Another month has passed here at Chez Chaos and so here I am with pictures … again!

Julian turned 3 this month. Boy, how time flies!  When I got them up that morning, I told him, “Guess what, Julian!  It’s your BIRTHDAY!  Happy Birthday!” and he told me flat out, “It is NOT my birthday!”  LOL  Oh, the joys of living with a 3 year old.

He wasn’t in the mood to do much that day and considering it was nasty looking outside, we stayed in, played games, watch PBS Kids and just had a low-key day.  The kids helped me make pizza that night (I rolled out the dough, they decorated it with toppings) and we enjoyed some Birthday Brownie after dinner.

Oh, and talking about food, here’s proof that yes, my kids eat broccoli without any complaints:

Actually, right before this picture was taken, Wynter was announcing to the world: “Broccoli is yummy!  I LOVE broccoli.”

During this month, we had 9 or 10 straight days of rain.  Ugh…  To keep the kids from killing one another or driving me insane, we broke out the bubble machine.    I just love this super cute pic of Julian:

————-

Oh, and for my own information…and for those that may be interested:

Julian had his 3 year old well kid checkup on the 11th of January.  He was 32 lbs, 6.4 oz (which means he gained over 4 lbs since the last checkup a year before) and around 3′1″ tall (we had a hell of a time measuring his height because he wouldn’t stand still against the wall long enough so she took an educated  guess).

He greeted the doc with an enthusiastic “HI DOCTOR!” when she walked in, which she said made her morning. Then he proceeded to read her all the numbers and letters out of a kids’ book (her comment: Wow, he’s smart!).  After the exam, while she talked to me about his progress, he snatched her paperwork off of the desk and tried to throw it away for her.  LOL  Helpful kid.

All in all, the doc told me, “He’s doing great.  Keep doing whatever you’re doing.” so that’s what we’re going to do….

Yes, I know….been promising these for a long time.  There’s a bit of a long story behind that one but the gist is between the computer crashing / reformatting and a massive rewrite/re-edit of my book, I’ve been a bit distracted the last couple of months.  When I wasn’t working on my book, I was doing business writing or spending time with the kids or trying to keep up with the dishes and laundry…never mind the joys of taxes, grocery shopping and periodically mopping my kitchen floor.

I’ve been pretty guilt-ridden over not getting these pictures up.  I mean…come one…they’re from NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER!!  Oy!   If you think that’s bad, you ought to see how full my RSS feed reader is.  Hehehehe.  Yeah, some things had to be dropped during the last couple of months while I dealt with other priorities.

Well, thankfully, the writing project is almost done, which meant I could take today off and catch up on some things…including pictures!  Yeah!

As you can guess, I had a lot of photos on my camera.  I’ve picked out the best ones to showcase here.  I hope you enjoy them!

Anne

———————

November 2009

Wynter walked up to me one day while I was working and told me, “I’m gonna take your picture!” … and then held her little barn up to her face….

So I took a picture of her taking a pretend picture of me!  LOL

Julian got his hair cut that month while we were in So Cal.  Boy, did he need it….

Scary thing is….he needs another one already!

November included our annual Thanksgiving trip to So Cal.  The best pics seem to have come from that trip (thanks to Maria, who let me steal her pics    )….

Here’s the two cousins – Maria and Wynter.  Ain’t they cute?  (Julian would have been in the pic too but he had fallen asleep in the stroller on our walk back to the eyeglass store.)

Kids and Auntie Christy’s dog, Zedd….he always loved to be in the middle of the mess.

And yes, that’s a bruise under Wynter’s eye.  The kids were playing one night at Grandma’s house …. Wynter zigged, Julian zagged and they slammed heads together.  Ouchie!  I’m just happy that she didn’t get a full black-eye.

Grandma Keller with three of her grandchildren.

And another one of Grandma and Wynter hanging out watching TV together.

Aunti Christy, her dogs (Zedd and Zena) and the kids.  They LOVED hanging out with Auntie Christy and her zoo of animals.  I’m sure they were quite happy for us to go home.

And as you can see, Julian figured out how to stand on his head…well, that is with the help of furniture.  He’s been doing flips and standing on his head on our couch ever since.

While we were in So Cal there, we attending my Grand-Aunt’s 100th birthday party.

