MOVE update #2

Let's see...what has happened since the last (and first) move update? For one, we sorted through 6 years of household accumulation including owning our first home and the births and babyhoods of both of our children, plus less sentimental items including absurd numbers of packages of Top Ramen discovered in a storage space, lots of hideous shirts of unknown origin, and many many cat toys discovered under furniture. We haven't bought the cats any toys since the children were born, when we discovered they are more fun to buy presents for (and we no longer have to suffer through pervasive jingling all night long), so those were some antique cat toys.

Anyway, what have we accomplished?
1. Sorted an entire house into "Sea" (sea shipment, heading across the Panama canal for 6 weeks), "Air" (stuff we'll need for the last 6 weeks in Seattle), "Storage" (very small pile left in our basement), and "Yard Sale" with appropriate stickers applied. The first three were provided by the moving company; Amelia set up a sweatshop and made dozens of "Yard Sale" tags by herself. Here are some examples of massive piles of stuff ready to go:

2. Entertained a crowd of movers (Mary, while I was at work) while keeping track of children and making sure things went in the correct piles. The movers first said 3 days, revised down to 2 days in the pre-move survey when they saw we didn't fit into the typical 4-person American family house size (gasp! Only a 2-bed, 1-bath!), and then ended up taking less than 6 hours. They commended us on how organized and prepared we were - all credit here goes to Mary!

3. Moved our own stuff to our temporary furnished apartment. We now live in the South Lake Union neighborhood. It's really fun to have the opportunity to explore a new neighborhood while being within the same city. The kids are delighted by the huge playground across the street, and given the tiny size of the apartment we spend a ton of time there! Amelia continues with her stigmati-building obsession with monkey bars at the new playground. And the kids are treated like spectacles as there are very few of them in this area - many more young hip urbanites. Here are some pictures of the kids being "urban."

Playing around with some public art outside the nearby Whole Foods (after one trip I now drive 3x as far to pay 1/3 as much)

Amelia showing off a new Amelia-esque pose at their newly beloved playground across the street.

Shopping together at the neighborhood weekly farmers market.

Taking in the fountain scene after attending the pride parade and festival.

4. The big yard sale came next. We held it on a blazing hot day (my birthday!) to coincide with a pretty cool antique/hot rod car show they have in our neighborhood every year. This leads to a lot more traffic in the neighborhood. We managed to get everything out by the allotted time, although I was unwilling to spend an hour applying prices to everything, so I just put out 5 sheets and had a $10, $5, $1, 25 cent, and free pile. The aforementioned Top Ramen went in the free pile and made some people very happy. The traffic, nice day, and of course my winning salesmanship led to a lot of good sales. I would say that almost everything that had true value did sell, with the exception of some nice enough sweaters. On a hot day no one can consider buying sweaters! At the end of the day Mary bundled the remainder up into a large pile for a thrift store.

5. Here is where my hat really goes off to Mary. After getting the entire house sorted into appropriate piles, including hours of work, she then took over entirely as soon as we moved to the apartment. It was time to get the house ready for our wonderful new tenants! We were very lucky to find the perfect tenants, or rather they found us. They even want the house for the full 3 years we'll be gone. They seem to adore the house like we do, and they're really excited to be living there, to take care of it and the yard, and to really enjoy it. YAY! Anyway, Mary worked all weekend, then every weekday following that until the 1st, starting her shift at 6pm when I got home and usually getting back to the apartment at midnight.

Getting the house ready, though, was a TON of work. Mary repainted all of the rooms, many with two coats in areas where we'd hung a lot of art or there had been fading/staining. She cleaned and cleaned and cleaned some more. She sorted through all the detritus of which there was a LOT. She did countless dump runs, fixed clogged sinks, replaced hardware on some cabinets, basically all of those things that you think "Hmm, I should get around to that" but then never do. She could barely walk as of July 1!

