The Salvateenie Farewell

On Sunday, Grandma and Boppy came over at lunch time to hang out with the kids. After an inauspicious beginning to the visit in which Max was screaming and unhappy when the grandparents arrived and Daniel greeted them with a curt, "Go away", things picked up pretty quickly.

They cornered Grandma in the dining room and made her play catch for a long while, trying to make "baskets" by throwing their balls into the light fixture.  Max was successful once, which ended THAT game.

They then ran all over the living room playing and dancing and showing off all their toys, including the cool new "foam finger" Boppy brought them from the Saint Mary's basketball game.

That's personally decorated to ask, "How many Salvateenies?"

After a couple of hours of general toddler craziness, the old folks had had enough and it was time for them to head out.  As is their custom now, the kids followed their guests to the door and slammed it behind them, then turned and raced to scrabble up onto the couch and look out the window and watch them walk to their car.

Here they are saying sending goodbye kisses.

At the end there, you can hear that, just as the car starts to pull away, Daniel is already shifting his attention to ask when Daddy will be home and they can heap all their attention on him.

Balloon Fun with Grandma and Grandpa

Somehow, I completely forgot that I had these adorable videos (courtesy of Auntie Lee Ann) from the kids' birthday celebration for Grandma Salvatore last month.  Here they are enjoying the fun of balloons and learning the joy of static electricity!

Pre-School Open House

It will not surprise most of you to know that I went to pre-school.  It might surprise you to know that the pre-school I attended is still open and being run by the same woman who opened it when I was two years old.

Now that the Salvateenies are two, we've been talking about thinking about starting them in a pre-school next year.  Especially since by the time they're ready for public school, the cut-off birthday will be September 1st and they will not be eligible to start Kindergarten until they are five years old (and nearly 6!), so we've got three more years to cover.  So, Grandma, Uncle, and I took the kids over to the Montessori Children's Center open house on Saturday to check it out.

Can you see the doll on the counter?  Do you think they saw me coming?

We started out playing in the yard area.  Caroline instantly fell in love with the climbing play structure and the other parents were  quite impressed when she tripped and fell and didn't break down crying.

The boys gravitated to the basketball hoop and they gave them a mini basketball and a soft soccerball to play with.  Daniel wanted to be lifted up to make slam dunks, but Max tried his hand at shooting from the little square "key" painted on the ground and actually made three shots from different angles.

Inside, they went crazy for the hand-washing station and dove right in with all the little trays of things to organize and sort.

Though they never really did get the hang of sorting and the nice lady finally had to take the beans away to sort them without Max's "help".

Their favorite area was the daycare/naptime room where they dragged out toys to play with.

Daniel enjoyed the Chinese New Years firecrackers while Max tried to interest the penguin in playing blocks

Max really liked the dinosaurs

Caroline proclaimed that this penguin was "so cute"

I think Max was dancing

Daniel encouraged the "baby penguin" to give "daddy penguin" a kiss

All in all, they seemed to have fun and didn't break too much.  

Teenie the Magnificent

After a pretty horrific bath time tonight (in a nutshell, I and the bathmat both ended up nearly as wet as, let's say, whatever the wettest thing you can imagine is), Daniel, the only child to behave, asked to be released from the craziness of his siblings, so he got out first.  Then, after a moment of glancing around and a perplexed, "Where Danyo go?", Max decided he wanted to join, and he rushed out and into his diaper and dripped his way out to Daddy.

This left Caroline in the bath, refusing to get out.  Caroline was, by far, the worst offender in the bad bath conspiracy.  She splashed.  She poured water over the side of the tub.  She yanked on the shower curtain.  SHE PICKED UP HANDSFUL OF WATER AND THREW THEM AT ME.  So I wasn't in the best of moods when she proclaimed she didn't want to get out of the bath yet.  Last bath, she put her hands on the side of the tub and walked her feet up the wall on the other side and held herself up parallel to the water for a split second before I nearly lost my mind and made her get down.  Who knew what she would do!

So I told her I was draining the water and when it was all gone, she had to come out.  Surprisingly, she agreed.  As the water level went down, she rolled over on her tummy and yelled, "I'm a fish! And then opened and closed her mouth in a classic 'fish mouth' that she'd learned from watching Caillou and made some swimming motions and I started to soften on just how mad I was.  Then I took a step toward the tub and heard the mat squish under my foot.  Grrr.

As I was towelling her off, she noticed something shiny on the floor and told me, "Mommy! That's a penny!"  I let her pick it up and she immediately closed her fist around it.  I was inclined to think she was just being greedy, but then she put her hands behind her back, mumbled something that sounded like"akkada" and put both hands back in front of her, smiling at me.

It took a long time to figure it out.

On a different episode of Caillou, he goes to Leo's birthday party where there is a magician who does a trick with a "magic coin" behind his back.  Caillou tries it at home, but it won't work until he says the magic word - abracadabra!

At bedtime, she unearthed the penny again and the boys got involved.  They were very enthusiastic, slapping my hand to tell me which one held the penny, then running me through the steps themselves.  Max made it his own by putting the penny in his hand and then running both hands up to his fuzzy, curly hair and clasping them together on top of his head before bringing them down in fists in front of his chest and asked, "Which hand, Mommy?"  Luckily, they think it's amazing when I guess right or when I guess wrong, so I didn't have to work very hard.

