Pictures

We got dressed up in our Christmasy garb for church yesterday and snapped some pictures on the deck afterwards.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Ambitious Big Brother

This post was also started a while ago, about two weeks I believe.  I do what I can :)

Caleb and Lydia were down in the playroom while I was preparing a meal in the kitchen.  I can see them from the kitchen, but my attention was mostly on what I was doing.  All of the sudden, Caleb rushes up the six steps from the playroom and says, "Mommy!  You have to see this!  Lydia just crawled across the room!"  I was very surprised because she had not been interested in crawling for the past couple of weeks, so I walked toward the play room with Caleb.  Sure enough, Lydia was 10-12 feet from where I had left her, still sitting and playing happily.  I was taken in for a second and rather amazed, but soon realized from something in Caleb's grin that all was not as it appeared.  

"Caleb, did you drag your sister across the room so it would look like she crawled?"

"No!  Of course not!  It was amazing!  She suddenly just crawled across the room!"

"Caleb."

"Oh, maybe I helped her a little bit."
"Caleb, tell me the truth."
"Okay, I did it.  I pulled her across the room.  Sorry for telling a lie, Mommy."

As evidenced from this story, Caleb gets even more excited about each of her milestones than we do, even to the point of rushing them a bit :)

Not The Best Way To Wake Up

I started this blog post about a month ago when this story happened, but am just now taking the time to finish writing it and post it.

The other day, Marcus was home in the early afternoon, and he let me sneak upstairs for a little catnap before dinner.  Lydia had been up a lot the night before, and I was exhausted so I fell right to sleep.  About 45 minutes later, I woke up in a panic, but had no idea why.  I rushed downstairs and saw nothing immediately alarming: Marcus was sitting at the computer, Lydia was playing on the floor behind him, the door from the play room to the garage was open...wait a minute!  Just as I was wondering why that door was open and where the boys were, Caleb rushes through that very door saying, "Daddy, Ethan is playing with a big knife in the garage and there is blood coming out of him!"  (So that's why I woke up in a panic!)

Marcus sprung out of the computer chair and we both rushed into the garage to find 3 1/2-year-old Ethan sitting on the garage floor, playing with a box cutter and bleeding from three fingers.  He looked up with a guilty smile and said, "It doesn't hurt.  It really doesn't hurt," in the same soothing tone that we usually use for him when he gets hurt.  He saw our panicked-changing-to-angry faces and made his own switch to a logical appeal: "But Daddy, you are a doctor and you can fix me!  Don't worry, you can just fix the bleeding!" And that is exactly what Daddy did: cleaned him up and sealed him up with Band-aids while I put the box cutter back in the tool box and put the toolbox on the highest shelf in the garage.  I think Daddy and I are in agreement now about the boys playing in the garage unsupervised :)

"I'm Making My Bad Heart Angry"

Ethan is our passionate child.  From day one, he has been hot or cold most of the time.  The older he gets, the more mellow time there is, but he is still a very intense little guy.  When he's bad, he's really bad, and when he's good, he's really good.  Because of the intensity of his personality, I talk to him a lot about the good/bad war within him.  He has a good handle on the idea that he has a "good heart" and "bad heart," each vying for his permission to act.

One night, I had tucked all the kids into bed, and Ethan asked me to lay down and sleep with him.  I usually tell him no because Marcus is usually waiting for me to watch a TV show and hang out with him.  But Marcus was working late and I was exhausted myself, so I cuddled up with Ethan on his single mattress and closed my eyes.  I was just about to drift off when I heard him whisper in a smugly mischievous voice:

"Mommy, I'm making my bad heart very, very angry."

I asked him what he meant, and he explained that since he was being so good today, his bad heart was getting madder and madder that it wasn't getting a chance to be bad.  As he was talking, I realized that he had a mental image of something like this going on inside of him: a little demon locked up in a cage and throwing a massive fit of rage while the good little angel skipped circles around the cage.  I was telling this story to a friend later on, and my friend pointed out that Ethan had found a way to "be bad" by being good.  His love for power and strength over anything, even the "bad heart" inside of him, is helping motivate him to behave well!