we got the girls new toothpastes at the store today

maggie uses the toddler training toothpaste that's safe to swallow but has no flouride, and nina uses the bubblegum flavored kids toothpaste. they were out, so we got some today. nina's has princesses on it and maggie's has a horse.

wow! you'd think we'd bought a real horse and real princess into the house! they were both so excited, and nina exclaimed "new toothpaste! i don't believe it!"

now for the last 15 minutes maggie has been saying "neigh toothpaste! i don't believe it! i don't believe it!!"

maggie is cradling and kissing her toothpaste as we speak. nina is carrying her's more to keep maggie happy, but is still thrilled.

how cute!

last night maggie walked in to the family room

after going on the potty, and said to me, "mama, i did a poop and a fart and a pee pee!"

there has certainly not been that moment of potty training that nina had, but i think maggie is 95% there. i still keep her in a diaper outside of the house, but she hasn't peed in one in a month. i was doing training pants with the cover outside of the house, i think i'll have to go back to that. in the house, she still has about 2 or 3 accidents per week, but they're overwhelmingly in the evening when she's tired. and poops, the last holdout, are now starting to go in the potty. yay for maggie!!

that was quite the storm we ended up having on thursday night!

wind gusts were over 60 mph and the house was shaking! it felt like a hurricane. it almost was! i couldn't sleep in my bedroom because it was just too loud and too cold. the wind was coming from the northeast (i guess if it was snow instead of rain they would have called it a nor'easter), and my bedroom is in the northeast corner of the house. the wind was just pouring in through the sliding doors and window, and the sound of the rain against the glass was like a train. so i slept on the futon at the top of the stairs.

amazingly, we didn't lose power. there were about 5 trees down between our and mom and dad's house, just one really big one (trunk about 2 feet in diameter), but that one was partly rotted on the inside. lots of smaller branches down.

then, at about 12:30 am that night, our basement fire alarm went off! we're not sure why, there was lightning so maybe a nearby strike? or just smoke blowing back inside cuz of the wind? i dunno, but it didn't come back on so we fell back asleep. still, it made for a terrible night's sleep!

and now today, we wake up to 2 inches of snow. it was all gone yesterday! what crazy weather we're having!

WINDY today!

and maggie is a little scared of the wind. it's cute!! the scary wind has made her more scared of other things too. so this evening, when nina was playing flashlight in the dark (just what it sounds like), she went up to nick and said, "i got a little scared." awww!
then later, they were looking at a pop-up animals book, and she said she was afraid of the squid and snuggled up against nick. they decided to put away the book.

sometimes I feel like an olympic athlete!

here was our day:
cook eggs for everyone for breakfast
at the Y for play with nora and iris: running around the track, open gym, back to the track, and downstairs in the workout/teen rooms
home for lunch. leftovers!
watch a few minutes of the little mermaid II (depressing)
get all the swim things together
back to the Y for open swim
dash to hannaford for a few things
back to the Y because I FORGOT THE CRACKERS OMG WILL SOMEONE ELSE EAT THEM!!!!!!!!!! (nina, remember, does NOT want other people eating her food!)
home for dinner
cook dinner
hide from kids
get kids ready for bed
nurse maggie to sleep

that was 12 episodes of getting the kids in or out of the car. since maggie weighs about 28 lbs, and i have to lift her in AND out, that's 336 lbs lifted for carseats only! where's my gold nick, where's my gold...

wwwwhew! no wonder i am so tired.

the olympics are on!

nick and maggie were watching bobsledding tonight. "me do that," commented maggie. she'd love it i know... she has a need for speed!

i have sewn the girls matching nightgowns. too cute! they look like little frontier girls. i promise to get pictures tomorrow. if i can get them to wear the dresses again. when i was sewing maggie's she refused to try it on. "no nightgown!" she'd yell, running away. but when it was finally done and she eventually put it on, she liked it. "i'm a princess!" she said.

on another note, nina refuses to let nick near her food and freaks out if anyone eats or drinks anything that is hers. how could i possibly have a child like this! my dream life of communal food is coming to an end, i can feel it.... the sacrifices we make for our kids, you know? changing who we are to make them happy. do you know i once even shaved my armpits because nina told me to? what was she, 2 or 3, i don't remember... goodbye hairy pits, goodbye ice cream from the carton. i didn't realize parenting would involve these kinds of sacrifices.