So now we're happy tenants in our apartment and we have happy tenants in our house. It's not 100% smooth sailing - sometimes the apartment seems a bit...cramped...and we definitely miss our house at times. But we're enjoying all the fun changes and trying to take advantage of the remainder of summer we have here. In fact, we're heading off camping for the long weekend...but I suggested and then insisted that Mary stay home to recuperate from the endless hours of hard labor. Going camping with this group (7 adults, 9 children 2-5) may not be the most relaxing!

Flashback time!!

We had a great playdate with Amelia's former nanny (ages 6 months to 22 months) and her sons in June. I've just been going through pictures for the month of June and was delighted to find this picture of Amelia and her nanny's older son sitting together in the sandbox:

Now check out THIS picture from Amelia's first birthday of the same two kids sitting together in a sandbox!!

5-year old girls and their stigmati

Amelia and her friend Zoe, also 5, were playing together yesterday and at one point I noticed they had matching palms. Both have deep nasty blisters right in the center of their palms from endless, obsessive monkey-bar and monkey-ring swinging. The picture above was, of course, staged. The hands that are also covered with ink are Amelia's.

I can't actually speak to whether Zoe is as obsessive about it as Amelia. Amelia's obsession with monkey bars and rings is way over-the-top. We're trying to counsel her to open her mind a bit to other forms of playground activity. Wherever we are, she just does the rings/bars over and over and over and over and over (fill in 500 more "and over's" here). She is determined and obsessed, and if it's a tricky curving one or something she hasn't tried before, she'll do it over and over until she's completed it in both directions each visit. This means there is often a lot of crying, wailing, flinging herself around on the ground, and hitting herself on the face. We tend to alternate between letting her work it out herself and telling her if she is so clearly miserable we're leaving the playground.

This might just be the first thing we've seen her be single-minded and completely obsessed to the point of pain about. She usually leaves the playground now with bloody palms...hence the stigmati. But her joy when she's flying through the air is impossible to miss.

The big MOVE update!

I have been severely chastised by several people for not doing a better job of keeping everyone updated on our move-to-England process. As I chat blithely away on the blog about things the kids said or did, our lives are the swirl of (happy) chaos that apparently comes with moving countries.

I'll try to be organized here.

What have we done?

1. Decided to move! England, London outskirts (waaay outskirts, I'll be working in Reading). In a very Hobbit-like way, everything out there ends in "-shire." Reading is in Berkshire, which borders Oxfordshire, which borders Buckinghamshire. And within each happy shire are many many towns, villages, and a few cities. I learned to my fascination that a town cannot be a city unless it has a cathedral, no matter how large it grows. So Reading is forever a town, despite being very large, whereas there are some small sleepy "cities" that cling to the term because of their cathedrals.

2. "Familiarization trip" - Mary and I went to the area to get a good in-depth feeling for it to help inform us as to where we should live, options for the kids' schooling, etc. We had a fantastic relocation services/housing consultant and with that and help from a schools consultant we had a very successful trip. We headed home armed with a town to live in and a school for the kids. We picked Henley-on-Thames, which is a picturesque town on the river Thames about 20 minutes from where I'll be working. Since I'll be doing a lot more travelling for work, we chose a location closer to my office so that I can be home quickly. Henley-on-Thames is just beautiful and we left town pretty excited to return. We also found a fantastic school, where Amelia will start Year 1 and Oliver will start "Lower Nursery" first thing in September! (Note: kids start kindergarten a year earlier in the UK, so Amelia really is entering first grade. She may be behind in a few things like coin recognition and perhaps handwriting, but we expect she'll catch up pretty quickly). Thank you Bubbe for watching both kids for the whole week!

3. Visas secured!! This was a cause of much stress for me given the massive amounts of paperwork and zipping around town to the Office of Homeland Security for "biometric data collection." Which sounds way more exciting than it is - it's actually just fingerprints and a digital photo. No cheek-swabbing, no retinal scan, none of that. Anyway, we finally mailed off all of the stuff to the visa expeditor (yay for Sandy!) and were graced with visa-laden passports the next week. Hello, my name is Lorraine and I'm a Tier 2 Migrant. I find Mary's the most funny - she is a Tier 2 Partner. I've pointed out to her that I may at any point decide to go looking for a Tier 1 Partner.

