saturday already?!

how on earth does this happen?

well, spring is here! the snow has ALMOST melted, temps in the 40s for the last few days, and tonight we set the clocks forward. woo hoo!

nina stayed home from school on wednesday. she had a tummy ache on tuesday night and was a bit warm overnight, so i thought she might be coming down with whatever maggie had had. she slept in on wednesday and then seemed fine, so it was nothing.

thursday and friday were typical, nothing of note. and today is nick's birthday, the girls are very excited. they got up early to set the flowers out and set out the cards they made him, then we all had eggs. it's supposed to be in the mid-40s so i'm not sure what we're going to do, but it's definitely going to be outside.

Maggie is funny!

this morning maggie and i were hanging out with mom. maggie turned to me.

"who's your sister?" she asked.
"tante vanessa," i replied.
"no, your sister is aunt artica!" she said.

wow! what a clever joke!! i think that is better than anything i've ever come up with.

poor little comedienne's temperature was creeping up again as she was falling asleep. even worse, nina was starting to feel warm (though the thermometer read normal) and she had a touch of diarrhea before bed. something tells me i'll be sleeping between two steamy little girls tonight and home with both tomorrow. my poor babies!

poor little maggie is sick

:-(

she had some really, really mild diarrhea a few times over the last 3 or 4 days, and last night she woke up at 2 am with a fever. poor little girl. i didn't want to bother her to take her temperature, but it felt like it was about 102. she still had it this morning, a little lower, and this time i took it. 101.5. not to bad, but she said her tongue and her cheek hurt, so i gave her some tylenol. her tongue looks fine, so i'm not sure what that's about, but i'll check later and she if she gets any blisters. hopefully it's just a little stomach flu, i know of at least one kid in nina's class who had that last week, so it would make sense. now she's sitting happily next to me watching the cat in the hat. she looks a little out of it but is sipping some apple juice and generally happy, so it seems pretty mild.

well it's colder again today, the high is only supposed to be in the mid-30s, so it's not a bad day to stay inside!

it's finally getting warm! it's finally getting warm!!

wow, what a winter! just never-ending cold and snow. so many days where the highs didn't get out of the single digits and overnight lows were well, well, WELL below zero. brr! the mist sure looks pretty rising off of the water on those -15 degree mornings, and the frost that coats all of the trees, shimmering in the early morning sunlight, is just gorgeous. but BRR! and with the price of oil these days, downright painful.

anyway, that's not the point! the point is that this weekend it was finally warm! 40s and rain, that might not sound like much, but it feels like spring. a foot of snow must have melted this weekend alone. which means that there's still another foot or so of snow on our backyard, and the snowbanks the plows left are only 4 feet tall, but that's ok, it's only a matter of time. spring! spring! next weekend we even change the clocks.

what else... took the girls swimming yesterday and then in the evening, my friend eve and i went to the hootenanny at the opera house. it was fun! nick stayed home with the girls, but i had to come home early because maggie missed me and wouldn't go to sleep for nick. we're getting closer though, she ended up falling asleep in bed with us but she was cuddled up with nick and not me. maybe one day someone else will put her to sleep and i'll be able to stay out late. someday!!

just now i was settling down to check facebook and perhaps update the blog

when maggie, sitting next to me, took over the mouse pad and said, "ok, here's the plan," then tried to open up one of her favorite websites, poisson rouge. what a funny kid!

ahhh, finally friday. maggie is still sitting next to me, looking at my ear. she said, "oh, you have a hole in your ear. why do you have a hole in your ear?" and i said, "where's the hole?" (because i wasn't sure if she meant the ear canal or the piercing) and then she said "here. OH maybe it's for your EAWINGS!" i love her little voice!

now she wants me to sit on the floor so she can have my seat on the couch. she's been ordering everyone around all night. at mom and dad's she demanded the middle cushion, as usual (have i blogged about her middle thing? she has a fixation with sitting in the middle. it can get ugly. and it's hard when she, nina, and i are cuddling in bed and maggie wants to be in the middle but nina wants me in the middle so we can cuddle). anyway. she kept ordering everyone to different seats. she tried to get nick to sit on the rocking chair right next to the TV and he said, "no maggie, i want to watch TV." and she showed him how he could sit there and crane his neck and still see the TV.

ok, time to get this little monster to bed!

i just found out something very disappointing.

wait, make that 2 things that are very disappointing.

1) i had the very exciting idea to print out my blog. there's this website that does it, it's not called book-your-blog, but it should be, because that's what they do. this blog, as i might have said, is my prized possession. i intend to read through it a million times in my golden years, and to give it to the girls to read when they are older. i mean, how cool is it to have a diary of your early childhood? very cool.

anyway, you're probably wondering where the disappointing part comes in. i'm building this up way too much, i am the only person that's going to find this disappointing. but what happened is, the book-your-blog website tallied that i had 476 posts. if you recall, i recently celebrated my 500th post, based on the fact that blogspot tells me on my dashboard how many posts i have. but it's wrong! the 476 is right! i added up the post count on the left-hand side of the page there. so when i had my exciting moment of hitting my 500th post a few weeks back, i was wrong. and that's disappointing.

oh well though, my plan now is to order the book of my blog once i complete 500 posts. that's a nice, convenient time to archive.

and

2) nina is convinced that the tooth fairy gives $5 to $6 per lost tooth. she's said this a few times. she asked me a few weeks ago if the tooth fairy was real, in a tone of voice that indicated she does not believe that the tooth fairy is real, so i said no. it's just me. but she still mentioned the tooth fairy giving her $5 (or maybe $6) when she loses her tooth (this is not happening any time soon by the way. the tooth wiggles like, half a millimeter, but she's convinced it's coming out any day now). i don't know if she forgot i told her the truth about the tooth fairy, or if she just doesn't care, so long as she gets her $5.

dinner conversation

over dinner tonight nina said, "we're poor, arent we." (it was a statement, not a question).
"how can you tell we're poor?" i said.
"well," said nina, "we don't have very much food."
"why do you say we don't have very much food?" i asked.
nina walked over to the fridge, held it open, and gestured.
"see," she said. "there's not much in there."

ouch! the girl takes after her father. he's always complaining that our fridge is too empty, and accuses me of keeping it that way on purpose. which is kind of a valid accusation, i don't like an over-filled fridge, i find we end up wasting food that way. i like to be able to see everything in there with just one glance. if it's so full that things get hidden, i forget about stuff and it goes bad. but anyway, no one in this house is under-fed!

sheesh, kids!