We Have Two of Everything

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Area Wildlife

Spotted recently around town:

sea lions


penguins


butterflies


monkeys

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I have not had normal dinner conversation since March 2007

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These boots are made for splashin'...

What's even better than getting rain boots?

Getting rain to test them out in the very next day.

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(My) Kids Say the Darndest Things

JENNIFER: Good night, sweetheart. Sleep tight.
HENRY: Don’t let the bed bugs bite me!

•••

Jennifer enters bathroom to take shower, is followed by two “helpers”
HENRY: (throwing open shower door) Oh WOW, Mom, look at the shower! It’s beautiful in there!

•••

family is watching the Colts win
ANDY: Touchdown!
HENRY: Go Colts!
ELEANOR: Where is Brett Favre?

•••

Eleanor regularly talks in her sleep. Some of her recent slumber exclamations:

Good morning!

Kitty! Kitty!

Dad! Dad! There’s another one THERE!

No, I don’t want any yogurt! I don’t want any yogurt!

•••

Eleanor takes nap in play tent, Jennifer relays that fact to Andy
ANDY: So, Eleanor, I heard you took a nap in your tent today.
ELEANOR: You heard me snore? At work?

•••

JENNIFER: We need to make a dentist appointment to go clean your teeth.
ELEANOR: In the washing machine?

•••

At supper, Henry eats plate of spaghetti, piece of cake, bowl of strawberries, and Eleanor’s piece of cake
HENRY: (rubbing tummy) My tummy hurts.
Grandma picks up Henry’s plate, revealing large cake crumb on table
HENRY: Oooh! MORE CAKE! (pops cake in mouth)

•••

JENNIFER: So, guys, how old will you be on your birthday?
ELEANOR: (holds up three fingers) I’m three!
HENRY: (holds up three fingers) I’m W!

•••

Andy wipes Eleanor's nose
ELEANOR: What's that, Daddy?
ANDY: Oh, just a booger.
ELEANOR: My boogers are white. White like the snow.

•••

HENRY: Met-a-mor-forus!
JENNIFER: Do you know what metamorphosis means?
HENRY: (throws hands up in air) a BIG CHANGE!
JENNIFER: That’s right! Like how caterpillars change and turn into butterflies.
HENRY: And like tadpoles into frogs!
JENNIFER: That’s right! Good job, Henry!
HENRY: And mommies into penguins!

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Eat your heart out, Justin Bieber

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Thanks for the confidence boost, kids.

ELEANOR: (pointing at Jennifer's nose) What's up there?
JENNIFER: I don't know. Air, maybe?
ELEANOR: No, it's hair!

looking in bathroom mirror, Jennifer examines blemish on underside of chin
HENRY: What’s that, Mom?
JENNIFER: Oh, that’s just a zit.
HENRY: No, that’s a NIPPLE.

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Pretty in Pink

After the kids' bath last night, I realized that the only clean pajamas we had were of the Eleanor variety. Sensing Eleanor's unwillingness to give up her monkey jammies, I announced to Henry that he got to wear her pink PJs.

"Ooh, flowers," he said as I dressed him. As I zipped him up, Henry told me, "I'm beautiful."





Yes, kid, you are.

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(My) Kids Say the Darndest Things

Today is Delurker Day, in which blog readers are supposed to not just read but leave me a comment already, you Lurky Lurkersons. Actually, scratch that, go over to fellow Indy-dweller and mom DesignHER Momma's blog and leave her a comment. Today (you still have six hours—go!) she's donating $1 for every comment to Compassion International Haiti Disaster Relief Fund. All I can really promise you is to drink a Diet Coke for every comment on my blog.

So anyway, I know I just had a "ha ha ha check it out my kids are ridiculous" post. But Henry and Eleanor are at that wonderful age where I feel like I could transcribe everything they say throughout the day.

•••

JENNIFER: You guys look like you’ve grown.
HENRY: I grow and grow and get big and strong!
ELEANOR: I grow tall and drink your Coke!

•••

Henry, shaking his hands as if operating imaginary jackhammer
JENNIFER: What’cha doing, Henry?
HENRY: Breaking up rocks. (wipes imaginary sweat from brow) Whew! It’s a hard job, Mom.