Some musician friends of my cousin’s performed at the party.  The ensemble included bongo drums…which Julian fell in LOVE with. We couldn’t keep him away from them!  Thankfully, they didn’t mind Julian going to town on them.

Wynter, on the other hand, loved the garden, especially the little ceramic mushrooms.

———————–

December 2009

First, a couple cute headshots…..

This month is a bit sparse….mainly because…well…have you ever tried to take a picture of erratically and constantly moving objects.  One night I decided I wanted to get a pic of the kids together.  Well, 18 pictures later, the best I got were these….

Helpful, huh?

Oh, and may I say one of the cutest Christmas gifts we got this year were these: a flock of bird and dinosaur puppets.  (Thanks to my sisters for finding these at Costco.)  The kids LOVE them!

As most of you know, I plan to homeschool the kids, especially through the grammar years to give them a good foundation to building on.

Well, now that J is turning 3 and Wynter is about to be 5, it’s time to actually start doing something about it.  You may be wondering why I seem to be starting “late”.    In my eyes, we’re not really staring “late” ….parents “homeschool” their kids from the moment their born, teaching them life skills.

But no, we haven’t been pushing any heavy “formal education” in our household.  I have a lot of issues with our culture’s current trend of “early is better” when it comes to education.  We pretty much push out that important  preschool “play” and social time in leu of early reading and math.  I’ve always believed that kids NEED to have that time between 0 and 5 to play, explore the world and have fun.  And so that’s what we’ve been doing – exploring the world and having fun.

But now that Wynter is getting close to kindergarten age, it’s time to start getting her into the “school” groove.  I had planned to start doing a “preschool” sort of curriculum: letters, numbers, colors, shapes, art, life skills.  Much of this she already knows so it’s a good “introduction” to school. And Julian will be tagging along, learning the same things, doing the same activities, so they get used to the idea of learning together.

Starting this week, we’re doing homemade “letter a week” units, with activities centered around a letter of the alphabet, touching on all of the learning methods so it sticks.  This week, it’s the letter “A”, of course.   I sat down last night after the kids went to bed and went through the activities books my sister gave me and did some internet research so I had a plan for the week.

We started today, with reviewing the little “A” poster I made (I hope to have a set of these up on their bedroom wall, once for each of the letters):

Later in the morning, I made a Big A and a Little A on the floor with masking tape and had them line up pennies on the tape.  You can see which side Julian did (the left side of the Big A):

Then we did the same thing with their stuffed animals:

Cute, huh?  I hope to keep the tape on the floor until the end of the week.  We’ll see….

I have little activities planned for each day except for Weds and Saturday….little coloring activities, art, songs….small things that won’t take more than half an hour to do – most a lit shorter.  That’s about the extent of Wynter’s attention span right now.  The rest of their time is free time for them to play as they see fit.  I also have a closet full of activities and such to supplement, when they start climbing the walls or look like they need a diversion.

———————-

Julian is very much into learning songs right now.  He has that knack of listening to a song a few times and be able to sing it back to you.  I’ve been taking advantage of that and teaching him song after song.  He knows “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, TWO versions of the ABC song, “Itsy Bitsy Spider”, “London Bridge is Falling Down” and miscellaneous other little ditties he’s learn from PBS kids shows.  I’m currently teaching him “I’m a little teapot” which is a big hit when I do the body motions with him.  (I guess “Mom being silly” is hilarious in his mind.)

The next song on my agenda is one from PBS’s show “Dinosaur Train” that the kids like…it’s called “Every Dinosaur Poops”.  Yeah….that’s what I said…poop.  The first time I heard that song, I almost fell over in shock…. LOL  You can see a video of it at PBS’ Website (scroll down to the videos halfway down the page).

Here are the lyrics:

Today I found out something new,
And everyone else should learn it too
Guess what!
Every dinosaur poops!

For every critter of every species,
the food we don’t use turns into feces.
Call it a stool or call it scat,
everyone does it, and that is that.
EVERY DINOSAUR POOPS!

My Mama told me, that everyone knows
When I dinos gotta go, a dinos gotta go….
Carnivores, Herbivores, even Omnivores,
Every Dinosaur Poops!

Won’t that go over well with their father?  LOL  But it’s the perfect “boy” song – funny, gross but still semi-public friendly, though I sure wouldn’t let them sing that in front of my 100 year old Grand-Aunt, if you know what I mean!

