Quinn + Lila

Happy Valentine’s Day…or, as Quinn would say, Happy Thanksgiving.  Not sure why but he mixes up Valentine’s Day with Thanksgiving.

I had a very unwelcome Valentine visit me starting Monday night- the stomach flu.  Of course we still had Valentines for school to make and treats to bake because we’re procrastinators like that.  Good thing stomach flu is no match for Ryan, who always turns into Super Dad when I get sick.  He helped Quinn finish addressing his Valentines, packed up all of their stuff for school, cut up strawberries for Lila’s class, and baked brownies for Quinn’s class (with sprinkle hearts on top, no less).  I feel a little better now- think stomach flu has his bags packed and is almost out the door- but he did a nice job of ruining my Valentine’s Day!  We managed to still have a candlelit dinner with ripped red construction paper serving as rose petals on the table.  And we used the “fancy” napkins, at Quinn’s request.  Never mind that the kids and Ryan ate a frozen pizza while I ate chicken noodle soup, it was still nice.  Maybe not romantic, but nice.  Quinn had soccer practice and the kids capped their evening off with a bubble bath…a must on Valentine’s Day.  My how times have changed since Ryan and I spent our first Valentine’s Day together eleven years ago!

Lila and Quinn have an official brother-sister relationship.  For the most part they play well together and they can make each other laugh like no other, although they definitely have their moments.  Lila gets annoyed at Quinn because he often gets in her personal space and Quinn gets annoyed at Lila because she wants to do everything he does.  One of my favorite things that Lila does when copying Quinn is what I call the Hype Man.  Quinn will say something and Lila will repeat one or two of the most important words in a very excited tone.  She’s our own little Flavor Flav.

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We “fixed” our TV this weekend.  Ryan and I went out on Friday night and needed some extra recoop time on Saturday morning, so at 6:30 on Saturday morning I fixed the TV with Quinn’s Handy Manny wrench.  It was a little under two weeks of no TV, but I actually noticed a difference in their wanting to play rather than watch a show.  We are setting up some new rules for the TV to hopefully prolong the positive effects of this little experiment- no watching TV in the morning before school and no TV every day.  I’d like it to be something that is more of a treat than something that is expected.

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We’re trying to get the kids to do some more chores around the house.  Lila loves to set the table and picks out silverware with each person in mind, meaning that she gives herself three spoons and gives me a humongous serving fork each time.  And Quinn feeds Fenway and helps straighten up by putting things away.  It’s helpful and it keeps them both busy, although does cause for some interesting finds.  I opened the pantry today and found a can of supposed-to-be refrigerated dough.  I later opened my armoire (where I hang clothes) and found a pair of boots stuffed in one of the drawers.  I did ask Quinn to put them in my closet…I guess I should have clarified.

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This is a fun age with both kids.  Quinn seems so old and is constantly cracking us up with the things he says.  This weekend he has started calling me “baby” and just today expanded it to “regular baby”, whatever that means.  I’ll ask him to do something and he’ll respond with, “No problem regular baby.”  And he calls Ryan “bro”.  It’s too funny.  And Lila has started asserting her independence, which is both funny and tiring.  She’s also joining Quinn in the class clown category- she knows when she is doing something funny and loves to get laughs from people. These kids definitely don’t lack in personality!

Lila has this weird new obsession with putting socks on her hands.  Anytime she sees a sock laying around, she makes a beeline and shouts “sock!  me!  Lila!  sock!”

Sometimes I have to fight her to put the socks on her feet instead of her hands.

And by sometimes I mean every morning.

I’ve given up trying to stop her.  We now compromise and my only criteria is that the socks are clean.  If there is one thing I’ve learned in my four and a half years of parenting it’s to pick my battles.  Case in point.

These two made a hefty bet on the Giants-Patriots game.

Looks like Uncle Ryan has to cash in.  Good thing baseball season is coming up so Ryan can redeem himself!