maggie's language has really exploded lately

she's talking in complete sentences most of the time now. it's amazing how quickly this happened. it started around christmas and just keeps gaining momentum. every day i hear new vocabulary (words like 'facebook,' as in "mommy's checking facebook." and 'kneesocks' as in, "i want kneesocks." and 'need' as in, "lion king, i need go downstairs!" at bedtime. lion king is nick of course!).

everything is in sentences. "where are marshmellows?" she said yesterday. "oh, nina has them." or, "mama, read me." or, "nina's biwis, i'm chester, mama's inabelle. bone! bone!" (pop tarts are their doggy bones).

i'll try to take better mental not of her vocabulary. nina's is also amazing (did i write about the time she said navigating one of her favorite websites was "intimidating"?). i'm also going to try to remember her most impressive stuff.

long time no blog!

well not that long i guess, but it feels like it's been a while.

nothing really specific to talk about tonight... so why don't i recap the last few days. hm... friday. what happened friday? oh i know, we were going to have a playdate with nora and iris, but their mom was sick so we ended up hanging out at home in the morning, playing dress-up and fixing up the dungeon playground. i mean, the play area in our basement. see, i have a rug down there, a small slide, the girls' bikes, and a few other things, and it's become an alternate place for us to run around on cold days (even though friday really wasn't that cold). but it's kind of depressing looking still, being an unfinished basement and all, so i call it the dungeon playground. the girls love it down there though.
in the afternoon we played with charlie and hattie. did a little bit of sledding, which maggie just LOVES. more! more! she yells. the girl is a daredevil!

on saturday we took a walk to the penny lake preserve. maggie is still talking about ducks at the pond, so we were hoping to catch some. we didn't see any from the bridge (there's a bridge over the pond), but we did hear one quacking JUST as we were getting back into the car. i caught a quick glimpse of it flying, but then it disappeared. how disappointing!
after that, the girls went in mom and dad's hot tub (which they LOVE. nina would go in every day if we let her). by 6:30 they were so tired that maggie was running to the door, demanding to go home and go to bed. yes ma'am!

sunday was fun too. the moss family came over for some smores over the fire pit. the kids play really well together and we all had lots of fun.

then, today, we played with james in the morning and around the house in the afternoon. lots of wagon rides! good times.

another open swim thursday

boy do we love swimming! even though it was in the mid 40s today, we went to the Y for open swim. nina swam with 2 and then 1 bubbles! she's getting really strong. swimming with 1 bubble is still a lot of work for her, but she's building up her swim muscles really fast, so i'm sure in no time she'll be swimming all on her own. she's such a big girl!!

then we run on the track. the big kids left maggie in the dust at one point and she yelled "wait james, wait! too fast!" (she loves james). it was so heart-breakingly cute. the girls usually make 3 or 4 laps, which i think is a half a mile, because i think it's an 1/8 mile track. you'd think they'd go to bed nice and early on thursday nights with all this, but no... usually they're not asleep until 9. oh well.

this is what a day is like around here

"i'm chester, mama's isabelle, nina's bider, papa's bear, otay? woof woof!"

or:

"i'm tigger, mama's christopher robin, nina's pooh, papa's eyore, grandma's rabbit, grandpa's owl."

papa is also often lion king. i go days without hearing "mama." it's cute, wonderful that she has such a great imagination, but i get confused! one minute i'm prince erik and she's haaaa (that's ariel. "ariel" became "haaa" because of one of the songs ariel singss), the next minute i'm isabelle... it's too much for my tired little brain!

and this tired little brain is going to bed soon, so i'll write more later...

more ice skating

nina is getting really good! she was mostly holding my hand and we were skating together, but a few times she let go and shuffle skated along on her own! it was only her second time and she was on single blade skates. she loves it! we were out at the rink together for almost an hour while nick and maggie ran some errands (maggie wasn't interested in ice skating today. i mean, ice slipping. that's what she calls it). my feet were pretty sore by the end, i haven't skated in about 15 years and those muscles got quite a workout!

big day tomorrow--church, sunday school (if we can get up early enough, mass starts at 9 so we have to be out the door just after 8:30), then a birthday party. fun!

