Down the Hill

After lunch on Christmas Day we bundled up everyone and got out the sleds. It was a beautiful, mild day, so we trekked through the arboretum. Gus fell asleep in his sled and didn't wake up when I transfered him to the car, so we decided since we were out and dressed for the weather, we might as well do some downhill sledding too. We drove to the sledding hill and I waited at the bottom with the camera to catch a few pictures. I was snapping away and snapping away and Ms. Crazy Preschooler was screaming her way down the hill. I noticed the screams seemed a bit frantic after about my eighth snap, and here it turns out she was headed straight for an enormous tree. It turned out that she didn't hit the tree, but was scared silly. When I got back to my computer at home I fell in love with this picture because it seems that she is looking over at me and screaming and thinking "PUT THE CAMERA DOWN! PUT THE CAMERA DOWN! YOU CRAZY MOTHER! I'M ABOUT TO HIT A TREE!" So typical of everyday life in our house. When I'm in a picture taking frenzy catastrophes often occur.

Christmas Dinner

We had a lovely, low key Christmas. Church. Presents. Naps. Sledding. On Christmas Day Dr. Pediatrician slept in until 20 minutes before lunch. Ms. Crazy Preschooler needed a task, so I suggested she help set the table. She did a great job, and got very creative with the silverware. Each person had a most unique placement of knives, forks and spoons. Some were upside down. Some were sidways. It made me smile.

Toilet Trouble

It is lunch. I'm cooking some delicious pasta. Ms. Crazy Preschooler is calmly eating an apple. Gus is in his high chair chomping away when I look over. He looks at me and throws up. (I'm not sure if he didn't swallow right or what.) I take him out of the chair and change his clothes. I change my clothes. I go to the kitchen to clean up the high chair and floor. I hear a suspicious sound before I'm done with the high chair, and peek my head around the corner. Gus is in the bathroom. I go through the gate to get him out of the bathroom and find this lovely suprise in the toilet. Hair brushes. Soap. Deoderant. Even the toothpaste. Hmm. Boys. They have to be soooooooo curious. To make matters worse, Ms. Crazy Preschooler had forgotten to flush last time. Needless to say, I used a lot of disinfectant and went on with life. However, it was most disappointing that the pasta scorched and was generally overcooked.

Peanut Butter Cookies

This holiday season peanut butter cookies has been my choice item to bake. I could have made lots of different Christmas cookies, but I really didn't want to. During the regular year I generally make a lot of delectable chocolate chip cookies. I wanted a change for December, and I just can't seem to get enough peanut butter taste lately. Needless to say, I've eaten way too many of these scrumptious little guys.

Jumping on the Bubble Wrap

These aren't the best pictures. The lighting was bad and Ms. Crazy Preschooler was moving fast, but at least you can see how much fun that bubble wrap is.

Girl with a Vision

Yesterday I let Ms. Crazy Preschooler and Gus open one present early, just because. They chose a mysteriously wrapped present from their Auntie Dot that was shaped sort of like a rolled up sleeping bag. It turned out to be the best present to open early . . . she sent them 20 feet of bubble wrap rolled up. We unrolled it in the basement playroom and Ms. Crazy Preschooler jumped crazily for hours on end all day long. She jumped with two feet smashing down on the bubbles. She leaped with one foot. She crawled, walked, rolled; you get the idea. Gus loved the popping sound, alhtough he couldn't quite figure out where it was coming from. I must confess, I did a bit of jumping myself.

Because 20 feet of bubble wrap is longer than the basement playroom, Ms. Crazy Preschooler got the idea that she should hang the plastic up the wall. I said, "Ok, but there really isn't anything to hang the bubble wrap up on the wall to make it stick, honey."

"I have an idea, Mom."

And she trip trapped out of the playroom, into the laundry room and came back with a clothespin. She squeezed the clothespin and fastened it to the bubble wrap, but of course there was no way to hang the clothespin on the wall.

So she trip trapped back out of the playroom, up the stairs and back down and came back in with a piece of cardstock paper from her writing box (when things print awry, I give her my scraps for her writing box). Cardstock is a nice sturdy choice of paper. She clothespinned the bubble wrap to the paper, but of course, that didn't really solve the problem because the paper wouldn't stick to the wall.

"I don't think that's working, Sweetie Pea," I said.

"It's OK mom. I know what to do."