Look what I found at the bottom of the computer box!

Yeah, I know, I know….REALLY outdated software but I keep using it because 1) I know how to use it, 2) it does everything I need it to do and 3) (most importantly) I already own it, so it didn’t cost me anything.

Now I just have to wrestle my way through 2 months worth of pictures…. 

Anyone know where the month of December went to?  I don’t mind that it’s over with – I’m kinda glad that the holiday chaos is behind us – I’m just trying to figure out what happened.  One moment, it was December 6th and now, it’s January 6th and everything inbetween is all a blur of writing, kids tantrums and food.  Ah, the joys of the holidays….

Yes, I know – I need to post pictures.  Still haven’t found the disc with my my photo editing program on it.  Stupid computer just had to crash the day I planned to post pictures.  I’ve been so annoyed at having to reinstall everything ontop of life and everything else, I just haven’t been in the mood to search the boxes in my bedroom for that disc.

You’d think that’d be easy, wouldn’t you?  Well, you havent’ seen the pile of boxes.  *sigh*  A wall of boxes full of books, papers and various “stuff” that I didn’t want to go through until I had somewhere  (i.e. bookcases) to put it all on.  Well, that’s a’changing this week, thanks to Target having a sale of bookcases.  Woot!  I’m getting my bedroom back!  It’s a slow process, sorting through each box, shelving books and finding homes for the “miscellanious stuff” that seems to congregate at the bottom.   I’m amazed at the sheer amount of books I have, even after two moves.  Ugh….

So, yeah, that’s where I am right now.  If you need me, I’m probably buried in a pile of boxes somewhere in my bedroom…

A couple things I want to note before I forget:

• So, it’s 2010.  Julian will be 3 in a week – THREE!  Wow….  Even more mind blowing when my internal calendar reminds me that Wynter will be FIVE this April.  How time flies….
• Talking about Wynter, she made me laugh a few weeks ago: The kids were playing in their room while I was doing something on the computer (probably writing – that’s all I did for the 1st 2 weeks of December).  Wynter came running out to me at one point, proclaiming, “Mama!  Julian got hurt!”  My Mama radar went up instantly.  “Julian?” I called out, “Are you OK?”  He answered back, “Yeah, Mama, I OK.”  *insert big sigh of relief here*  So I tell Wynter, “You guys need to be careful back there.”  And she looks at me with full innocence and tells me, “I’m always careful, Mama.  I always land on my butt.”
• Julian transitioned from Terrible Twos to Terrible Threes a little early.  His favorite phrase these days is “NO!”, usually said in a loud whiny voice that makes your ears bleed.  I hear a lot of  “I don’t want whatever-item-mama-is-trying-to-give-him.” followed by him throwing a tantrum because in reality he wanted whatever-item-mama-is-trying-to-give-him but just didn’t want to tell me that.  *sigh*
• I think Ms. Wynter is gearing up for another growth spurt – she’s been eating everything in sight and demanding more more more!  Oy!  My poor food budget!
• We’re working on potty training the boy.  He’s got the general idea….it’s just getting him to actually sit down long enough to “produce” something that’s a challenge.  He can’t seem to sit still.
• Oh, and have you ever tried to take a of pick of 2 young kids and have them both standing still , looking at the camera, and NOT make faces?  Almost impossible in this house.  Tried to take a pic of the kids last night…..it took 20 or so takes before they finally gave me something I’d be willing to post.  LOL

Anyway, that’s how things are going around here.  Happy New Years to y’all….I hope 2010 treats you well!

Wow…it’s been quiet around here!  Sorry about that.  November was a little crazy around here….finished revising my book (then I realized it’s written in the wrong point-of-view *beats head against desk*), started the 2nd one (it’s on hold now), wrote a few resumes….and then spend the last week and a half of the month in So Cal to celebrate the holiday with my family (aka – driving my family crazy).

Pictures will be posted sometime soon.  We’ve had a small computer snafu that’s really screwed with my schedule.  I woke yesterday morning with plans to make coffee and then spend an hour or so editing and posting pictures.  Imagine my surprise when I sat down at my computer to find it erroring out and crashing.  I did the usual tech support thing and restarted the computer.  It loaded halfway and then hung for 10 minutes before finishing, with multiple errors and no internet access. 