more on how nina amazes me

her ability to think through scenarios is incredible. instead of explaining, i'll just give you an example of what i'm talking about.

a few days ago we were in the car. nina had locked her door (again. she always locks her door). the conversation went (approximately) like this:

me: nina, why do you keep locking the door?
nina: it's safer.
me (intrigued, because this is actually true): why do you think it's safer?
nina: if there's an accident it's safer.
me (wow! could she possibly understand this? at 4? on her own?): why is it safer in an accident though if the door is locked? (she already knows her poor mom is pretty dumb, so i'm not ashamed to let my 4 year old explain things in simple terms)
nina: in an accident, if the door comes open and my seatbelt comes open, i won't fall out.
me (shocked that she came up with this all on her own): wow, that's true nina. would you like me to lock all of the doors when we're in the car?
nina: yeah.

so, we lock the doors now. and i never talked about vehicle ejection in front of her, and haven't ever heard anyone else mention it, so i'm pretty certain she really did come up with this one on her own. the other possibility of course is that she can read my mind, because this is the kind of thing i worry about when we're in the car.

she's demonstrated this ability to anticipate dangers before. one time she talked about what we would do if there was 'a lot of water on the ground that came up really high.' i told her that can happen, it's called a flood, but we're safe where we are. this was a long time ago, but again, didn't follow any talk of floods. of course, these things are mostly fear/anxiety centered. she's definitely a worrier... hopefully this doesn't portend a clinical anxiety problem. ha ha, i'm worried about her worrying!

ice skating was a hit!

nina loved it and can't wait to go back! maggie even tried skating with skates, but it was too hard, so we just put her shoes back on. she said she preferred the shoes. but nina wants to be back out there on skates tomorrow! i had taken the girls over for a party at the rink, it was our first time out there. it was really hard to skate with the 2 girls, so i think we'll have to go back with nick. that way one person can hold maggie's hand and the other can help nina. also, there were kids learning to skate by holding on to kiddie chairs. kinda like walking with a walker. smart idea! either way, i'll need nick if i'm going to skate because i can't skate and hold on to maggie. bummer! (oh, they had skates in nina's size at the rink, and some that were big on maggie but worked well enough. how cool is that!)

by the way, maggie AGAIN had a poop as i was trying to put her to sleep. can it really be intentional, or is it just her pooping time? i wonder...

"it's not roses all the time." "it's not roses all the time."

the girls are an absolute joy, we all know that. but to be totally honest, they can also be annoying sometimes. so, in a departure from the typical oh-look-at-the-cute-things-they-did-today post, i'm going to complain about the ways they get under my skin. bullet format!

*nina thinks it's funny to repeat whatever i say. not funny.
*maggie saves up her poops so that she can finally let them out before she falls asleep. this is her way of postponing bedtime by 15 minutes. clever, but evil.
*nina has a few things she's obsessed with; right now it's the drips after she pees, so wearing pants and underwear is a constant struggle. this week she added a fixation with this one ponytail elastic. bizarre. oh yeah and socks, but she's pretty much past that now.
*maggie won't let anyone but me take off her shoes and jacket.
*nina is hyperactive. the internet says this is normal, but it's still annoying. i think she's more hyperactive than the average 4-year-old, but fortunately i don't spend enough time with other 4-year-olds to be sure.
*maggie still nurses all night long some nights. to be fair, lately this has improved. she only nurses all night long approximately every third night now. the other nights she only wakes me up about 2x to nurse. in case anyone is confused, she's not 2 months old any more.

ah, i feel better!

antibiotics.

well, turns out poor nina is pretty sick after all. she has bronchio-sinusitis, it's like a sinus infection that has spread to the lungs too. it's also gotten in to one ear. poor kid! she didn't seem that sick, no fever or anything, and pretty much her usual self, just a little bit tired. but i should remember that she always acts like her normal self even when she's sick. well at least i took her! i have to say the only reason i made the appointment yesterday was because my friend jeanne was at the Y with us and she commented on how sick nina looked. and nina was coughing up a lung too at that point because she had been running around. i had just figured that since she didn't have a fever, she didn't have an infection. go figure, you can have an infection without a fever. the dr said it was good that we came in when we did because this could progress to walking pnemonia.