4. House hunting trip - we just got back this past Friday evening. After four action-packed days (I'm actually not kidding; it was exhausting!) we ended up with a lovely house that will be perfect for our family. The house even has a name in addition to an address. It's roomy and will have a full-time guest bedroom for all of you visitors!! There's a big backyard and Mary and I subsequently had a good time thinking up ideas for the kids for their new huge backyard. We're both really excited imagining them running through the house for the first time, especially Amelia who loves exploring new spaces. Luckily our fantastic housing consultant Louise was on the case, because she submitted a massive list of things we needed changed before we'd sign a lease - and they agreed to all of them! So the hideous red hallway carpet, nasty blue floral dining room carpet, and stained bathroom carpet will all be removed and replaced along with many other things. It's been extensively "lived in" over the past several years by a family with 4 small boys. We're fine with our house feeling real and well-loved but would prefer the large heaps of rotting food and dirty clothes gone.

This past week we also put in the (very expensive!!) orders for all of Amelia's school uniform pieces. Thank you Grandma and Grandpa for taking both kids the entire week!

5. Got a post office box! I'll send this address out at some point, so people can have a US and UK address for us.

6. Cancelled the gym. Note: do not ever join Gold's Gym. The process to quit is totally absurd (involving requirements for certified mail) and sure to lead to Judge Judy cases.

7. Had a million relocation project management meetings, tax consultations with teams of tax experts and attorneys on both sides of the pond, benefits consultations, etc etc etc.

What do we still have to do?

1. Tomorrow - yes I said tomorrow - the movers arrive to take everything out for the sea shipment. Mary and I have been working madly since we returned in an attempt to get everything sorted into:
- yard sale
- sea shipment
- store in basement
- got to temp housing with us
- throw away

It's looking pretty good but it's still sure to be a huge day tomorrow around here. Mary will be handling all of it while I'm off at work.

2. Move into our temporary housing. We do this tomorrow!! We'll be down in a different neighborhood which will be fun to explore - but I'm feeling massive pangs of missing our "real" house already, and I'm sure I'll msis our neighborhood. We decided to do temp housing on the Seattle side rather than the UK side (since we're shipping our sea shipment, 7 weeks, now rather than right when we leave) so that we'd do the unfamiliar thing in the familiar surroundings of Seattle.

3. Enjoy what Seattle has to offer this summer - we'll go camping once, one other little road trip, lots of outdoors, swimming, etc.

4. Mary and the kids leave for Virginia August 1st. I need to stay here for work for a bit over a week, then I fly to Virginia August 10th. We spend a few days there all together, then we're off to England August 14!!

5. The kids' school starts Sept 3....and "real life" will officially embark.


I will try to do a better job of move updates. Please comment if you have any questions so I know what to talk about!

Quick one

Just a quick note (big blog coming, really!) to jot down something Oliver said today while he was sharing something long and rambling, as we were driving on a road that leads past the zoo:

"No, we're not going to the zoo - we take the bus to go to the zoo, not our car. I like going to the zoo - my favorite is the penguins. I was watching the penguins which were splashing into the water. Penguins use their wings to swim through the water - OH! - just like birds use their wings to fly through the air. It's just the same!"

Then he demonstrated to show how similar penguins swimming and birds flying look.

Comments on Amelia

I exchanged some pictures with Amelia's preschool teacher this last week of school - of Amelia sitting pressed closely to the object of and ready participant in her love/hate relationship that has extended all school year. She and A have had extreme highs and extreme lows and ended up their preschool tenure holding hands, giggling together, and as close as can be.





A comment from Amelia's teacher over email summarized the situation pretty well:

Amelia is a child of passion. She loves very much or not at all. Fortunately for us, it is mostly love. I would love to hear from you when she reaches adolescence.