After some troubleshooting on the laptop, I realized it was a losing battle.  The only way to fix it was to wipe the hard drive and start over.  Thankfully, all of my personal data (files, photos, stories, etc) were on an external hard drive already, so I didn’t lose anything….except a day or two’s worth of productivity. 

Scarey thing is…I’ve had this desktop for many many years (we got it right before Wynter was born) and this is the first time I ever reformatted the old beast.   I almost fell over when I realized that…LOL  No wonder it was acting up!!!!  Duh!

So, long story short….once I get my computer squared away and everything reloaded, I’ll post November’s pics.  Thankfully, the family took a lot of pics of the kids while we were down there, so you’ll have a lot to see!

I spent last Saturday shampooing my Living Room carpet.  Yes, I lead a wild and exciting life, don’t I?  But it had to be done.  We had only been in this apartment for two weeks before I started to notice a visible trail across the floor and the kids’ legs and feet always being dirty.   Ew.

My landlord swears that the carpet was cleaned before we moved in and I believe him – it looked clean when we moved in.  This carpet’s probably been cleaned a trillion times in its lifetime.  The problem was that no one actually rinsed out the soap, so the carpet just got dirtier faster!

So, I borrowed a carpet cleaner, mixed some strong vinegar water (to help break up the suds) and made what felt like a trillion passes over the the carpet.  The first few buckets of dirty water had a serious head of bubbles – that’s how soapy it was!  By the end, my apartment smelt like an Easter egg factory but the carpet was clean!  When the sudsing dropped off, I switched to plain hot water, making sure everything was out of the carpet.

I spent the rest of the day moving furniture.  I moved my office area from the dining area to the living room, a better spot for me to supervise the kids while I work (or attempt to work) during the day.

(Enjoy the pic – that’s the cleanest you’re probably ever gonna see my desk.    )

Getting my desk out of the dining area meant we could have an actual dining room table!  *gasp*  Yes, we have an actual table to sit and eat at!  It’s been a very long time since I could say that.  Actually, thinking back, I don’t think I’ve ever had a table to sit and eat at…..I mean, besides my desk. 

I had the table – a large folding table I had used in the last apartment as extra counter place – but no chairs.  Considering the ages of my kids, I thought it best to find used (aka – cheap) chairs.  Yeah, they’d probably be mismatched and ugly but at least I wouldn’t care if the kids destroyed them.

As the week passed, I asked some of my local friends for ideas on where to go to get chairs.  Of course, everyone had an opinion.  A couple friends told me about some thrift stores and consignment stores they knew  about while another told me about some friends who might sell me their old chairs for $100 (it was hard not to laugh – I couldn’t spend that much!).

And then I spoke to another friend this morning across IM:

Me: “I have a table but no chairs.  Gonna have to go thrift store shopping Saturday.  Want to come?”

Her: “Thirft store chairs?  EW!”

Me: “Yeah, well right now that’s all that fits in my budget.  I need four so I have one for me, one for each of the kids and one for my mom to sit on when she visits in December.”

Her: ” Go to IKEA.”

Me: “But I don’t want to spend an arm and a leg-”

Her: “GO.  TO.  IKEA.  They have something for every budget.”

So, I packed up the kids and drove the 30 minutes to the store in Palo Alto.  Let me start with the fact that IKEA is a dangerous place to go when you have no money.  I’d never been to an IKEA before, but I can see why people are always shouting their praises for that store.  It’s HUGE and has a wide variety of furniture and household goods at all sorts of prices.

I finally settled on some plastic and metal chairs ($15). They’re not pretty but you can sit in them, they stack when we don’t need them,  and best of all they fit in my budget.

(((((I also walked out of there with bead abacuses (or is that abacis?) , potties and new step stools  (each $4) for the kids.  Bad bad bad!!!   But that’s another story!  ))))

An so, Chez Chaos now has a redneck dining room set – folding table and cheap plastic chairs.  At least they’re not folding chairs!!!!

(Sorry it’s so dark – not enough light in my kitchen tonight.)

Well, at least they’re easy to clean!  I see a lot of art and cooking projects in our future…. 

—————————————–

The kids are in LOVE with their new toys:

I had seen these around before, usually priced over $20.  IKEA had them for $10 each.   They’ll be a great teaching aid for math (there’s a few programs out there that use a bead abacus to teach basic math ideas) but for now, we’ll use them to practice our counting.

