Friday

So, after my big production of opening up my blog, I haven't done a thing since. I was hoping to have some pictures to make my comments more relevant, but the reason there are no pics is because I took one on Christmas morning and suddenly the card was full, after what.. three years? Now we have 3 years worth of pictures to transfer to discs and store them in a safe place (I think I'll send them to my dad) before it's safe to erase the card and start over again. Anyhoo, here is an update of the kids and life in general w/o pictures.
Eliseo is constipated-gross-but was very brave about taking his castor oil this evening. Actually, he didn't make even the slightest fuss about it. So there is another perk to making your kids take cod liver oil all the time--they don't fuss if they ever have to take castor oil. Thanks to Eliseo's ailment, the poo jokes are flying left and right at our house. All initiated by Grant, of course.
Rune is still hooked on Goosebumps books. I don't know what he'll do when he reads through all the volumes available at the library. He loves to give me the blow by blow of his books and there is apparently no short version. The account can take well over a half an hour to fully expound upon. I feel guilty that I don't have the slightest idea what happened in any of the books because I'm always tuned into my own thoughts and activities while interjecting the occasional "uh-huh" "that's weird" "Holy cow!" Actually, I have this goal to really listen to him one of these times, with eye contact and everything, and use the opportunity to teach him to express his thoughts articulately. I mean, like, have you heard kids these days? They can't, like, get out what they want to say. I mean, they try to, like, say something, I think, but it's so, like, drowned with a ocean of likes that you can't, like, understand what they heck it is. I so want my kids to have like-free speech!
And, onto Lils. She has officially entered the age where she is computer addictable (i.e. she cries when I tell her to get off and it's the first thing she asks to do when she wakes up). So she is now officially timed to 30 min/day just like the boys. Those first days of enforcing the rule are always so difficult and full of tears but worth it in the long run. Besides computer she loves to "pretember" (pretend). Lately, she is either a cat, with a really high pitched meow, or a dog, with a really high pitched bark. And in either case she adopts a sort of chimpanzee kind of run. The other day she waxed really creative and ran into the kitchen where I was washing dishes and says, "Mom, pretember you're the mom and I'm your kid and Alma is your baby." That was one of the easier roles she's given me in her long-standing pretember game!
Then there is Alma. He's the only one of my kids that didn't go through a totter/fall down stage for several weeks when learning to walk. He just got up and started walking. One day he was crawling and 2 days later he's walking everywhere. I love this stage because suddenly everything they do is so purposeful. He systematically empties everything he can out of the bottom cupboards in the kitchen and drags the things somewhere else. All with an air of doing something really important that needs to be done. We are in a constant war of take out/put back that he usually wins.