News From the Small Folk

Our kids have been very busy these last couple months--learning, growing, creating. Here's a summary:

Bean:

*At preschool, they have woodworking time, where they've been learning to use a hand drill and hammer. I went in to help out last week and was so impressed when she made this without any help. She's actually gotten the hammering down really well--she was helping us make our raised garden beds yesterday and got one nail all the way in without any help! Daddy-o was really impressed.

*She seems to have taken some big creative steps recently. Here's a few of my favorites:
This one was completely her own creation (well, I matted it on the pink paper so I could frame it). I got up from naptime one day and she came running to show me her tree with all the blossoms on it.

Her drawings have gotten really detailed lately.

* And then there's all the painting she does at school. She brings home a dozen or more a week.

*Bean also made a coyote costume the other day. They had been pretending to be coyotes and dinosaurs at school (quite the combination!) one day and so she came home and got busy with scotch tape, peices of a cat costume and some washclothes and material scraps. Scotch tape can do just about anything.

*She did her first sommersault without help today.

*Finally, Bean is really into dogs right now. I have a book of dog breeds that she has been spending hours looking through. She's learned the symbols that indicate if the dogs are good with kids, other dogs, need lots of grooming, can handle cold or hot weather. She picks out several breeds a day that she thinks we should get. Although she keeps coming back to a yellow lab or the labradoodle. As long as its a tan dog--that much she's sure about. And I've finally convinced her that we aren't getting a puppy, although she still wants a girl dog, "so it can have puppies someday." I dont' think we're ready for that.

Bugaboo:
*This boy is still obsessed with yellow. He loves his new yellow shirt from Bean's preschool and asks me every day if its clean. I should have bought a couple.

*He also got a little OCD about bedmaking the this week. He watched Bean make her bed one day and then decided that he had to do the same thing. He did a pretty good job smoothing out his blanket in the crib and laying out his small blankets and animals and paci. But he didn't want to unmake his bed to sleep. So for two nights, he cried hysterically when we tried to put him to bed and spent naptime laying on top of the blanket, smoothing out every wrinkle that he made each time he moved, but not actually napping. He would even wake in the middle of the night, and realize that we'd covered him after he went to sleep and start screaming and try to make his bed again. It was a couple miserable days, but I think the bedmaking fascination has passed. Good thing because he's always been a snuggler and needed that blanket on top of him to sleep well.

*Bugaboo has also been learning to hammer (he loves doing woodworking at the preschool on the days I help) and just figured out pedaling on his tricycle yesterday.

*And finally, he has this funny game that he came up with the week Grandma was here. He'll come up to each of us and demand, "Say Boo-bah, Mama!" or "Say Boo-bah, Grandma!" and after we repeat "boo-bah", he pretend to lock a door. Once we're all "locked in", he comes around and noisily unlocks us and tells us we're all free. We have no idea what "boo-bah" means or where this came from, but he loves doing this.