Category: Kids

I wasn’t going to ask, really. I was studiously ignoring Miss B while she tromped through the house at the behest of her brother, returning outside with overly large cups of water. No, I told myself, I’ll just pretend I’m not seeing that. It’s what I do sometimes to keep my sanity.

Alas, curiosity got the better of (as it often does). I peeked outside to see what they were doing:

They were searching for worms, so they could catch a bird. This was about as successful as their attempt to catch a rabbit.

The Marvelous Miss B made a startling announcement the other day: she no longer likes Disney Princesses.

I know! Shocking. Although she amended that. She likes Jasmine and Mulan, but that’s it.

Her new aspiration is to be a teenager. This is far better than being a princess. The evidence:

As a teenager, she is in charge of 2-3 younger siblings. (Where these siblings come from, I have no idea. The ether, perhaps.) She has car keys and “driving lessons.” She has a best friend named Casey. They talk a lot on the cell phone. The one-sided conversations go something like this:

“Oh, Casey, that’s just great. That’s really great. Oh, I know … that’s just great, Casey.”

Apparently, things are going great with Casey. And no matter who is on the phone, she ends the conversation with: “Love you, bye.”

And, Miss B has a boyfriend. His name is Jason, because that’s a “cool” name. He has flat hair and bangs (also cool) and possibly a boy necklace.  Once, when Jason called, she looked at me, then pulled out her phone with a sigh.

“He always calls me,” she said in a he’s a boy, what can you do about it kind of way.

But perhaps the best part of Miss B’s secret life is her brother is the younger sibling. This drives him crazy, even when I explain to him how she longs to be older, stronger, bigger–just once.

And in her secret life, she is.

So, the Easter Bunny woke up yesterday to snow! Yes, we had a white Easter. It was looking very Christmassy outside. But we had colorful eggs to counteract all that pristine white:

The kids went to town with the wax crayon. Andrew wrote his name on one of the eggs; Kyra wrote Mommy. She also wrote Boo on another (why, I don’t know). Andrew wrote E=MC2 on yet another (again, I don’t know why). You see 11 eggs because one cracked during boiling. (Just one! I think that counts as a cooking non-disaster as far as I’m concerned.)

On Friday, we surprised the kids with a little getaway. There’s a hotel with a mini-water park (really, it’s just two small pools, some slides, and so on) that they have much love for. We stared there once when the power went out for a couple of days.

Anyway, we told them we were going out to eat. Bob took the kids while I stayed back and packed their swim stuff and an overnight bag. We ate dinner at the restaurant next to the hotel. Andrew, Mr. Theatrics, was all: “Oh, I can smell the chlorine. It smells so good. Please can we get a room and go swimming?”

“Oh, no, no, no. Easter weekend, I’m sure they don’t have any rooms.”

And so on with the dramatics and denials.

We left the restaurant, then drove around to where our room was. The kids were bouncing, not quite sure what was going on. We still didn’t say anything, just grabbed the bags, headed up the stairs, and into our room.

Then they got it.

So even though it snowed all weekend long, a good, if exhausting, time was had by all.

So, I ran to the store this afternoon to do a little survival grocery shopping. I left Kyra by my computer desk, quite happily working on one of her paper projects. Give her a ream of my computer paper, crayons, scissors, and some tape, and she’ll go to town. In fact, I’ve said, “Wow, B, you’re going to town,” so many times, that now, she’ll glance up while working and ask: “Mommy, am I going to town?”

She’s made her own toolbox and tools out of paper, a paper baby and a paper baby carrier (along with rattle, bottle, and so on). I wasn’t sure exactly what she was after this time, but it looked cute. However, between the time I left for the grocery store and returned home, there was a meltdown of epic proportions.

Apparently, she was trying to make a paper stuffed animal. She had the front, and the back, and figured out the way to make sides. Then she put the whole thing together–inside out.

How this went from meltdown to Bob pulling out the sewing machine to make her a real stuffed animal, I still don’t know. But he did. And since you can’t make one child a stuffed animal without making the other one a stuffed animal, Andrew got one too. Kyra named her bear Buttons. Andrew named his manatee (we’re calling it a manatee at any rate) Dairy–because it’s a sea cow. The laughs, they never stop around here.