Hey!  Look!  It’s the FIRST of the MONTH and I’m actually posting PICTURES!!!!  OK OK OK, you guys can pick your jaws up from the floor.  I have a lot of pictures this month.  I’m going to try to throw them up here in some logical sequence but I’m tired (thanks to the time change), so things may get a little strange…please be patient with me. 

Let’s start with Julian…..

Somebody found where  stored my headbands….

Helpful, isn’t he?

And lesson learned: if you tell your kid, “Hold still, I want to take a picture of you.” he WILL NOT hold still, but rather move closer and try to take the camera from your hands.

A couple weeks ago, Julian came into the office to show me his “glasses”:

Those are the glasses from his Mr. Potato Head and yes, he can get them on his head….

I was surprised to find two “Sleeping J” photos on the camera this month.  He went from “daily nap” to “I don’t need no stinking nap!” within a week’s time a few months ago.  But every once in a while, after a long day or an early morning, he will finally crash out:

Cute, huh?

And no, I didn’t cover him up.  He brought the blanket from his room, curled in on the chair and fell fast asleep.

Last Julian story: His hair is starting to get really long.  At some point, I’m gonna have to take him for a haircut – I’ve been putting it off becuase 1) I don’t really have the money and 2) I don’t really have the patience to wrestle with him AND try to keep his sister out of trouble.

Whenever I comb his hair, he tells me, “Look, Mama, I’m handsome!”

————————

And now, here’s Wynter:

I noticed that most of the pictures I have of Wynter are ones where she’s doing some sort of activity with her brother. She was super busy this month, always on the move, creating games and pretending all sorts of things.

Here she is as “wild jungle girl” (she just got back from her dad’s):

She also has her moments of “tiredness”.  You can always tell because she sits still for more than five minutes.  Here she is after a long day of playing and bossing her brother around:

I loved that face.  It’s that whole, “Geez, mom’s taking pictures again….” gaze.

And once again, I tried to take a self-portrait of Wynter and I:

Yes, I tried to take one of Julian and I but he won’t hold still long enough – I keep getting side of his head or some other strange pose. The closest I got was:

Half a kid! But at least he was looking at the camera! LOL

—————————-

We don’t use a lot of paper towels in our house (I seem to use a lot of baby wipes and Clorox wipes instead), but when I do finally finish off a roll, I cut the cardboard insert in half and let them play Pirates:

Julian tells me:  “Mama, I’m a PIRATE!  AURG!!!!!”  Thank you, Dora, for that one….

It took some conjoling but I finally got them to look through their “telescopes” at the same time and hold it long enough for my camera to take the picture:

—————————–

I also made them a tent last week:

They loved it for about an hour, and then Julian kept trying to drag it down. *rolls eyes* Boys….

——————————

Lastly, there’s coloring time:

Coloring time is a supervised activity in our house. I wouldn’t put it past Julian to go in search of a “larger canvas”, so I sit with them and read or do some other activity while they color.

It’s still a scribble of lines and a chaos of colors but they have fun…..

While eating our early dinner tonight, I asked Wynter, “What do you want to do tonight?”  “I want to watch cartoons,” was her answer.  Tired of Blues Clues, Dora and Spongebob, I took it upon myself to select tonight’s entertainment, popping in one of our Bugs Bunny DVDs.  After a long weekend of work (I cleaned the living room carpet and moved furniture all day Saturday) Bugs is right about my level tonight.

Best of all, the kids are fascinated.  They haven’t moved from their spot for the last 20 minutes….

The last time I put on Bugs Bunny, they loved it…until we got to a short where Bugs pretended to die.  Wynter fell to the ground and SOBBED at me, “THE BUNNY IS DEAD!!!!!”  Even when Bugs popped back up, alive and well, she continued to be inconsolable.  So, now, Bugs has to be a “supervised” entertainment.  Thankfully, I remember a lot of the Bugs Bunny from my childhood, so I know when to quickly fast forward. 

There are 2 things I’m thankful for about this new apartment:

1. There’s more room for the kids to run.
2. I don’t have a downstairs neighbor.

I’m reminded of this every time the kids go running through the house, sounding like a herd of wild horses stampeding down the canyons.  Oy……