A storied history of self-expression

Amelia has always believed that one can purely express oneself through self-adornment. Sure she enjoys accessorizing, deciding on clothing, browsing through piles of jewelry and hair clips. But what better, truer method of self-adornment than body art?

Let's take a brief survey back in time:

1. Amelia, still 2, opted to take an Aboriginal body art approach with a late night white paint experiment. The blog from that incident even includes a little video confession.

http://beanqueenamelia.blogspot.com/2007/04/criminal-mug-shots-and-confession.html

2. Amelia approached her 3rd birthday with a sudden enthusiasm for self-tattooing, marking a possible future as a prison artist.

http://beanqueenamelia.blogspot.com/2007/04/turning-3-series.html

3. And then of course, one of my all-time favorites. The late night Vaseline grease-em-up party. The capstone event being her long and noisy struggle to get out of her bedroom with Vaseline-covered hands.

http://beanqueenamelia.blogspot.com/2007/06/return-of-evil-twin.html

The three above incidents occurred during a hectic and moisturizing-obsessed phase in her late-2s and early-3s. Since then we've managed to channel her passion for self-adornment via more constructive channels, including body painting in the bathtub, liberal moisturizing after bath, stickers, and plenty of time digging in the dirt.

Imagine my surprise when I came across my now very mature 5 year old and her gullible trusting 2.5 year old brother looking like this the other morning:




"We have a terrible case of the measles" she reported. "They're washable and non-toxic" she followed up with quickly.

Sigh.

Must he?

Go flying down the ramp on his scooter?

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Must he play the tortured artist, crying and wailing "But I have a band! I have to go back to my band!!!" as I dragged him away from this delight he found at a friend's house??

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A truer sentence never spoke....

This is one of the top Amelia-isms from my point of view for how simply yet purely true it was.

Amelia and I had a really lovely outing yesterday after her preschool 'graduation' and party (this is her last week of preschool!). Mary took Oliver home for a nap, and Amelia and I went out by ourselves - first to see the movie Up (we loved it) then to get a coffee and chocolate milk, then to our delight we happened upon a bookstore. Amelia had an hour to read anything she could get her hands on, and we picked out a couple of new books for Oliver.

While Amelia was reading some books, I was standing by the parenting section and picked up "Your 5 year old" by Louise Ames. Amelia walked by and glanced at the cover, and I smiled and said "Now I will really be able to figure you out."

Amelia just smiled and said, "But I'm not just any 5-year old."

Oliver at 2.5: Reading next?

Having been through the joys (yay, no need to entertain her on a 7 hour car trip!) and challenges (I'm going to trust librarians/bookstore employees and cross my fingers that each next huge book she picks out doesn't have anything inappropriate in it seeing as how I haven't been able to pre-read for a year) of a very early reader (Amelia started just after 3), we had no intention of pushing Oliver down that path. The experience with Amelia was perfect in that she informed us she was reading, then I would sit with her and listen to her before bedtime when she wanted, which helped her learn how to pronounce new words. Very little work, and at 3.5 she was independently silently reading so no work at all!

Now here comes Oliver. Everyone has been telling us since my pregnancy that he would talk later (boys!) and wouldn't be verbal like Amelia at all (boys!). These helpful warnings included her early reading - no way would he be doing that; he'd be too busy playing with cars. He is indeed extremely busy playing with cars, but he has really shocked me lately by showing some amazing early reading skills. He's sounding out words that are around him and using his really good memory and phonics skills to figure out what other words are. Yes, it just so happens that he loves a video we have with singing letters, but that doesn't exactly make every kid start reading at 2.5. So I thought it would be fun to show a couple of videos of him doing what he's been doing lately.

First - here he is sounding out a few simple words around him. I just took little snippets of video over a couple of days and put them together so there are a few examples.

