Kindergarten...FINALLY!!

The twins started kindergarten last week.

In preparation for this momentous occasion, I purchased a mountain of school supplies and was required to label it all with their names.

And I mean, they make you WRITE THE KID'S NAME ON EVERYTHING.

I don't mean just on the two notebooks, eight folders, one pencil box, two erasers, one pair of scissors, four boxes of crayons, et cetera, for each child.

I mean each individual thing. That's 96 crayons, 20 pencils, and 40 markers EACH.

But I'm not really complaining.

It's a small price to pay in order to get them into school ALL DAY LONG.

And look how happy they are about it!

 

 

That is, they were happy until they found out they were going be in separate classes. But that's another story...

What's Going On?

(image from http://www.andertoons.com)

I'm working on some changes for this blog.

Does that sound ominous? Sorry.

Hopefully we will be able to transfer to a format tht makes it easier to comment, follow, and such.

Stay tuned....

Playing Board Games With Preschoolers

...Otherwise entitled, "Praying for Patience."

While I was playing Candy Land with the twins today, I think time slowed down.

In SUPER S-L-O-W M-O-T-I-O-N we crawled along the board with our game pieces, only to be sent back again and again.

"Oh no! I drew Mr. Minty!" (GROAN)


The whole thing was further complicated by:

1) Little Boy's threats to jump to the finish line regardless of the cards' directions. (Him: "I win!" Me: "Um. You can't win while the rest of us are out of the room.")

2) Little Girl's ill-wishing of her brother. ("I hope he gets Plumpy!" "Please let him get stuck in Molasses Swamp!")

We had to reshuffle the cards THREE times. I thought the game would never end.

Still, at least game-playing teaches them good sportsmanship. Right?

Little Boy paused in his gloating over winning to reassure me. "You losed, Mom! But you did good losing."

They DO grow up... eventually

Yesterday my five-year-old daughter streaked through the house screaming, "i have to poop; I have to Poop; I Have to Poop; I HAVE TO POOP!!!!"

Then she stopped just short of the bathroom and said, "Oh. It was just a poot." She calmly went back to playing in the living room.

This child has NO SHAME.


This might concern me if I didn't know that kids grow out of this.

I can remember being mortified by my oldest daughter's antics as a preschooler. I had my mother sew her little frilly bloomers to wear under her church dresses so she didn't flash the congregation during the children's sermon. I thought she would never stop lifting her skirts over her head.

Amazingly enough, as a sixteen-year-old, I notice she never does this anymore.

Neither do the thirteen and ten-year-olds. Their skirts stay resolutely down. It's great how they can manage to go to the bathroom all on their own, too.

I may be a little TOO blase about this sort of thing now, however. The preschool teacher had to remind me last year to make sure Little Girl wears shorts under her dresses. I was thinking, "She's FOUR. Who cares if people see her My Little Pony underwear? SHE certainly doesn't mind."

In any case, at least she'll learn a semblance of modesty by age sixteen.

My least favorite letter of the alphabet

Okay. Pictures are disapperaing inexplicably from my blog.

I would understand if they were someone else's photos that I was unauthorized to use, but these are my OWN pics!

The first time this happened it was on my post about Bug-Bombing the Van. ET had snapped an awesome photo of the roach she saw fleeing the van to show me as evidence, and of course I had to include it in my post.

I posted it, and it disappeared, leaving behind a little box with a tiny red "x" in it.

So I reposted it, and a few days later, Mr. Tiny Red X reappeared.

I growled and gave up.

Then recently I had an awesome pic of Little Girl waving a pair of thong underwear like a flag. It was such a cute image that I built a whole blog post around it.

Enter Mr. Tiny Red X.

Grrrrr....

And NOW, Mr. T-R-X has invaded my reading blog!!!!  I had a lovely ratings system I'd created with photos of my own hand giving each book the thumbs-up or thumbs-down. But now, all my books have received only.....

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

ARRGH!!!

I have NO IDEA how to fix this!

I have now resorted to a crude cartoon hand-signal system.

I know, it's completely pathetic.

And it still may not be safe from that evil third-from-last letter of the alphabet who stalks me.

CURSE YOU, MR TINY RED X!!!

I give you a big THUMBS-DOWN!

UPDATE: My very-smart friend emailed me privately after reading this post with some suggestions on how to deafeat Mr. Tiny Red X. The gist of it was... LEARN TO OPERATE YOUR BLOG PROPERLY! Sigh. I'll work on it.

The Beefaroni Incident (Illustrated)

I made the kids some beefaroni for lunch. Hooray! They wanted to eat by the TV.

I placed the twins' bowls on the table, but Boo carried her own bowl.

Little Girl was so excited that she vaulted herself over the back of the couch towards her beefaroni bowl.

Unfortunately, the upward momentum of Little Girl's foot caught Boo's full bowl of beefaroni.

Everyone yelled and I came in to witness the carnage.

The good news is, all the children survived the incident unscathed.

I can't say as much for the furniture.

Apparently I am a robot...

You know those security-test thingies on the internet that make you type in some random letters and numbers to prove you're an actual human?

I can't seem to pass those tests.

I'm serious. I just spent like twenty minutes today trying (unsuccessfully) to download a game for my daughter to play on my phone while we waited at the orthodontist.

Yes, it WAS a game for my daughter, you Doubty Mc Doubter.

So I had to set up an account in order to download the app or whatever, and it wanted to make me prove I wasn't a robot.

I groaned when I saw it. "I can never pass these tests," I told Boo. She laughed like I was kidding.

I wasn't. I couldn't do it. I kept messing up the characters. I'm going, "Is that a number one or a letter I? Is this capital or lowercase? What is that weird twisty thing? Is that supposed to be a digit or just a blob?"

Long story short: the orthodontist was finished adjusting GG's braces before I was able to get any sort of entertainment loaded on my phone.

It was pathetic.