New york!

monday afternoon we left for NY. we had a fairly easy trip down. the girls watched a movie, then we drove along for a while, then we stopped at a costco in connecticut for some dinner and supplies. we got to NYC at 8 or 8:30, and everyone was tucked into bed by 10. success!!

tuesday morning we woke up bright and early to head to the museum of natural history. it was school vacation week in NY too, so the museum was pretty crowded, but the girls had a great time. the mascias came with as, as did another friend and her son, who we've known since nina was a baby, and uncle henry, aunt marilyn and the girls met us there too. we divided our time between the 4th floor, with all the dinosaur bones, and the 1st floor, with the whale and the origins of man exhibit. maggie said her favorite thing was the giant tree stump (it's a cross-section of a tree about 1500 years old. yowsers! i'm not sure if it was a redwood or a sequoia. but you could see all the rings, and it was about 12 feet in diameter. really something! nina liked all of it.

on wednesday we went to the playground at our old co-op and saw some old friends. it was fun to see how all the kids have grown and catch up with everyone. nina is at least a head taller than everyone, it must be all this fresh country air! she's always been the tallest of the group, but now the difference is even greater.

wednesday afternoon and evening we had a lovely visit with great grandma and great grandpa. the girls both fell asleep on the way over, so i was afraid maggie would wake up grumpy and grandma and grandpa wouldn't get to see her cute, fun side, but she was great! when they were taking pictures, grandma said "say cheese!" and maggie kept yelling "banana!" so cute. nina also did some math (it was her idea, she just likes to do math all of the time, i swear i wasn't pushing her to show off!), and she impressed everyone by adding 25+25 in her head, and then explaining how she did it ("well, 5+5 is ten, and you can't have forty-ten, so it must be 50!" she's really good!).

then thursday morning we hit the playground one more time and then hit the road. we had a really smooth trip back. we stopped at a mall with a carousel inside of it (the girls LOVE carousels), and even picked up some clothes for nina, who, being so tall, has outgrown pretty much everything she has. we got in at about 9:30.

what a great trip!

oh, one other cute funny thing that maggie said: little penelope had gone to the bathroom and had pulled down her jeans without unbuttoning them. that went fine, but she couldn't pull them back up. so she sat down on the floor with her pants half pulled up, and they were covering her feet. she started to cry and maggie and i went over to help her, and maggie said, "why are you crying pepe? is it because you lost your feet?" that cheered pepe right up too, she started laughing! maggie and pepe really have a little bond between them.

wow, i'm tired. but glad to be all caught up, and still one more day left in february!

saturday, sunday and monday in boston

before i get back to talking about our trip, i just want to point out that you may notice an increase in typos here in the blog. i can catch the ones that spellcheck automatically underlines, but not ones that are real words, just the wrong real words. and the reason for this is that the computer screen that i cracked a few months back took an elbow from maggie, and now it's very blurry. so i can see well enough to type, but not perfectly. so, there you have it. pardon the mistakes!

ok, back to the trip catch-up blogging. saturday was a day of hanging out with the family and visiting with vanessa's old college friends, rebecca and frank. we played with wyatt and chester (favorite games include getting him to say AA-CHOO!!, playing tickle wyatt, and blowing my nose loudly to his delight). for dinner we enjoyed a $60 prime rib. rib roast? something like that, a piece of meat. it was tasty.

on sunday, nick and i took the girls and ethan to a children's museum in providence, RI. it was very nice! maggie enjoyed it a bit more than nina i think, she's starting to outgrow children's museums which can really be geared to the under 5 set. this particular museum was filled with 2-3 year olds, but still, there was plenty to play with and she had a good time. ethan was of course way too old for the stuff, but i think he had fun playing with the girls and helping them with things.
after the children's museum erik and i took the girls and chester to that big playground in sharon. that is a great playground, they had a wonderful time.

on monday, we just hung around the house in the morning and played some more. at one point, maggie was having some cranberry juice, and nina decided to try some and see if she has outgrown her sensitivity (it usually makes small pink splotches appear around her mouth). maggie saw nina about to drink some cranberry juice, stood up and yelled, "NO nina! you'll turn red!!"

earlier, nina had been reading to herself on the couch and said aloud, "this can't be right. burst into song?" haha! we sure do have some strange expressions!