She trip trapped out of the playroom, up the stairs and came down with a wad of poster putty. She stick the paper and the bubble wrap up on the wall with the poster putty, and lo and behold, it stayed.

"See Mom, I can do it myself," stated Ms. Independent Crazy Preschooler.

The Nutcracker

Ms. Crazy Preschooler and I went to the Nutcracker tonight. I invited Dr. Pediatrician, but he firmly declined. The year I was expecting Ms. Crazy Preschooler, he surprised me with tickets to the Nutcracker in Grand Forks because I had never been to the ballet and always wanted to go. And he's a pretty good sport about cultural events. I loved the ballet. He hated the ballet. He still cringes every time I mention it. He just felt there was no purpose and ended up staring at the statues along the wall instead of watching the dancers.

This local production of the Nutcracker was less professional that the last local production ( I think in Grand Forks they had flown in some really important ballerinas that year), but I think I might have enjoyed it even more because several of my piano students were dancing, and it was so fun to watch them, their faces all lit up and excited to be dancing. All of the dancers just seemed to be in their element even though their feet might not have been quite as fancy. The little girl who danced the role of Clara was the best a Clara could possibly be, I think. I just wanted to squeeze that little girl! She was adorable and animated. My favorite part in both performances has been the snowflake scene.

Ms. Crazy Preschooler was mesmerized by the performance, absorbing everything she saw, and she actually saw a lot of things that I happened to miss.

Before Church

Ms. Crazy Preschooler and I left the house for church at 8:45.

At 5:20 a.m. Ms. Crazy Preschooler crawled into my bed because she couldn't find her socks and her feet were cold, cold, cold, plus she needed a drink of water. I warmed her feet up and then crawled out of bed to get her a drink of water. I climbed back up to the attic to deliver the water and decided I might as well wrap the present for her Sunday School teacher, so I ventured down to the basement to do that.

No one was up so I decided to clean up the kitchen.

At 5:45, in the middle of cleaning the kitchen, Gus woke up again. He'd already been up once in the middle of the night with explosive diarrhea, and this time he smelled suspiciously of vomit, but it wasn't overhwelming, and I couldn't find any hard evidence. So I cleaned him up, found new pajamas, changed the sheets and took him to the couch with a glass of milk so he'd stop screaming. And as soon as he was done with the milk, he snuggled and snuggled and was gloriously happy, and I thought maybe, just maybe we were done with a grumpy week of teething and upset tummies.

At 6:40, Ms. Crazy Preschooler was back up, this time for the morning, demanding supper. I am working and working on the difference between supper, lunch and breakfast, but apparently this vocabulary is much more tricky than I realize. I climbed the attic stairs to wake up Dr. Pediatrician and ask him if Gus should go to church. He says Gus seems like he's feeling fine., Because I knew that it was going to take two people to get two kids ready to leave for church in an hour and a half (sounds ridiculous, I know, but oh so accurate), I reminded him to get out of bed. Dr. Pediatrician rose reluctantly, and I assigned him the duty of breakfast while I took a shower.

Only I forget that he forgets to clean as he goes, so when I got out of the shower, the kitchen was in worse shape than when I got up the first time.

I clean the kitchen again, finish breakfast and put Gus in the bathtub. Things are going well. While supervising Gus as he splashes away, I brush my teeth. I look over and suddenly the water looks murky. And then I realize it is my long dreaded nightmare: diarrhea in the bathtub.

I snatch Gus out of the tub, wrap him in a towel and hand him to Dr. Pediatrician, who is in the middle of locating tights and shoes for Ms. Crazy Preschooler. I walk back in the bathroom, and decide it isn't so bad. And then I bend over and start the drain, and realize it is very bad. Very very bad. Bad enough to make me sick. So I get a dishtowel, tie it around my nose, and a spoon and a paper cup, and when the water drains I start fishing out the chunks. And I disinfect. And rinse. Everything.

So much for the shower.

Dr. Pediatrician decides to stay home with Gus, and I take another shower (in the basement) and rush out the door.

Here's Why . . .