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Second, this is a book that he picked out of a giveaway basket at a store. I read it to him once, and admittedly it's an extremely simple formula. But after that single reading, he reads it flawlessly outloud. More interesting is that becauce of his good phonics skills he can figure out what most of the words are. This video shows examples of me asking him questions to show that.

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He really is into this whole thing now. He'll walk by saying something like "Trike. Tr- tr- what makes the 'tr' sound??" I haven't done the sitting and listening to him read before bedtime yet. We'll see if it's something he asks for. The kid is only 2 and there's plenty of time!

The girl makes me laugh

First of all, this story from last night is fit for the stage. Amelia and I were both in the bathroom, where she was changing into her nightgown. I was gazing at some water puddles on the floor of unspecified origin.

Amelia: "What are you looking at?"

Me: "Oh, I just noticed there's some water on the floor."

Amelia: (sighs and turns around to remove hand towel from its ring) "It's okay; I'll take care of it. I don'd mind doing the work. I'm the only one in this house who doesn't mind the work. Mommy doesn't like doing work, you don't like doing work.....I feel like I'm Cinderella, except no one is coming to rescue me."

That last bit was so masterfully delivered I pretty much just stood there agape, before I fumbled out something about how she would be able to rescue herself from anything she encountered.

------

Laughing with raised eyebrows moment #2

Amelia came into the room cradling her lifelike baby doll from Bubbe. She had named the doll, creatively, Amelia #2 when she received it. This was all about to change.

Amelia: "I've decided her name is not Amelia anymore. Her name is now Couragea."

Me: (barely misses spitting out coffee) "Couragea? Really? Tell me why."

Amelia: (tenderly cradling Couragea and looking into her eyes) "She told me that she was ready to go off to war, and she was very courageous and left for war....and Mama, she came back completely unharmed!"

Me: (at a complete loss) "...."

Oh, and by the way - the picture above is how she looked all day today. She designed her own fresh-flower accessory, pointing out that she would be able to smell it all day.

Ahhh! Off we go!

The picture says it all...

Oliver meets the computer!

Oliver has had one or two opportunities to play with a computer at the library, but that was with me sitting beside him navigating. The other night Amelia was playing on her new hand-me-down computer (THANK YOU AUNT TRACY!!) and Oliver begged to have a computer too. I decided if heavily supervised I'd let him try to play on mine, and thought it would be interesting seeing how he got on with a mouse.

The answer? Superbly! I know this is no surprise "these days" how digital-friendly kids are, but man - he was immediately clicking, dragging and dropping, and having a great time. The only problem he had was getting the mouse caught on the table edge.

I of course took a tiny little video to commemorate his first experience using a computer solo at 2.5 years old!

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Amelia's eyes

Amelia has always had a very expressive face, but as she gets older she's moving it all into her eyes. It is astounding, seriously astounding, what she can do with them. She makes them "dead" when she's "done" with you or dismissive and this is something she came up with on her own, as we certainly don't look at her like that and she hasn't watched anything but fluffy cartoons!

I managed to catch a few shots over the past weeks. It's not nearly as effective in the photo, but I think you can get a feel for it.

This first one I had just said something to get her to giggle and she's showing me how unamused she is. Excuse the dirty face, they'd been outdoors ALL day!


Then I was telling her it's okay to not have success catching (one of my mom's) chickens the first try and she was totally disagreeing:


A different day, a different reason to use Dead Eyes on her mother. Sometimes when I try to make her laugh, she looks at me like this and says, "Ha. Ha. Ha." in this flat voice. It is so funny and sophisticated but also freaky.



Don't worry - she's still my happy girl often enough. I find this remarkable because she's so unique in this area and have had at least 15 stranger parents over the past 6 months at playgrounds say 'OMG did you see that look she just gave you???!" to which I sigh and say yes.....

My happy girl!

Surefire way to get a boy out of a cranky spot: kidnapping!

While we were on a visit to Bubbe's house this weekend....