•••

HENRY: My nose is a candle!
JENNIFER: Um, why is your nose a candle, sweetheart?
HENRY: Blow on it, Mom!
JENNIFER: (blows on nose, still confused)
HENRY: You blew the fire off of it!

•••

Henry and Eleanor cover boxes with blankets, begin hitting them
HENRY & ELEANOR: PONGA! PONGA!
JENNIFER: Are you guys playing bongos?
HENRY & ELEANOR: YEAH! PONGA!

•••

family watching Wheel of Fortune, Jennifer shouts out answer
JENNIFER: Acquired taste!
ELEANOR: I’M a acquired taste!

•••

JENNIFER: Henry, you need to help your father pick up your toys.
HENRY: He’s not my father.
JENNIFER: Oh, really? What is he, then?
HENRY: My DAD.

•••

HENRY: Where’s my toboggan?
ELEANOR: Where’s MY toboggan?
ANDY: I don’t know, and uh, how do you know the word toboggan?

(We’ve since figured out Caillou was responsible.)

•••

Henry and Eleanor haven’t learned to lie yet. This comes in handy when they’ve done things they shouldn’t. “Did you just hit your brother/sister?” “Yes, I did!”

My favorite recent example:

JENNIFER: Henry, did you just throw my booklight?
HENRY: Yes, Mom, behind the chair! (walks over to chair, makes toddler jazz hands in direction of booklight) TA-DA!!!!!!

•••

Kids and Jennifer eating lunch, Elvis comes on radio
HENRY: Who’s that? Who’s that, Mom?
JENNIFER: That’s “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis.
HENRY: That man in bathtub!
JENNIFER: Okay?

•••

HENRY: (playfully pulling on Jennifer’s scarf) I pull you. I pull you, Mom, and break you. I break you in half like a Pop-Tart.

•••

ELEANOR: (asking for a snack) Mom! I want some Goldfish! I want some Goldfish and raisins! I want some Goldfish and pretzels, Mom! No, Mom! I no want Goldfish! I want pretzels!
JENNIFER: (muttering under breath) This is why I drink.

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Let It Snow take 25 minutes to get bundled up before we play outside for 10

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(My) Kids Say The Darndest Things

Henry and Eleanor are pretending they’re kittens in a cage (i.e. laundry basket) while Andy and Jennifer are eating supper.
JENNIFER: I need to email Mom and make sure she knows that Jason got engaged.
ELEANOR: Jason got a cage?
ANDY: Well, that’s one way to put it, har har.

•••

Eleanor, sitting on potty chair
JENNIFER: Eleanor, are you all done peeing?
ELEANOR: I’m thinking, Mom, I’m thinking.

•••

Arriving home after playgroup
JENNIFER: Okay, let’s go in the house. We need to eat lunch and take our nap.
HENRY: No, I no want to take nap! I want to play. I want to play TOO MUCH.

•••

An Allstate commercial comes on TV
ELEANOR: (pointing to President Palmer) That my dad on TV!
ANDY & JENNIFER: Uhhhhh..is there something you need to tell us?

•••

HENRY: When I was a baby, I in your tummy.
JENNIFER: That’s right, you were in my tummy.
HENRY: I no baby any more. I Henry.

•••

As long as she's been talking Eleanor has talked in her sleep. One night this week I heard from her room, clear as a bell, "That’s fun! That’s fun, Dad! Wow!"

A daddy's girl, even in slumber.

•••

Jennifer and kids arrive at library story time.
JENNIFER: (pointing at various seat cushions) Pick where you want to sit, guys. How about the triangle? Or circle?
HENRY: I want to sit on the HEXAGON.
JENNIFER: Um, okay?

•••

walking down the stairs
HENRY: I smell meat! I’m Santa, and I smell meat!
JENNIFER: ????

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(My) Kids Say the Darndest Things

When we were all under the weather a week or so ago, I prepared some Benadryl for the kids.
ME: Come on, guys, let’s take some medicine.
HENRY: (in perfect sing-song voice) Boys and giiiiiiirrrrrls! Time for medddicinnnne!

•••

Sitting at breakfast table, Bentley lays nearby licking his paws
ELEANOR: Noooo, Bentley! No! Don’t eat you paws! That’s not food!