We were at my parents’ house on Saturday and Quinn took a liking to some of my old toys.  He has always played with my brother’s old matchbox cars, but this time he was into my collection of My Little Pony.  I hadn’t seen these things in ages and I’m proud to say that the braids I put in their tails and manes still looked great!

But he definitely put a boy spin on them.  I’m pretty sure I never made the ponies fight one another.

Or make one of the ponies die from the fight.

He also played with my old dollhouse.  By making the people jump from the rooftop deck and the third story windows.  He’s such a boy.

We got to spend a little time with the kids’ favorite cousin, Carter.  We attempted another cousins picture, but this is the best we got:

I swear I do brush my kids’ hair!  And does anyone know at what age the “cheese” face stops infiltrating all pictures?  Cause I’d like a picture where Quinn’s eyes aren’t being swallowed by his cheeks because he is cheese-smiling so hard.

The kids were pretty tired when we got home.  Before we hit up our Superbowl party, Lila got in some down time.

Sprawling on the couch sans pants with a good book.  What is better than that on a Sunday afternoon?

In an effort to combat the winter doldrums, I put 20 pounds of rice in a bin, threw some little toys in there, and let the kids go to town.  They love digging through it and building hills with the rice.  I love that it keeps them occupied for over half an hour straight and they play together without fighting so I can get stuff done around the house.  Fenway loves eating the rice that spills over the sides, which there is a lot of.  So far, that’s 4 out of 4 “likes”.  But Ryan…oh, Ryan.  He walked in yesterday with the kids and saw the box sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor.  He stared at it for a few seconds- I know his brain was going haywire when he saw the little tiny particles that could potentially get all over the house.  He was quiet for a few seconds and then he said, “What’s that?”

“It’s a rice box!  For the kids to play in!  It’s great for sensory input!”

Silence.

The kids were thrilled and Quinn mentioned a number of times how he loved it and how fun it was.  Lila agreed, like she always does, with a resounding “Yeah!”

Ryan was still silent.  Just watching them play.  I was waiting for smoke to come out of his head as his brain overheated from watching the pieces of rice get all over the kitchen.

“You hate it, don’t you?”

“No, it’s just…”

“I know.  The rice.  But it’s easy to sweep up.  And it will actually make me sweep and vacuum the kitchen floor more because I’ll have to when they are done playing.”

Laugh.  “Ok, I guess that’s one way to look at it.  I still…it’s…”

“You hate it.”

“Ok, fine, yes, I hate it.”

But 4 out of 5 Pudloskis?  That’s a winning activity in my book!

Although as I was sweeping the floor for the billion and fourth time last night, I was slowly moving to Ryan’s side.  I guess 3 out of 5 is still decent.

We are in the midst of an experiment in our house.  Nothing drastic, but hopefully drastic enough to the kids that it will result in some different behaviors.  Our TV “broke” and just can’t be fixed.  (Miraculously it works once the kids are in bed!)  The kids don’t watch a ton of TV, usually about 20 minutes in the morning while we’re getting ready and half an hour or so in the evening while I’m making dinner.  And, of course, early morning cartoons on the weekends.

But I started to notice that the more free we were with TV watching, the more Quinn whined when we turned the TV off.  And would beg to watch a show the second he woke up or the second we got home from school.  Combine that with his need for physical activities and we decided that a break from TV would do everyone good.

To be honest, I think this experiment will be hard for me and Ryan.  I use the TV to occupy them so I can get dinner prepped and started before Ryan gets home from work.  And we also rely on it for early weekend mornings when we can lay on the couch and grab a few more minutes of sleep while the kids watch a show.  But I know it’s not a bad thing for us all to develop new habits, especially when it means that we will all interact and play together more.  And maybe I will finally get the Zaboomafoo theme song out of my head, where it has been playing nonstop for about a week!