Oliver was in a full-on 2.5 year old grump after his nap. He was sitting there with his arms folded (hmm, where did he learn that?) refusing to do anything or talk to anyone. Amelia, meanwhile, was buzzing around outside. She took matters into her own hands. She walked up to Oliver with a child-sized wheelbarrow, handed it to him, and said,

"Oliver, I am the White Witch. Would you like to be my helper dwarf and help me kidnap children? My plan is to fill this wheelbarrow with flowers to attract the children, then when they come to look at the flowers, we'll capture them!"

Oliver: "Yeah, okay!" He grabbed the wheelbarrow handles and marched off following her, shouting "Let's go capture children!!"

Ahhh, just warms the heart.

Why I think I've just had a pichua!

Last night as we strolled towards Amelia's swim class:

Amelia: "...the word for that is pichua."

Me: "For what?"

Amelia: "When you do the same thing in different ways in one day. I picked the same type of flower in two different places at two different times today. It's not a coincidence, it's a pichua."

Another new word courtesy Amelia.

Oliver the very chatty 2.5 year old

Last night, as he walked past me on his way down the hall to the bathroom, "Can you imagine?!? I have to go potty again!"

This weekend, as he played on his "skateboard" which was actually a fragment of wood my mom gave him to nail with earlier that day. "Darn it! Darn it, my skateboard is ruined!" He then proceeded to "fix" it with a stick "screwdriver" and some invisible batteries. Apparently fixing it did not require installing wheels. It was very amusing watching him attempt to reach the "finish line" that he had set up without any way to actually move the skateboard.

And my favorite, watching him lecture a not-yet-very-verbal 2 year old boy his size at the playground as Oliver approached a very tricky looking twisted ladder:

"I'm going to climb up this ladder. I can do it all by myself; I don't need any help. You should watch me do it all by myself. I'm just going to climb it like this - see? I can do it all by myself. [feet fall off the step he's on, so he's hanging. Tries again, same thing happens] I can do it all by myself, but it's very slippery for me. That's okay, I'll just try it this way - do you see how I'm doing it even though it's slippery for me? [Finds self unsuccessful, gets back on ground near boy] Maybe I can't do it all by myself, but I have BIG muscles and you do not."

Amelia invents 4D

On a loooong car ride, Amelia was pointing out things that were 2D or 3D. Then she said, "This cup is four-dimensional, because it's 3-dimensional plus it has an empty space on the inside so that's another dimension."

Hmm.

Visa application snafu

Well, they didn't tell me that this question would be on the visa applications for both Oliver and Amelia. As you can imagine, I couldn't exactly respond "No" in good conscience:

Have you engaged in any other activities that might indicate that you may not be considered a person of good character?

We may not be heading to the UK after all!

The children as cheese

Amelia has moments of jealousy over not being the little sibling - mostly when it comes to being carried, coddled, cuddled. Which is amusing largely because she has made a point of resistance since infancy to carrying, coddling, and cuddling. Sometimes it takes a little sibling to open you up to new experiences - whether it's playing with trucks, kicking a soccer ball, or seeking out hugs!

She asked nicely if I could carry her back to the car after swimming as she only had light pajamas on and she was cold. I was carrying Oliver, but looked at her little face and said "Okay, after we cross the street I'll carry you for the last block before the car."

As I swung her up to carry her, we had this exchange:

Amelia: Do I feel light?
Me: Yes, actually, you do. [Thinking this would be way over her head] Probably because you're lighter per inch.
Amelia: [immediately] That's just because I'm skinnier than Oliver. Look at him [coos] - he's like a big chunk of cheese. I'm like a string cheese stick.

What do you do at a skateboard park without a skateboard??

Oliver knows just what to do! Take your "air board" with you and have fun.

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Hide the books!!

I mentioned before that with a crazily voracious early reader like Amelia, we're certainly not doing anything to directly encourage Oliver to head down the same path. That said, he can't help but think reading is cool in this house (his coolest older sister spends a good portion of her time with nose in book). Oliver can often be found at the fridge lining up different letters and attempting to sound out nonsense words.

