the sleppys

WARNING: Picture-heavy. Dial-up UNfriendly.

Last weekend, the children and I went to the park where Dear Husband and I got married. My parents met us there with bagels and fruit. Before we left, Ty said that he wanted to fly the kite. It wasn’t exactly kite-flying weather, but I obliged. When we got there, we found an empty wooden shelter to have our breakfast picnic – the whole park was empty because it was nine in the morning! My parents showed up and fed us until we couldn’t move. After a sugar-induced coma, we woke up and tried to fly the kite.

Here is Kyle, waiting for my dad to do something with the kite strings. My dad knows how to fly a kite, but I didn’t know that as I’ve never flown a kite. I suppose that my parents wanted to be cool while my brothers and I were growing up, and kite-slying was totally not cool. So I didn’t know about my dad’s kite-flying talent until Kyle turned three.

One of my piano moms has two girls who are seven and five. They have all sorts of princess, pretend-play costumes, and, being that they are seven and five, have outgrown some of them. They gave me the costumes, and here is Taylor’s sporting a tiara. I told her to smile, but she kept turning away. Then I told her, “Show me your teeth,” and she literally is showing me her teeth! Silly girl!

On Tuesday, my mom treated us to the science museum where the Dinosaurs from China are being exhibited. Kyle stayed at home with Dad because, well, he’s Kyle and he’s special and we let him do whatever he wants. SOoooo…. The exhibit is totally interesting. The dinosaurs are just like North American dinosaurs but with small differences. For example, Tyrannosaurus Rex has two claws, and the Chinese Sinraptor Hepingensis has three. I’m sure there are many more important differences between the two dinosaurs, such as an angle in the shoulder blade, but my brain can only contain so much.

There is a room that is gigantic monster skeleton-free. It contains a couch that has plush dinosaurs sewn on, a bird cage with tiny finches, a dragon lizard that eats REAL BUGS, and a table that supports two sandboxes that hide fossils. Kids are supposed to take the supplied brushes and wooden sticks and dig out the fossils, which really can’t be dug out because they are fused to the bottom of the sandbox.

Taylor and my mom were having a good time being paleontologists.

Ty was more interested in playing with the plastic dinosaurs. Here he is with the “Supersaurus” (I think the people who name these dinosaurs ought to have creativity consultant around). There were feathered dinosaurs around, too, but Ty likes the old-fashioned Brontosaurus shaped ones.

It’s next to impossible to get a still picture of my children, especially with a camera-phone.

These three children amaze me. They grow and learn so quickly that I usually take it for granted. So here are milestones to remind me to stop, observe, and appreciate.

Ty counts to 53: My parents came over along with my mom’s sister, who is visiting from Central America. While I was giving a tour of the house to my aunt, Dear Husband and my mom were talking about growing a garden. And Ty, Kyle, and my dad played cars. Ty arranged all his cars in order of the colors of the rainbow and put the white, black, and brown ones at the end. Then he counted them. One through forty-nine was a breeze, but he couldn’t remember that it’s fifty and not five-tee. “Oh, that’s right. Fifty. Fifty-one. Fifty-two. Fifty-three. Uh… Fifty-three cars! Hooray!”

Ty plays chess: He took the game box out of the closet and started setting up the pieces, asking everyone who walked by, “Do you want to play chess with me?” He has played chess before, and he knows how to set up a game properly. I told him that I’d play with him. He insisted on making illegal moves. He whined when I captured his pieces. Finally, he asked me to knock over my King. “Do you mean like this?” And my elbow knocked the King down. “I win! Hooray!” he celebrated.
Afterward, I showed him to play chess on the computer. He didn’t like that the program didn’t let him make illegal moves. And when it came down to defending his King, he didn’t like that he couldn’t capture the Queen because the Bishop was waiting to capture the King. He doesn’t like losing. Hey, I lose a lot in chess. I’ve won only a handful of times. One loses a lot when learning to play chess. That’s chess!

Kyle knows where we live: “We don’t live in outer space.”
“Well, that’s true in some aspects,” I answered.
“Outer space is outside.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“We live inside.”
“Uh, yes”
“We live on Earth,” he said assuredly.
“That’s right. Is Earth in outer space?”
“Yes.”
“Do we live in outer space?”
“No,” he said quietly. He looked around and smiled before he said, “We live inside.”
“Your logic scares me, Kyle.”
“Ahhh HAAA HAAA!”

Kyle like being alone: Dad and I have been noticing that Kyle likes to keep to himself. He does well at parties and get togethers for a short while, then he gets timid. Last week, at a birthday party, he had an accident in his pants. And he had another one after the Independence Day parade. We have been staying indoors after that, going outside only to do yardwork or look at the stars. Kyle rarely follows. He’s a happy child, don’t get me wrong. He likes to play with his brother and sister, playing chase around the house, playing “Red light, Green light.” He prefers the company of his solitude, however. playing with his trains and working on puzzles.

Taylor namecalls: She calls people “Bad!” If she gets her hair pulled or a has toy taken from her, she cries a most insulted cry. She runs up to me, points at the perpetrator, and yells, “Baaah!” Tears fall down her cheeks, and her little mouth (or big mouth), is curved downward. She looks so sad and angry. I hug her and ask her to show me what happened. She yells “Baah!” again. This happens often. Sometimes, she comes running to me, crying “Bad!” and another child comes running, too, telling me, in English, that he took the toy from her because she took it from him so she hit him and he pulled her hair and she pulled his hair and he hit her and, well, this happens often, too.

Taylor puts her things away: After the kids are finished eating, they put their trays and cups in the sink. Taylor has been too short to reach the sink, so I would do it for her. Or one of the boys would do it. She can reach now. Her height allows her to set the tray on the edge of the sink and push it in. She also knows where her shoes go, but she can’t reach it. She says, “Down. Down. Shoes,” telling me to bring the shoebox down to the floor so that she may put them in.

Aside, this “drought” we’re in doesn’t seem like much of a drought when it rains three inches one day and four inches the next, making it very difficult to keep up with all the growth. Dad spent at least eight hours doing yardwork this weekend. I mowed the lawn, which took me about two hours. I pulled some weeds for twenty minutes, too. It’s not just the lawn, either. The hedges need pruning. The sidewalk needs edging. The compost pile needs aeration. Who needs a gym membership when you have a yard to keep? Better yet, who has TIME to go to the gym when your lawn tools are not gasoline powered but elbow grease powered?