My house isn't clean. In fact it's a disaster. The problem is I am so easily distracted from domestic duties. Yesterday, for example, I found a crunched cracker on the futon in the living room next to the picture window. I thought to myself, I'll just grab my handy dandy little vacuum cleaner and get rid of these crumbs. So I threw everything off the futon, much to my children's dismay, climbed over the heaps of blankets, board books sippy cups and other preschool paraphenelia and folded down the mattress. Needless to say, this is a rare project in my world, so there was quite a bit of grunge to scoop up with the vacuum, but in a few minutes I had it taken care of. Then Ms. Crazy Preschooler decided that she would like to play on the futon bed instead of the futon couch, and Gus joined her, and they were having so much fun I grabbed my camera and took 140 pictures (no, I'm not lying). By that time it was lunch, and clean up time for the kitchen (a whole different story) and then time for nap, and then a rush to clean up the futon mess before my afternoon students, and then a lot of playing on the computer with the 140 pictures . . . and of course none of the other dirt was even brushed aside. But I have some fun pictures.

Teething

The grumpiest child alive this week has just recieved his two top teeth in time for Christmas, along with a many doses of Tylonel. All week he has been chewing everyhing he can get his hands on and checking out those new pearly whites with his tongue.

Dear Santa

Ms. Crazy Preschooler wrote a note to Santa yesterday morning. Actually she colored him a picture of a fire truck, and in a preschool scrawl mentioned that she would really like two tubes of Princess chapstick and some scotch tape of her very own. She asked for some help spelling "Santa" for the outside of the note, and then folded and sealed it in a tupperware bowl with some verbal instructions for me to mail the whole package, tupperware and all. In case the note ran into snow, the tupperware would keep the note from getting soggy. From start to finish it was all her idea.

Lips

Ms. Crazy Preschooler is in the middle of an obsession with her lips. She adores chapstick, and is marveling in the fact that I've allowed her to be responsible for her own lip gloss application. (You would understand advantages of having her do this herself if you had spent two days applying chapstick every five minutes all day). Sometimes things get a bit greasy, but for the most part she does a pretty good job. The hardest part of the task seems to be keeping track of the lid for the stick.

Today Ms. CP attended a birthday party for one of her friends from preschool. I was not able to go because I was teaching during the afternoon, so another mom transported her to and from the party. She bounced back in the house with a little bag of party favors, and inside was a tube of play lipstick. It was flavored strawberry, and radiated a bright pink hue. The lipstick was actually in a little pot attached to a bracelet, and so all afternoon Ms. CP sat on the couch watching my students muddle through their music, wearing her bracelet, EATING the lipstick. Her entire face was covered in pink lipstick. She just kept her lips right in that little pot the whole time. I wish I could have grabbed the camera in the middle of lessons to snap a picture.

Saturday Afternoon

This afternoon Ms. Crazy Preschooler's hair was . . . crazy. So we took some pictures of her hugging Little Gus's new birthday bear.

Decorating the Tree

Last weekend while Noah was napping, Ms. Crazy Preschooler went on a Christmas decorating spree. She was so excited she jittered and skittered all over the house, hanging up stockings (at our house Santa Claus brings breakfast . . . fruit loops, a banana and a juice box . . . but this year he might bring some princess chapstick too.) putting out the Nativity Set, and decorating the Christmas Tree.

Our big tree is in the attic this year because Little Gus would not be kind to a tree in the living room. He is simply into exploring, exploring, exploring. He isn't malicious about it, just curious, and the living room is the one area I can just let him wander around and explore. I just couldn't take that away from the little guy. And we have a perfect spot next to a window in our attic for the Christmas tree. It even makes the outside of our house look festive and joyous from the front.

Ms. Crazy Preschooler also has a small little tree in her room with some special ornaments just for her. You can see her decorating this tree on the kitchen counter because Noah was snoring away in their room. We also have a tiny little ornament tree on the buffet table in the living room with some of my very most precious glass ornaments that my Great Aunt Carol and my Grandma Jan painted. I don't put those ornaments on the big tree in case the big tree would topple over (not an unlikely possibility in my house).

A Good Teaching Week

I had a good teaching week. Preschool music classes went great, but perhaps the most exciting teaching happened in several different private lessons. I read some important pedagogical articles this week about teaching basic musical concepts with artistry, and when I implemented the ideas I was amazed at the results. I did a lot more imagining, a lot more pretending, and a lot more playing with my students at the piano this week than normal, and it was fun. My voice students had several "aha" moments in learning and visualing the correct vocal space to resonate better.

My students are getting ready to play Christmas music for residents of two different nursing homes on December 12 and December 17. This has also been a new project in my studio. I hadn't ever really thought of taking students to a nursing home before, and I think it is working out well. The kids are excited to go to the nursing home. The nursing homes are excited to have the kids come, and I am excited to see everyone get excited.