Fake Pouting, Dinosaurs, and Fruit Flies {7 Quick Takes}

--1--



This kid kills me.  She does this fake pout and uses her deepest voice to scold whenever she does something wrong...  "You pooped on da playroom floor.  Did you eat a crayon?  Did you pee on da chair?"

And then brightens up immediately to correct herself, "Poop goes in da POTTY!  We COLOR wif crayons!  Pee in da POTTY!"

It makes it a whole lot funnier because she uses the same voice and expression when she's pretending to be various dinosaurs or small plastic animals, which frequently tell her to do a good job pooping (her idea).

--2--

John Paul dictated a really boring dinosaur story to me before bed...  And I spelled half the dinosaur names wrong.  Whoops.  (You may have to click through for the video if you're on email or in a feed reader)

I really don't understand the ending.  And I was expecting something more from a story titled Protoceratops vs. Triceratops but somehow it ended with a flea.

He also wanted it to be a math, hence the math problems.

--3--

This is disgusting buuuuut...

We've been trading off between having a problem with ants and having a problem with fruit flies in our kitchen.  It's gross, and once we solve one problem, the other always comes back with a vengeance.

But THIS I find fascinating:



Fruit fly traps - cut off the corner of a sandwich bag, invert and rubber band over a glass with apple cider vinegar (I like wine glasses because then I can see them dying).  On the left is Braggs, on the right is the dregs from a Trader Joe's bottle.  And they LOVE the Trader Joe's stuff!  To be fair, they were in different locations, so maybe that was the only reason but yeah, I find it fascinating.  Also gross.  But mostly fascinating.

--4--

Cecilia has decided that she would like to put the baby to bed all by herself when he's born.  She just needs us to build a crib with a ladder, she says.  "And what if the baby won't go to sleep and you get tired of rocking him?" "Oh, I'll just put him down and he'll fall asleep on his own!"

Yes, because that has EVER worked in the history of our babies...  Oh wait.

Two baby dolls and a unicorn under her in that bin.  Babysitting, literally.

--5--

"Picture Yizabeth pouting!"

Elizabeth played a game for a long time this afternoon that involved two small wooden elephants jumping on my stomach, but my stomach HAD to be bare.  So that was a lot of fun for me...  I think I preferred the game she and Cecilia invented later, which involved a very small baby doll being shoved into a toilet paper roll.

They're going to be AWESOME babysitters when they get older.

--6--



Naps are a disaster lately.  Mary Claire keeps refusing to go to sleep, in no small part because John Paul is SO LOUD no matter where I put him.  I piled up a stack of books for him to read today and then went out to tend to the garden.  When I came back, he AND Cecilia had both left their rooms because they "needed to tell me something" but never got to it because I was so confused as to why John Paul had changed into his suit and Cecilia was wearing fleece-lined boots in August.

Then of course he was totally quiet AFTER the babies were both up, and stayed in his room for 30 minutes past naptime's end, only emerging with his Encyclopedia of Music because he wanted to tell me "SOME composers never die!!!"

By which I suppose he means that some composers are still alive...

--7--

I think we've finally settled into a routine around here, which involves quite a bit of time where I get to lie on the couch and read aloud to the kids (necessitated by my hurting my back a few weeks ago - I'm better now but I'm really enjoying the schedule we've got in place!).  In the past few weeks I've read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (PLEASE don't tell me that you don't read this first to your kids - go with Lewis' original order, not the stupid chronological order the publishers changed to - it loses so much if you read The Magician's Nephew first!), Little House in the Big Woods, and Prince Caspian to the big kids.  We're halfway through Little House on the Prairie and I think we're just going to keep going with these two series until we finish them (well, I'm not sure we'll get all the way through the Little House books just because the last two are a little more for an older audience). We also got some of the My First Little House picture books from the library and Cecilia adores them.

It's such a blast to be sharing these books with John Paul and Cecilia - they're constantly either exploring Narnia or talking about various homesteading adventures that we're going to have next (John Paul is especially intrigued by the pig's bladder).  And we've got a while before we move on to something else, but I'm excited to re-read some of my childhood favorites!  SO much more fun than reading the same boring pictures books over and over again...  Well, they're not all boring, but a lot of them are.

Linking up with Jen at Conversion Diary - go check out more Quick Takes!