Anyway, he's not a reader at this stage but he has some very strong pre-reading skills which are making me...wonder about whether he'll be following in his sister's foosteps in this area. I'd assumed no since he has SO MUCH else going on that he's interested in, like wheels and balls and running around using his crazy voices and pretending to be all sorts of things. But I may be wrong. His "pre-reading" skills are getting more and more evident, like what I saw today.

I have to admit I was really impressed today. The family came out to meet me for lunch at work. For context in the cafeterias they have separate bins labelled "Compost" "Trash" "Recycle" near the exits. Oliver was being whiny and annoying, so I decided to give him a job. I handed him a (compostable) bowl almost empty of food and said "Go put this in the compost bin." He ran over and I heard him saying slowly "C-c-c-compost!" and then he got all excited, pointed to the correct sign, and tossed it in.

He ran back and I gave him an empty aluminum can and said "This goes in the recycle bin." Again, he ran over and said "Rrrrrrr-recycle," found the right bin, jumped up and down, and tossed it in.

Same thing when I found a piece of plastic - he ran over and said "Tuh-tuh-tuh - trash!" and threw it away.

I have to say I was really impressed! Later on the way to the car he found a napkin on the ground and I told him to go put it in the compost. There were three bins very far away, so I could only watch but not hear as he went from sign to sign, found "Compost," and put the napkin in the right one.

Those are pretty good pre-reading skills, huh? For a kid who's not a reader he figures things out pretty well!

My big girl is FIVE!!

I recall posting on here about how dramatic it seemed that Amelia was turning 3. How sweet, how naive. The child is now 5 and although I realize that in theory I will look back in 2 years and think I was sweet and naive...she seems so big. Long and lanky, mature and loony, delightful and infuriating and so, so interesting. Fascinating and beautiful child.

My very first day of knowing Amelia

First birthday

Second birthday

Third birthday

Fourth birthday

Fifth birthday (pensive moment, very Amelia)

And a bonus "five" shot- Amelia being very, very herself in another way.

Oliver gets his groove on

The boy has some moves...he prefers to dance directly in front of the speakers. (The other dancer is a friend, not Amelia - we were at a vacation rental last weekend). Don't mind my typo on the title page!

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Amelia moments the day before turning 5

Moment 1
Mama: Amelia, look at the light from the setting sun glistening on the water.
Amelia: (sighs deeply) It’s not really setting Mama. The world is actually rotating so that it seems like it’s setting.

Moment 2
Mama: (kisses Amelia’s cheek) This might be the last time I ever get to kiss the cheek of a 4-year old girl! Until you have a daughter of course.
Amelia: I’m not ever going to have a daughter. I don’t want any trouble in my life.

Moment 3
Amelia: How did people first learn words? And where did the first human come from?
Mama: How about you explain it to me.
Amelia: Runs through an explanation of evolution including, oddly, snails
Mama: That sounds about right.
Amelia: But where did the first seed come from?
Mama: (struggles mentally) I’m going to have to get back to you on that.

What’s the answer?

Only Amelia...

Only Amelia Story #1

Mary picked out a beautiful cake for Amelia that completely tickled her. A lovely landscape with the princess/heroine above perched delicately on top, her name inscribed on it, the whole deal. She loved it and it truly impressed her friend with whom we vacationed this past weekend (to Cannon Beach, Oregon).

As she sat there admiring and whispering little things to her new portable heroine, I asked her what she was going to name her. I should have known better. Paralysis-inducing question. Oliver just spits out names without thinking - "Archer" for his toy dog from Nana, "Crochy" for his pet cockroach, "Baby Sandy" for his doll from Bubbe. Amelia agonizes and ends up naming things "Amelia #3." It's not at all that she's not creative, she just spends more time worrying about being dissatisfied with her selection than actually thinking about names.

Me: What do you think you'll name her?

Amelia: (suddenly goes crestfallen) What would you name her? I'm no good at naming anything.

