Tanks

Not that I'm complaining, but the last week has been very uneventful here. We needed some down time after the "divide and conquer" week where the girls went to Texas and the boys did boy things while we were gone.

After trying her gymnastics class for 7 weeks, E decided this week that she didn't want to continue. She says she wants to enroll in dance class, but the only problem is all the classes are full until this fall so I tried to convince her to stay in gymnastics until a spot was open for her to move to dance, but she wouldn't hear of it. It was dance or nothing, as she put it, so for now, it will be nothing. For a minute I felt like a bad mom letting her quit - afterall, she picked gymnastics in the first place so I thought maybe I should make her stick it out for a few more months. But, in the end, I decided I had many more years to fight those battles and I wasn't going to be ultra strict before she at least started kindergarten.
Honestly, I'm not really complaining about dropping this class though because while I loved watching her in class, it was chaos trying to keep her brother contained and controlled while his sister was flipping around on the mat and into the foam pit. All he wanted to do was join the group and those 50 minutes were absolute torture for me, for him and all the other parents (whose children, by the way, were sitting quietly reading next to them). So to preserve my own sanity and to appease E's determination to wait for a spot in the dance class, we're abandoning our extra curricular activities for now.

In other news, F is mastering the potty training well. That Peter Potty should be given some sort of brilliant invention award. Why don't more parents know about this product?! I've been telling everyone I know about it. I can't find it anywhere in a store around here, but walmart.com has it for less than $40. Can't beat it if it means $40 less in diapers, which in our case, it has already paid for itself.

F is also doing great with his speech these days. His latest accomplishment is saying "tanks" (thanks) for everything you do for him. It took us a few days to figure out what he was saying because we didn't expect one of his first independent words (that weren't drilled into him by repeating them 50 times a day) to be one that shows he has such good manners! Who knew?! He's so genuine when he says it too - just smiles that huge smile and says "Tanks!" It cracks Eli and me up every time he says it. Maybe that "Manners with Max" cartoon he watches does have some value after all.

Today we spent almost two hours hopscotching in the hallway upstairs. It's been so windy and cold here that we've been stuck inside for several days.




Yesterday F disappeared for several minutes before I realized he wasn't upstairs with us. I found him in the kitchen, standing on a chair next to the counter. In a matter of mere minutes, he'd gotten into a jar of peanut butter, scooped some out (okay, more like half the jar) and slathered it ALL over his hands and arms like it was body lotion. He was just grinning and giggling the whole time I was trying be mad at him. The only remedy for that mess was a bath. - and when he was cleaned up, he just looked up at me, grinned that huge tic-tac teeth smile and said "Tanks!"