•••

Henry’s latest song creation
Daddy change my diaper
poopy diaper
poop poop poop poop

•••

ANDY: What do you want for lunch?
ELEANOR: Butter sandwich
ANDY: (grabs peanut butter sandwich fixings) How did they go from saying puffavich to butter sandwich?
ELEANOR: Noooooo! I no want bug sandwich!
HENRY: I want bug sandwich!

•••

changing Henry’s diaper
HENRY: Kiss it.
ME: Kiss what, sweetie?
HENRY: Kiss my poop.
ME: Oh no, I’m not going to kiss your poop.
HENRY: It make your face all dirty?

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Playgroup? Or Paaaaaar-tay?

We had a lovely playgroup on Monday with friends Amanda and Christen and their kids, and I was all set to write a post about how cute it was to see three little matching sets of kids running around, and how glad I am to have gotten involved in my twins club and met such fantastic moms, and my GOSH, twins are just the BEST.

And then I loaded all my photos onto my computer. And realized that it looked like Henry drank excessively and then stripped off his clothes.


You know guys, this party is fun and all, but let's kick it up a notch.


Shots! Lots and lots of shots!


Duuuuuuude! You know what this party needs?...


...NO PANTS!


Quick, get the sand washed off your fingers. WE'RE GOING STREAKING!!!!!

Hmmm...what are the odds we'll ever be invited back?

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Random Ramblings to Round Out the Week

So Henry has peed on the potty two more times since I first announced his potty-chair awesomeness. He’s probably ready to start training, but his lazy-ass mother is still dragging her feet, and as a side note, I get annoyed when people are always saying “oh boys train later” like it is some kid of Established Parenting Law, which could very well end up being the case, but so far at our house pee production is Henry: 3, Eleanor: 0.

Lyrics to Henry’s latest song creation, performed in the car on Tuesday:
garbage truck
trees
big house
tractor
white tractor
white tractor
duuuuuuummmmp tttruuuuuuuckkkkk!
©2009 by Henry, all rights reserved

Things Eleanor does that are too cute to correct:
She sweetly tells me “Bless you, Mommy” every time I cough
She adds extra syllables to her name—El-li-li-li-nor
She sometimes says “mice” instead of “mine”

Henry and Eleanor smeared yogurt all over themselves while pretending it was sunblock and I should have made them stop, but I was impressed by their imagination and their dedication to sun safety so I took photos instead.




Oh, OF COURSE I will be using these photos as blackmail in a dozen years or so.

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Move Over, Julia Child

When your children have been watching an inordinate amount of television, what better way to get them off the couch than to cook some junk food with them?

That’s what I did yesterday, when Henry and Eleanor and I baked some brownies. I had never cooked with the kids before, so I was slightly worried the activity would be a messy disaster. Other than Eleanor licking raw egg off of her spoon, it was a success.




Henry and Eleanor were a little confused at the whole “the brownies need to cook in the oven” concept. Eleanor kept asking me, “brownies coming back?”

Look, the brownies came back! And they were quite delicious at supper, too.

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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.

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ABC FG FG

Henry treated us to a rousing version of the ABCs tonight. A future Billboard chart-topper, I'm sure.

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My (not)Martha Moment

It was a gorgeous day, perfect weather that had Henry pointing at the sky exclaiming “blue,” so the twins and I spent three lovely hours outside this afternoon. I was excited to reveal my newest creation for them, a new sandbox made from an under-the-bed storage box. I was feeling very Martha Stewart, and decided to snap photos of every step of the way—set out two milk crates, top with storage box, fill with sand, add toys—and post a cute little “look at me I’m clever!” how-to on the blog.

Except that I’m not Martha, and didn’t notice that I had my fancypants camera set on some manual-adjustment setting, and therefore all my how-to photos got way too overexposed, like we were outside playing in the midst of some horrible solar flare disaster.

Definitely NOT a good thing.

Luckily I finally noticed my mistake, and was able to capture some other moments of our afternoon in the sun.

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Sometimes* My Job Is Easy

*And by "sometimes," I mean "for a 3-minute window of time, followed shortly thereafter by witnessing a screaming, crying tantrum and argument over freaking BLUEBERRY YOGURT."

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