Me: You are a creative girl with lots of ideas. What about giving her a name that has something to do with what she looks like?

Amelia: (ponders) Her name is Animal because she likes animals. See, she's reaching her hand out to the animals of the world.

So the four adults in attendance that weekend had to ask her questions about "Animal" the princess, only call her "Animal" when addressing her, etc. Many looks of suppressed hilarity were exchanged.

Only Amelia Story #2

In a classic case of Amelia being Amelia (i.e. "unique") she was about 30 feet behind me as the other three kids ran eagerly towards the beach. Amelia was dragging a paper bag that looked to be 50 lbs. I was a bit exasperated because it is always VERY difficult to keep her moving (think, cattle prod) and the other kids were about to crest the hill in front and get out of sight. I ran back to see what was keeping her. She had three absolutely enormous rocks in the bag.

Me: Amelia, can you please dump those rocks out so we can get to the beach with Oliver, Z, and O? (her brother and two friends)
Amelia: (sighs deeply) Mama, that's exactly the problem. An evil witch turned Oliver, Z, and O into stones and I would feel terrible leaving them behind, so I'm taking them to the beach. We can't just leave them lying here by the road.

You can imagine this one was challenging to solve. It is useless to point out that Oliver, Z, and O are about 50 feet ahead of us excitedly leaping onto the sand.

P.S. Credit for those gorgeous Animal-on-the-beach shots go to Jessyca, who was kind enough to meet Amelia's photographic needs exactly.

Lazy sunny Sunday

I'm definitely on a roll with videos, but this little compilation from a week ago is just too cute. Of course, to be a tease, the cutest part happens at the end (it's only a minute!). You will see that our daughter is quite the fan of veggies.

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Wind in the trees

Oliver said such a lovely thing the other day as he looked at a row of trees waving in the wind:

"Look, Mama, the trees are conducting."

Glimpses of Oliver

Two things that Oliver either 1) loves or 2) is good at. These two may not overlap.

1. LOVES: Wheels! This is a short video showing the boy on a combined 10 wheels.

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2. Is surprisingly good at: Reading! For an almost-2.5 year old at least. Being home with Mary, she manages to read to him, talk about words and letters, so he's known letters and letter sounds for a year now. But this morning at breakfast Amelia was reading while eating and Oliver got quite jealous. He started attempting to read the wall poster using sounds, so I asked him if he'd like his own words to read. I wrote "cat" and "pig" on his napkin. Oh, and that's a chopped up muffin he's eating. Here are the results:

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It remains to be seen if he'll be an early reader like Amelia was because our policy is they tell us they can read when they've started reading :)

Amelia tackles a goal - monkey bars!

This is how Amelia is with goals:

1. She verbally states she wants to do something (ski, take off training wheels, do the monkey bars).

2. She then refuses to try.

3. I point out that if you want to reach a goal, you need to practice, giving helpful examples.

4. She sighs dramatically, rolls her eyes, and says "Okaaaaay" as she agrees to try something, and agrees she'll keep it up for 10 minutes.

5. She then whines/cries through the entire 10 minutes, acts totally miserable, yet doesn't want to stop. She tells everyone how much she hates skiing/bike riding/etc.

6. After 2-4 such practice sessions she's good at whatever it is, and she now enjoys doing it and tells everyone how much she enjoys it. You all saw the manic laughing ski video!

So here's monkey bars. This was somewhat different in that we were at a new playground and she tried them for the first time after steadfastedly refusing to try for the past 2 years. She kept at it, miserable and crying, running off to cry in bushes, coming back, trying again, hitting herself on the head, etc. I kept suggesting she take a break and do something else. Eventually she made it.

Here's the video (I managed to miss the time she made it across but you can hear it happen).

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So here's my question: will learning everything in her life be this unpleasant for her? In no case is this something any of us told her she had to do. But why is it so traumatic for her to work on something? Believe me, I tell her to back off and try another time! Since that doesn't work, I tend to be the goofy sidekick making her laugh and calm herself down.