nothing in particular that makes sense to anyone who is not Henry or Eleanor, until they get to 10, when they shake their little thumbs back and forth and yell “teeeeeeeennnnnn!” I’m not sure why they shake their thumbs for 10; it’s as if Fonzie is teaching them sign language.

The kids also remain very interested in the alphabet and love to sing their ABCs. We can never sing the ABCs just once, it must be repeated and repeated and repeated until Mommy gives up. I watched the Michael Jackson memorial last week, and was standing with Eleanor while “We Are the World” was performed. Eleanor was swaying back and forth just like the performers on TV, and was trying to sing along. After a minute I noticed that she was singing the ABCs. My heart melted a little.

Henry has the cutest big head ever, but sometimes while dressing him we have a hard time getting his 75th-percentile noggin through the neck hole of his shirt. Thanks to my jokester husband, Henry will now yell “BIG HEAD!” after his head pops out of his shirt. Yeah, that’s not going to drive him to therapy later in life or anything.

If you need an exterminator, look no further than my daughter, who has been single-handedly controlling the pest population at our house. If Eleanor spots a bug, she starts yelling “Ant! Ant! Eleanor get it!” and will grab a napkin off the kitchen counter, and scoop up the bug and throw it away. I have also seen her kill spiders and earwigs with her bare hands, which grosses me out and causes me to hose her down in hand sanitizer. But underneath my squeamishness I’m pretty proud of her fearlessness.

Potty training hasn’t begun in earnest yet, because of my laziness and the fact that we haven’t stayed home for more than 3 days in a row over the past month. But we still let Henry and Eleanor sit on the potty chairs before and after bathtime. A few times now Eleanor has farted while sitting on the potty chair, and she gets sooooo excited. “Fart! Fart! Eleanor fart!” she’ll exclaim, beaming. So we praise her and hope the transition from gasses to liquids and solids will be a smooth one.

Henry and Eleanor play pretend more and more and I love seeing what their imaginations dream up. They cook several meals a day in their play kitchen, and bring me cups of “coffee” and bowls of “soup” to taste. Henry spreads his arms and flies around like a plane, and I caught him serving his sister pretend cookies off of the Frisbee we brought home this weekend. Eleanor will hop on her ride-on car and announce that she is getting gas and going shopping.

I'll leave you with a cute photo of my breakfast partners from this morning, who saw me reading the paper and wanted to read, too. Note that Henry is such a genius he can read upside down.