January 10, 2008

I seem to be hearing more funnies from Nick these days than from Ben. Nick tends to be the one coming up with the 'first time' words and phrases, for now. He is a bit more talkative, so maybe that is why, as I think they are both pretty much at the same level with their vocabs.

I was changing Ben's diaper the other day and Nick was sitting on the couch next to me, quietly looking at an alphabet book. This book has one letter on each page, along with pictures of things that start with that letter. He was looking at the 'G g' page, as he pointed to it and said "Mama Rilla?", "Mama Rilla?".

Grandma Rilla is my 96 year old grandmother (my dad's mom). My mom's grandkids call her "mama" (pronounced mawmaw), so Nick developed his own adaptation and now calls Grandma Rilla "Mama Rilla".

Back to the alphabet book. I looked at the page he was pointing to, the 'G g' page and saw nothing there that reminded me of Grandma Rilla, yet he was still pointing to and saying "Mama Rilla"? I told him that I was not sure what he was talking about and asked him to show me. He put his finger on......wait for it.......the gorilla! I cracked up laughing and explained to him the difference between the words "Grandma Rilla" and "gorilla".

I thought it was pretty clever though, since we have not looked at that book in quite a while, even when we do look at it, we usually don't get very far into the alphabet before they are ready for another book, we don't cover every picture on the pages we do look at and, last but not least, 'gorilla' is not an every day word in our household and I can't think of another book that we have that has gorillas in it. So there is no telling how long it has been since we covered the word gorilla and we probably have not covered it very often. I WISH I had the kind of memory that little kids have! They are amazing. But, mostly, it was just a very funny moment:).

Another day, Nick was sitting in his booster seat at the kitchen island. Having just finished his oatmeal for breakfast, he pushed his chair back, saying "done". Then he realized he had spilled a small blob of oatmeal on his booster seat, next to his leg. He was holding up his leg so it wouldn't touch the oatmeal, looking at me and saying, "help". I said, "can you pick it up and put it back in your bowl?". He looked at it, looked back at me, shook his head no and said "yucky". This is the word I use when I am telling them not to touch something that is yucky, such as the cat's litter box.

Another day, Nick and Ben sitting in their booster seats at the kitchen island, almost done eating lunch. I had been sitting between them, reading to them while they ate. As Ben was finishing up, I started teasing him about giving me a kiss. Nick wanted me to do it to him too so I was going back and forth between them. Nick was turning his head the other direction and leaning away from me laughing and, just as clear as day, said "no way!". I was so surprised because this is not something he learned from us. I am guessing he learned it from my two nieces who were visiting us recently.

Nick is typically very compassionate towards Ben, when Ben is not happy about something and is crying. It depends on the situation though. The other day, Ben was crying about something he wanted and had not gotten his way about and Nick looked at him and said, "brother, hush", "brother, hush". The funny thing is that Ben hushed up pretty quick after that.

Yesterday we had our first exercise in finger painting and it went very well. The boys were not to overly thrilled with having paint all over their fingers though and kept wanting me to wipe them off. I think they would probably enjoy using a brush more but we'll see. We still have a lot of finger paint left so maybe they will be more into it the next time. The odd thing is that, since this is "finger paint", my assumption was that it would wash off easily with soap and water. Wouldn't you think? Nope.

I failed to post about the day, a couple of months ago, I decided to let the boys play with food coloring. I thought they would find it interesting to see how it changes the color of water. So we had several cups of water in clear glasses and I was putting the coloring in and letting them stir it. Then I was helping them to hold and squirt the coloring into the cups and one of the boys grabbed and squeezed the food coloring bottle while I was still holding it upright and it went EVERYWHERE....and it was red so it looked like someone had been severely hurt in my kitchen. The bigger mistake though was that I did not do a test before hand and I thought that food coloring washed off easily. It was not my brightest moment, as a mom, and I learned a few lessons that day.....but we had fun:).

Have I mentioned that this is my favorite 'job' of all time? I love being a stay at home mom.

Our second post placement report is almost ready to go to OKC for the apostille. I am thinking of going on Monday or Tuesday.