My favorite moment, though, was when Daniel was trying his hand at the trick.  He put the penny in his left hand, put his hands briefly behind his back, and flung his fists back in front.  I asked him, "Oh no! Which hand is it in?" and he giggled and, with his right hand, pointed at his left one and answered, "This one!" and then opened his little left fist to show the penny.  And he celebrated that he'd guessed correctly!

Beach Time

We live just blocks from the beach, but until recently we hadn't really taken advantage of it.  With the addition of the wagon, I am actually able to get all three kids out of the house on my own and without the car so more frequent trips might be in our future. (Though, I readily admit it is MUCH nicer to have Uncle or Boppy along to share the dragging duties.)

We've gone a total of four times so far.  The first was in the afternoon with Uncle (see here), then the next morning they begged me to take them out again.  I piled them in by myself and walked them down to the sand, where we played right by the bottom of the ramp.  Grandma called to say hi and she and Boppy came along to meet us and play for a while.  And this time I remembered to bring sand toys.

Caroline's gone far afield to find sand

Resting with Grandma

Ready for the trek back home

A few weeks later, Uncle and I took them again in the afternoon.  It was warmer than the first time we went, but still a bit chillier than we wanted.  Uncle taught them about digging down to the wet sand to get better building materials.  They really like building sandCAStles (emphasis on the middle syllable for some reason).  But like at the zoo the day before, the big hit of this trip to the beach was the snacks.

Because it was a few days past Valentine's Day, Boppy met us on the way home to deliver some post-Valentine's gifts - little pink stuffed animals!

Daniel calls his frog a "bee beep" (ribbit), Caroline loves her "horse" with the horn on its head, and Max has insisted on adding his pink monkey to the kissing routine at bedtime.

The next morning we went out again, this time in bright sunlight and much less wind.  Tentatively, another triplet family was set to join us, but it didn't work out for them, so we were thrilled when my friend Kate called and said she'd come meet us, especially since some of the kids' favorite sand toys were gifts she'd given them at their birthday.

Uncle dug an extra big hole to get the good sand

All three kids enjoyed finding sticks to "decorate" with

This time, we ventured further out onto the wetter, packed sand nearer the water.  With denser sand, and a little assist from Caroline, Uncle was able to drag the boys for a joy ride.

Caroline needed a bit more of an assist

When we got near the water, Caroline reminded everyone they were not allowed to go in with a definitive, "No go water! Too wet!"

Snacks were still a big part of the experience

Daddy's Birthday at the Zoo

This year, Daddy's birthday fell on the Friday of a 4-day weekend, so we all celebrated by heading out to the zoo together.  The kids have seen a lot of zoo animals on tv and in their books, so it was definitely time to go back.  And since many of the school districts didn't have this Friday off, we had a relatively empty zoo to enjoy.  We brought the wagon, which was much more convenient than the strollers, but led to just as much "up, up, up" requesting/whining from the kids.  I wasn't confident letting them out until we got to the top of the zoo, so they had to suck it up for a while.

Our first stop was the African Savannah.  At the first view spot, there was a giraffe right up at the edge eating leaves right in front of us, which was very exciting.  The kids also noticed the zebras lazing beyond them.  We followed the path on through a couple of tunnels where the kids learned the joys of echo and found ourselves at the gorilla enclosure.  The views aren't great from the wagon, but all three did notice that the gorillas were there and that they were thumping their chests.  Going up one of the winding ramps for an aerial view, I banged both Max's and Caroline's heads into the railing, so I'll have to practice being more careful with the wagon.

From Africa, we went to see the monkeys and the kids did their best impressions of monkey noises, and then off to the penguins.  The big cats were all sleeping, but the hippo was right up at the edge of her enclosure with her big, hairy nose sticking out of the water, snuffling.

From there we made our way up to the bears.  Caroline was really looking forward to seeing the bears, so we were very pleased to see the two Kodiaks walking back and forth from one door to another.

At one point they bumped into each other and growled, which scared and excited the kids.  But even with bears on the move, snacks were the big attraction for Daniel.

They were so excited to get out of the wagon that they started running off in all directions.

Caroline decided she wanted to be very helpful, so she pulled the wagon for us (as long as nobody was riding in it).  At one point, Max got way ahead of us and I worried that he was running toward the Little Puffer Railroad crossing.  I called ahead to him to come back, and Caroline took off running.  I was terrified that they were both going to run onto the tracks, but when she caught up with Max, she grabbed his hand and said, "Max, let's go back to Mommy!"

(notice Daniel grabbing for the snacks)

Checking out a polar bear

Daniel abandons the polar bear and goes in search of snacks

Everyone decided to hold hands when we got to the shadowy area beyond the insect zoo and I was herding them toward the Australian Outback enclosure, but all of the kangaroos were still asleep.  I tried to get a picture of everyone calling to the kangaroos, but unfortunately, this is when Max noticed my phone and started melting down, begging to be allowed to play "Lazy Town" and I had to put it away and pick him up.

While I calmed Max down, Caroline helped Daddy by taking charge of the wagon again.

And then we went to see the koalas, who were all sleeping (Caroline reminds you to shush!)  After that, we thought we'd take them to the petting zoo, but they became entranced by the trees at the entrance to the children's zoo (and trying to pull the leaves off to decorate a rock on the other side of the path), so we stayed there until Caroline proclaimed it was time to go home.

And that was our day at the zoo - just one melt down and nobody got lost - overall, a positive outing!