next: the trip to NY!

boston

on friday, we headed down to boston. hooray! the kids were so excited, as was i, because vanessa was going to be there with wyatt and ethan! and of course, we were equally excited to see chester. man, the girls really love that mutt!
we ended up keeping nina home that day, she was so excited and no one felt like getting up early to get her to school when we were going to pick her up by 11:00 anyway. we had an easy trip down and got to boston at 4ish. the girls watched one of their new my little pony videos and the trip went like a dream. they love to play a game that's like 20 questions only we don't count or limit the number of questions, and we call it "guess what i'm thinking." it's so fun. nina is great at it, and maggie does a pretty good job herself! sometimes she'll announce what she's thinking of before we even start asking questions (is it an animal? can we keep it as a pet? those are our classic first 2 questions. if we can't keep it as a pet, maggie answers, "oh no no no no no!"). even if she announces what it is, she still requires us to ask sufficient questions before we guess what animal she's thinking of (they're usually animals, but we also do plants, numbers, and things quite often). well on the way down, nina was thinking of a dinosaur, but we still had to figure out which one. maggie asked, "is it a herbivore?" what the heck!

we got to boston a few hours before vanessa got in, so we could play with erik and chester all by ourselves. then vanessa came with wyatt and ethan! the girls were so happy. wyatt is adorable, and ethan is so good with the girls.

we're going to go sledding now and enjoy the fresh 6-8 inches of snow we got yesterday. so, there's like 2 feet of snow on the ground right now. yay. this is the winter that just won't end!!

oh poor neglected blog! can i catch up with a veritable bonanza of blogging tonight!

ok, i can't even remember the last thing i wrote about, and i don't feel like going back to read, so at the risk of repeating myself, i'll just start with 2 weeks ago.

so.

the week before vacation maggie started to get sicker instead of better. uh-oh! she started to feel warm over the weekend, and on sunday night she was hot. she'd had that awful cold (the one that knocked me out and kept me from blogging before vacation week started), and her poor little nose was runny for 2 weeks. finally it evolved into a sinus infection. so on monday (valentines day, as it were), i took her to the doctor, and he diagnosed a sinus infection that was getting close to spreading to her right ear. ("does this ear hurt," he asked, pointing to her left ear. "no," she said. "how about this one?" he asked, pointing to the right. "a little," she said. "how about your nose, does that hurt?" "no." "your throat?" "a little." and so forth. it was so cute.) anyway, he prescribed a 10-day course of antibiotics.

still, valentine's day was fun. we celebrated nina's half birthday with the rest of our jello cake and a card. she was so happy.

what else?... hm... oh, there was the morning that maggie woke up and wanted to keep nursing. i was done and told her no. she screamed. nina (also in bed with us) offered to tell her a story. "tell me the story of the 3 little princesses!" maggie requested. so nina started, "once upon a time there were 3 little princesses: nina, maggie, and nora" "NO!" yelled maggie. "how about sarah, emily, and charlotte," i sleepily offered.
"NOOOOOOOOO!! WAHHHH" yelled margarete, devastated. "mama you're STUPID!" she said.

ouch! fortunately, i think being so tired helped me handle it well, because i really was too tired to care and just told her "we don't say that, it's not a nice word, zzzzzzzzzzzz" and fell back asleep.

oh dear though, that little maggie really has a tempter.

bedtime for the girlies now, but hopefully i will be back on tonight to do more catching up.

happy valentine's day!

ugh, what a week! maggie and i were sick sick sick, this could just wouldn't go away. maggie spiked a fever yesterday and looked pretty run down today (plus the fever was sticking around), so i took her in to see the doctor this afternoon. she has a sinus infection, so she got antibiotics. :-( it is this close to spreading to her right ear too, so i'm glad i ended up taking her in today instead of waiting another day like i was tempted to. but when that fever wouldn't go away, and i saw those dark circles under her eyes, i figured she'd gotten an infection. oh well, her spirits were great this afternoon, and the fever seemed to be totally gone by bedtime, so hopefully it's all uphill!

nina celebrated turning 5 1/2 today! she was very excited, i made her a card and we all ate leftover jello cake. at night she said she wanted to fall asleep by herself because she's 5 1/2, but that lasted all of 10 minutes because she wanted nick to lie down with her after all. that's ok, we don't mind, we'll take the cuddles whenever we can get them!

siiiiiiiiiiiiick

me, i'm sick. i've been sick for more than a week. it's been terrible. just a head cold, but an awful one. sore throat, stuffy nose, even my ears hurt. ever so slowly starting to feel better.

kids are good, will do some catch up blogging soon.

some blog construction

not much, but i've been meaning to get to this for a while and finally am. i'm labeling all of the videos with the label "video." obvious, yes. but now if you want to see any of the videos in the blog, you can click on the "videos" tag there on the left side of the page, under the heading "labels."

