Notes on Elizabeth

Elizabeth is 14 ½ months old now. She has added a few words to her list – she can now say Mama, Dada, Ollie, Girly, baby, Tristan, tree, shoes, ball, drink, banana, uh-oh, doggy, kitty, book, hi, Jesus, guy, bear, trash, clock, that, these, light, and door. She also knows lots of signs and has started using signs a lot to tell me what she wants.

Lizzy is such a funny girl. She has discovered books, and absolutely loves reading. She wants to read all day, but she is very picky with her books – she only wants to read certain ones that she has decided are her favorite. If I try to read other books to the older kids before nap or bed, she throws big tantrums and gets “her” books down from the shelf and forces them into my hand. She especially loves looking for pictures of dogs or cats in the books. She calls almost every animal “doggy!”. She knows the sign-language for book, and she is constantly asking me to read to her.

She also likes playing with balls, Mega-blocks, and toy food, and sticking magnets on the fridge. She’s always hungry and often brings me one (or all) of the bibs that hang over the back of her high-chair as a hint that she wants something to eat. She also tries to open the fridge and the pantry all the time. If she ever finds the pantry door left open, she starts taking out food as fast as she can (usually all the cereal boxes, because they are on a shelf she can reach) and then if I ask her if she wants some food, she runs as fast as she can over to her high chair and gets really excited.

She loves her monkey from IKEA that she sleeps with – she carries it everywhere, and never likes to leave it in her bed when she wakes up.

She is starting to do little smart things that surprise me, because I still think of her as just a baby. On Monday we went swimming with the Bates, and we ate our lunch at the pool. After we ate, I was gathering up all the trash and I put it into a little sandwich bag. Lizzy saw me put the bag down on the ground, and she ran over, picked it up, and started walking across the whole pool area toward the trash can, saying, “trash, trash, trash” the whole time. I had never heard her say that before, and I didn’t even know she knew what trash was, or where the trash cans were at the pool.

She seems to be paying close attention to all of the things we do around here, and it's funny how quickly she picks things up. I guess I do a similar routine each day when it comes to naps, and Lizzy has really memorized the whole process: as soon as I tell the kids it’s time for nap, she starts signing “book” and races upstairs to get out all her favorites. Then when we’re done reading and I go put the older kids in their beds, Lizzy never lets me forget that we’re supposed to get a drink first – she points to the bathroom and starts saying (and signing) “drink”. She never wants to skip that step, even if the older kids forget about it. After that she starts looking for her monkey, and then starts signing “nurse” and “ni-night.”

She is still a little wild child, and is always busy, busy, busy! She never stops moving. She loves racing up and down the hall with the big kids, and even tries to do somersaults with them (she runs around with her head cocked to the side trying to pretend she’s turning upside down, until she falls over).

She has one trick that she’ll do on demand – a “bend” where she bends over and puts her head on the ground. She loves to show-off with that trick (see above pictures).

Notes on Rachel

Rachel is a great little 3-year old. She has started prefacing lots of her comments and explanations with “here’s the story about this”, or “listen to the story, Mom”. They are usually not even stories at all – just regular old sentences about things she wants to tell me, like the fact that she used the stool to get up on the toilet. When she’s done making her comment she’ll ask if I think it was a good story or not.

Daniel took her to Barnes and Noble so she could pick something out with some of her birthday money, and she chose a little princess dress-up magnet set. She loves it and plays with it all the time.

She also recently figured out how to draw princesses, and she’s starting to spend a lot of time coloring with Oliver and Tristan.

She still says a lot of funny grown-up things to me that make me laugh. Her most recent one is, “That just doesn’t make any sense, Mom.” She loves to tell me that.

Notes on Oliver

Oliver just turned five. He is completely obsessed with anything relating to the universe and our solar system, planets, galaxies, etc. He checked out a book about each planet from the library, and keeps renewing them over and over because he doesn’t want to give them back. My parents gave him a book called “The Night Sky” for his birthday, and that includes information on each planet, plus stars and other things, so he said it’s okay now if we take a few of the library books back. He is always asking questions about the universe (which planet is hotter, which has more moons, which ones have atmospheres, etc.) but he has started reading so much about the planets that he actually answers his own questions now.