It’s only Day 3 but so far, so good.  It has helped that it’s been amazingly nice outside so one day after work we went for a walk and yesterday the kids played together (well, slid across the kitchen floor on their stomachs) while I made dinner.    Our goal is to go two weeks with no TV and then re-assess.  I’m certainly not anti-TV but I think I want to make it something that is more of a privilege than an expectation.

Luckily we are going to a friend’s house to watch the Superbowl, so we don’t have to explain why our TV was miraculously fixed for a few hours on Sunday evening and then broke again right after the game.

Once in a while I start to feel like I am doing this whole parenting thing wrong.  Using the wrong tactics, saying the wrong things, just not doing it right.  It usually happens when the kids seem more wild than normal, which is quite often lately.  Quinn is pushing everyone, we’re starting to see glimpses of the terrible twos with Lila, both of them tackle each other. A lot.  But then something happens that makes me realize that maybe we aren’t doing it all wrong.

I had Lila with me at the grocery store last night.  We were checking out and the bagger was loading up our groceries.  Lila was watching our groceries get packed into the bags and loaded into the cart.  She looked up at the bagger as she put a bag into our cart, smiled, and (without prompting) told her “thank you”.  It seems like such a small thing but I was so proud of her to spontaneously give a thank you to someone who often doesn’t even get thank yous from adults.

Then when we got home Lila sat down to take her shoes off.  She couldn’t get them off and was starting to get agitated.  I was in the middle of something and told her I would help her in a minute. Quinn stopped his car race, ran over to Lila, and took her shoes off so gently without even saying anything.  He then gave her a sweet little hug and ran back to his cars like nothing had happened.

The reason I was so proud of these acts is, while they seem really small, neither one of them did it because I asked them to or prompted them.  They noticed an action of someone else and realized that the person should be acknowledged or helped.  I think these little, unsolicited acts of everyday kindness really show a person’s character.

So maybe we’re not doing it all wrong.  Although I’m pretty sure that when Quinn said the word “dick” this morning at breakfast because he was repeating something in a Van Halen song that we let him listen to at bedtime every night…well, that’s definitely doing parenting wrong!

(In our defense, we didn’t realize and have no clue what song that is in.  Ryan’s job now is to listen to all 31 Van Halen songs to make sure they are clean.)

(Also, Ryan’s smart thinking turned Quinn’s phrase of “sick a dick” into “Dave is sick”.  I thought he was talking about Dave from Imagination Movers.  He looked at me with a face of disappointment and informed me that it was actually Dave of David Lee Roth.  And even Quinn knew that.)

I was reading Quinn part of his Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs before bed tonight.  I got to a part about the size of the bones in the dinosaurs’ skeletons.

Me: blah blah blah skeletons blah blah blah

Quinn: No, skellis.

Me: What?

Quinn: Skellis.  It’s another word for skeletons.

Me:  I don’t think so buddy.  I don’t think that is another word for skeleton.

Quinn: Yes it is.

Me: Skellis?  It’s not another word for skeleton.

Quinn: Ok, Mom.  You can think that.  You just use what word you want to.

To make it even more clear that he thought I was an idiot, he was patting my head while he said this and used a tone that conveyed the message “I know you are wrong but I’m just going to humor you.”  I’ve already lost him…

Ryan’s work had a mustache contest for a Big Brothers Big Sisters fundraiser.  The ‘staches grown were pretty impressive.  Ryan rocked a pencil thin mustache- one of his coworkers accurately described it as a creepy mix between Salvador Dali and Snidely Whiplash from Bullwinkle.

the mustache crew (Ryan on the left)

After taking a second look at this picture, they remind me of a weird(er) version of The Village People.

The kids and I stopped by the office at the end of the day to do some childcare juggling and Quinn was able to get in on the mustache action:

Lila was pretty creeped out.  Rightly so.

For even more mustache love, one of Ryan’s coworkers performed a rap he wrote called Mustache Anthem.  Seriously.  Ryan makes a little cameo in it.  I’m so proud.