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!