<----- look this way!


first go this way though
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V

hehe. anyway, now it'll be easy to find those adorable videos of nina singing teenager in love or maggie taking her first steps. :-)

and one of nina's patented hula-hooping

this kid is just too funny!!

more video!

yay, i can upload videos again!

here's one of maggie sticking things up her nose. it's one of her hobbies.

my 500th post!

wow, what a milestone!

well, for this very special post, here's a video of nina singing her ABCs backwards and reciting her list of 30 sight words (it's 30. i had thought it was 50 but nope, 30). sorry it's sideways, you'll have to tilt your head. apparently the ipod orients it to right way up on the ipod itself, but if i want it right way up on the computer, i have to film holding the darn thing horizontal. well, lesson learned! you'll just have to tilt your head for now!



well lookey there! it's the right way when i put it on the blog. will the wonders of technology never cease...

everyone's on the mend, including me

of course i'm the slowest to mend, but isn't that just always the way? nina, fingers crossed of course, seems to be safe from this one. she had a sore throat overnight and this morning, which is how it started for me, and we kept her home but by 10:00 she seemed totally fine. she said the sore throat was gone and so far it hasn't come back. whew! no wonder she's fallen asleep so easily for the past few days, she's been fighting it off. successfully, hooray!

not much happening anyway. yesterday maggie and i manned the book fair at the elementary school. maggie loves doing that because she gets to read books all morning. it's even better than the library too because the books are so new and shiny. we bought a few too of course.

i even took them sledding. it was in the low 30s and felt like summer! haha. actually, i was probably running a slight fever because i was sweating, which is not like me. my toes never even froze! they got chilly, but they didn't turn white. sledding is our primary winter activity. sometimes i take nina ice skating but maggie hates that, so if it's just the 3 of us we go sledding. if nick can do something with maggie on the weekend, then we skate.

this afternoon the girls played with some friends... yeah i really don't have much to say! it's gonna be a busy weekend, playdate tomorrow, birthday party, then some friends over for the superbowl! busy busy.

another snow day

wow, we've just been getting walloped this winter! i can't even guess how much is on the ground out there... about 2 feet. unfortunately, it's been SO COLD that we can't be out in it for too long. it was only in the teens today with a pretty brisk wind. brr! maggie actually agreed to wear a scarf, that's how cold it was!

maggie is feeling better by the way. the little temperature is gone, and she's still a bit snotty but not nearly so much as before. she's such a hardy child! my throat is feeling sore tonight though, so we'll see how i do with it. probably i'll be sick for a week. :-(

anyway, the girls had a great day home together. nina made us all play school for the morning, she misses it when she's not there! oh, and yesterday i had a meeting with her teacher about math. she was so great and enthusiastic, she gave me some ideas about what to do with her at home (she thinks nina will really like word problems since she's such a good reader). we also talked a bit about nina's reading, which is excellent. she said the next thing they focus on after the kids get the mechanics of reading down is comprehension: identifying plot, characters, setting (all those book report topics, remember?!), and then, making inferences, which she says is more of a 3rd grade thing but something nina is probably ready for (or doing already). it was a great meeting. it was really nice to hear what to work on with her at home since she LOVES to do math problems with me, and loves to read. oh, while we were leaving maggie went up to a drawing nina had done that said "nina" at the bottom in big letters, and read "nina!" mrs. mellor saw it and wasn't surprised. she can also read her own name. i haven't tried to see if she can read anything else. well, not "read," really i think, but memorized as a sight word. not that there's much of a difference, but i've never seen her sound anything out. she does know her letter sounds though, i heard her answering questions when super why was on ("what sound does the letter B make?" said princess presto. "Buh!" answered maggie).