He reads a lot and is very good at it – he even helps Tristan out sometimes with sounding out some of the more difficult words (Ollie reads from so many science books that he is used to sounding out longer words).

He still draws all the time and continues to add to his huge stack of drawings. He just finished making drawings of the sun, moon, and all the planets, and he loves lining them all up and looking at them and talking about them.

The other day we were over at the Bates's house and Daniel and I overheard Oliver and William Bates (also five, and Ollie's good friend) get into an interesting debate about Pluto's status as a planet. (Oliver has very fond feelings for Pluto and its moon, Charon. He has read several books giving different opinions on the matter, and wasn't sure which one was right, so we told him that he could decide for himself whether he wanted to count Pluto as a planet or not.)

It was so funny listening to them having this serious discussion. Oliver was insisting to William that Pluto is a dwarf planet, while William was wondering if it might actually be a moon that used to orbit Neptune. When Ollie heard this, he retorted, "William! HOW could a moon have a moon?!!" (meaning, how could Pluto be a moon when it has a moon of its own).

I love the simple logic of five-year olds.

Notes on Tristan

Tristan just started 1st grade yesterday. I think he’s going to have a good time this year. He’s pretty excited about it.

Tristan's such a good kid. He thinks about life at a pretty deep level for a six-year old, I think. He’s also very honest and exact in his communication.

He started flag football a few weeks ago, and he really loves it. I think he understands it a lot better now than he did last year, so he’s done really well at pulling flags and understanding the defense, which makes it a lot more fun for him. Daniel is one of the coaches again this year.

Here are some pictures of him at football practice:

Swimming with the Bates - Last Day of Summer

Karen and I had a lot of fun swimming with the kids at the Falcon Pointe swimming pools this summer.

The day before school started I asked Tristan what he wanted to do on the last day of summer, and he wanted to go swimming, so that's what we did.

Belly Buttons and Aliens

Last night I was reading to Tristan from a book about the human body (Oliver picked it out at Barnes and Noble with his birthday money). There was a picture of a fetus inside a womb, and Tristan pointed out the umbilical cord and was asking questions about it. He wanted to know if it was always connected to the belly button. I said yes, and told him that the reason we had belly buttons was because of the umbilical cord. He immediately asked, "So, what about Adam and Eve? Did they not have belly buttons?"


I have always known he would ask a lot of questions, but I couldn't believe how quickly he thought of that. I have never even considered it before, and I've known about umbilical cords for a long time. His brain is much too quick for me. And I'm a little worried about when we get to the section in the book about the reproductive system. Maybe we'll skip that part for now.


Actually, I just remembered a funny thing about that, though. Oliver had been looking through this same book after he had just gotten it, and he was really excited to show me a certain page. He kept calling it the alien page. I was a little sceptical, but never investigated. Then I was reading it to them a few nights ago, and Oliver asked if we could skip ahead to the alien page, so I said, sure. He then turned a few pages and started laughing and laughing at one of the pictures, and then said, "see, Mom? I told you there was an alien page! What is this? Doesn't it look like an alien?" It turns out it was a picture of the female reproductive organs. Somehow he thought it was an alien. He's off to a great start with understanding women.

Wasting Time

Apparently now that Rachel is three her time is very valuable to her. She was at Wal-Mart with me the other day and told me she had to go to the bathroom (she has to go every single time we go to Wal-Mart - I think she just likes the bathrooms there because they have sinks that turn on automatically when you put your hands under. Also, she likes to comment every time about how the toilets at Wal-mart are almost like the ones at church).

Anyway, I said "okay, just a minute" and finished getting a few more things in the aisle we were in. She then did a big exasperated sigh and said in a really loud voice, "Mom, you're WASTING MY TIME!" I guess she kind of liked how that sounded, because the rest of the Wal-Mart trip (even after I took her to the bathroom) she kept making more comments like, "Mom, I just don't have time for this anymore. You are really wasting my time!"

I had to remind her that she was the one who begged to come to the store with me, and she was actually wasting MY time.