whiplash

august is going to be a two-parter because it was a very busy month, so it's a good thing july never happened. but this time i'm taking a break from memory lane.  these are just some snippets about the kids where they are now.

first, caleb:

this picture is just a couple of weeks old, so aside from the red eye i forgot to correct, this pretty much is how he looks. in need of a haircut, but mostly very happy.

caleb's imagination has been running wild lately, and believe it or not he is mostly preoccupied with playing, or at least constructing, house. i'll leave the room for a few minutes and come back to find that pillows and blankets and kid-sized couches have become living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms. and when he can enlist grown-up help his constructions get roofs. i'll have to snap a picture of it the next time we set up the parachute/blanket/pop-up-tent/folding table combo that i have decided to call 'occupy the family room.'

he's been sick for almost a week and home for the past three days, snotty and coughing, and though he definitely knows better, is struggling to remember that a kleenex, and nothing else, is to be used as a kleenex. he woke up monday night and got a steam treatment for a croupy cough, and then 'camped' in his 'occupy the family room' setup while daddy slept on the couch. we slept there the next night too after i realized that it was an excellent way to concentrate the humidity from the vaporizer.

despite all his intelligence i am still coming to terms that he is primarily an irrational being. if you look at his picture you can see his bottom lip is a little red. that is the gash he put in his lip from merely sitting on the second step up and leaning forward too far. gravity won. he bled and cried like crazy. and yet i still find myself trying to reason with him about why jumping on his bed is so dangerous and watching him do it again 2 minutes later. i remember thinking when he was younger i couldn't wait till he was old enough to understand me when i tried to logically explain actions and consequences to him. i guess i have more waiting to do.

he voiced his concerns, out of the blue, that his cousin had died because she hadn't skyped with us since we moved. yikes. i was mostly taken aback by the morbidity of this thought, but was also sort of shocked but sickly pleased at his confidence that his cousin loves him so much that the only explanation for her not skyping was that she was dead.  i assured him she was ok and we'd skype as soon as it worked out.

noah:

here noah is wearing work goggles caleb got along with a tool set. in typical Christmas fashion, caleb wanted noah's toys, noah wanted caleb's. you can also see he did not want to be left out of the split lip action and fell outside so he could match caleb the same day caleb tipped himself off a step. when we say he wants to do everything caleb does, we mean everything.

noah has been making me just a tad bit nuts lately. he really is like having two different babies in one body. he can be so lovey and snuggly and sweet and smart. sharing his half-chewed graham cracker. giving caleb hugs ad nauseum. figuring out how to get a dvd started when no one's around to do it for him. singing christmas songs in their entirety. he loves to chase and be chased. he loves to get tickled.

but he can also be a little raging banshee. he's independent, which is great, and mostly to be encouraged. but he can completely dissolve because he just thinks you're trying to do something for him, even if you're not. and there will always be some things i'm just not going to let him do, like taking  hot pans out of the oven, that he's not yet resigned to having to sit out on.

 he's fickle, changing his mind when he's tired and not sure. we have conversations all the time that go something like this:

noah-dwink
me-what do you want to drink
n-DWINK
m-yes noah what do you want to drink? milk? water? juice?
n-milk! NO MILK! watuh! NO WATUH! juice!
m-you want juice?
n-juice
(i give him the juice)
n-NOOOOO JUUUUUUUUICE!
and then he swats the juice, throws his clothy, starts screaming.

yay for toddlerhood!

and on and on and on. half the time he's completely freaking out about some evil deed i have performed like giving him EXACTLY WHAT HE ASKED FOR and i can't even figure it out for several minutes because he's too livid to communicate what the problem is. then i find myself clapping my hands or shouting his name or some other less than cool, calm, and collected tactic just to snap him out of it to try to find out what the bleep is going on.

this most often happens just after he wakes up but really can happen any time, and so i feel like i'm always a little on edge just not knowing what completely unpredictable event is going to cause him to unravel. thankfully, this kind of behavior is only about 20% of how he spends his time, and we get fabulous, fun, make-me-laugh-till-i-cry noah the rest of the time. for every time we have an exchange like the one above there are 4 that he would walk into the kitchen and cheerfully say "milk, pweese o pweese momma?" but i will not miss this phase, not one bit.

working up the courage to tackle august. i know better than to lose my momentum though, even if the complete lack of comments confirms my suspicions that no one is reading anyway ;)