still, he said she was OK to go to dance if she had the energy for it, so we ate lunch at the ebb tide and then went to dance. maggie only finally feel asleep on the way home (her shot went just fine, she's tough!), and she's still asleep on the couch now.

we'll take it easy for the rest of the afternoon and hopefully little nina will be feeling 100% soon!

still fighting this cold

gonna take nina in to see the dr today because she's still coughing. she seems like she's getting slowly better, but her energy levels are still really low (she actually napped on sunday and still fell asleep by 8:30), and her nose is still runny too, so i figured i should take her in just in case. maggie needs to get a vaccine too, so we have to go by anyway. i'll let you know how the visit went after lunch! if nina gets the all-clear, we'll stay in town after the 11:45 appointment and go to dance.

reading, writing, and math

nina's hobbies these days. she's gotten very good at reading--books like easy dr. seuss (the ones without all the made-up words) or board books aimed at toddlers. she is also really good at sounding out words, but she doesn't like it so much, she gets bored quickly when the words are too difficult. actually, she gets bored with reading quickly no matter what. hopefully that's just a beginning reader thing, because i love reading! she started sounding out words 2 years ago, and was spelling and reading lots of 3 letter words last year. but over the past 6 months, she's jumped to where she readily recognizes lots of words and can sound out more difficult ones (like, say, "water.")

she enjoys math MUCH more. she's constantly quizzing everyone. "what's 3+4+5+4+6?" she'll say, and then answer "22!!" the other day i heard her from the kitchen listing off numbers, and then saying "25. is that right?" so i said, "i dunno, what numbers again?" and she said "5+6+4+5+5" and nick said "oh, close, that's 24." and i said, "no, that's 25." HA! she's better at math than nick now! lol. he claims he misheard the numbers, i'm not so sure...

she also does a great job with subtraction, and is figuring out the idea of multiplying (she'll say, "what's 3+3+3+3?" i point out that 4 threes is 12.) that kind of pointing out and giving her vocabulary (that minus is the same as take away, for example) is all i'm contributing to this. she really has driven this learning all on her own. she loves math! i'm so happy!!! i'm trying to give her more chances now to practice her math, so i'll do things like give her a handful of chocolate covered raisins and ask her to share them equally with maggie. it's no problem for her of course.

gosh, i hope she's not too bored in kindergarten next year! something tells me she won't be though. she enjoys doing tasks that she can already do well because i think she likes the feeling of being good at things. heck, when you're 4 and most of what you do in a day is difficult or new, feeling like a master at something must be a welcome change!

we've all been sick!

it's not an awful sick, moderate i'd say but long and drawn out. and the cough is awful. both girls have thrown up a few times from it (i almost did too! it's a doozy). BUT seems like we're all on the mend now.

we managed to get to the Y for open swim this afternoon. we've been cooped up for a while, between the sick and it being too cold to go out for sick kids, and today the girls were bouncing off the walls. so we went, and nina swam so well! only 2 swimming lessons, but her technique and confidence are much improved. she swam with 2 bubbles, then no bubbles (mostly just treading water, she was still a bit scared to swim with no bubbles, but she stayed where the water was only up to her shoulders), then with 1 bubble. the important thing is that she really has a lot of fun swimming on her own, it's so cute!

2 maggie cuties

1. when we were eating dinner at the restaurant at the hotel this weekend, maggie had a runny nose. "ooh," i said, "let me wipe your snot." "not snot," said maggie, "it's mucous."
haha! this comes from the princess and the frog--it's not slime, it's mucous!

2. on the way home to maine, nina fell asleep and we were trying to keep maggie happy. i found a lollipop (half-eaten, but clean) and gave it to her. usually she loves lollipops but she freaked out. "baun wun! baunnnnnnn wuuuuun!!!!" she yelled. we panicked! we didn't know what she was saying and didn't want her to wake up nina. "brown one?" i said. "we don't have any more lollipops!" i said. but i looked anyway. and there, in the console, was a half-eaten brown lollipop. i gave it to maggie. "baun wun," she said. "red one ninas."
she was right! a week or 2 ago i had given them lollipops in the car, and nina had the red one and maggie had the brown one. she remembered! nick and i couldn't believe it.