Lily Apple Cline turns 2!

Happy birthday to Lil. She may wear the clothes of a four year old, but our lil just turned two!

After dropping Luke off at school we had date and had milk and donuts on a bench.

Had a great day and she thoroughly enjoyed all of it.

There is a banner hanging over the fireplace that says “Happy Birthday” and every time we would mentioned her birthday, she would run to the banner, point at it adroitly, then throws on her new “2” cape, climbs into her now rocking chair and smiles, smiles, smiles.

Owl cake by mom was also a giant oreo cookie in disguise, win win for Lil!

Late in the day she took a face plant off the outdoor couch onto the coffee table and got a fat lip the size of Alaska.

But she still keeps smiling!

This is really a snippet of what needs to be a longer post, or possible a book.

Luke’s interest, availability and need to make things, imaginative playful things is growing rapidly. I am doing my darndest to give him room to grow in that area. Not to have stuff ready for him to make, but to try and create environments that let his imaginative skill set flourish. which, in reality that is not hard to do.

He has been working on a Delta 5 rocket ship for about a week. It continues to evolve and grow. It now has a communication system, and some other stuff that I have no idea what it does, but sounds really cool. And, it is built for two!

I am pretty excited and happy about the crane arm I built into Luke’s construction area. It was a few weeks for me to figure out how to make it and get all the parts, but as soon as it was available it was in use and he is currently building a house that he says is the same size as ours, but has a second story. So far most of the foundation is done, but he says he will be needing a lot more wood.He has also asked to use my hand tools enough so that I figured it was time for him to have his own toolbox, which we gave him on Lily’s birthday. He knows about it and he asked if there will be a saw?

I hesitated on the saw, cause I was afraid what he might start sawing, (see this wonderful academy award winning short to stress my point)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90SIuISIVB8

I kinda hesitated when he asked and said, well, what are you going to saw with it.

“Why, wood of course!”

OK, he gets a saw.

Another sick weekend, yet this time and for the first time we all got sick. In some ways there is beauty in it because no one is better off than anyone else, but on the other hand it can be hard to take of the the youngins when you feel like a thousand pound bag of cement.

Of course it was great to have mommy and daddy home and I thought we made the best of it. nesting for two

Luke takes a candid shot of dad. See, I’m still smiling.

That decisive moment.

You’re late to leave the house, bringing Luke to school. You are trying to package up a piece of mail to drop while you are out (for no reason other than to test your timing skills) you look around and see this:

It had a two year old sitting in the middle of it, but I decided to deal with her first (no names) and take the photo later.

Miraculously she had virtually no paint on her, but the decisive moment is…how to react.

“Oh, you want to do some painting?”

“Oh my what have you done”

“We’re late and I really don’t want you to get the paints out by yourself.”

Well, I didn’t really say any of these, but was as careful as possible about what I did say, remember I was running late already. The last thing I wanted to do is confuse or scare Lily just because she got some paints out.

I was pretty successful I will say, got to school and realized that for the first time in 184 days, I had left Luke’s lunch at home.

Oh well.

This post is hard to finish because I feel like every day there is something to add.

Lily is truly one of the most specific and spirited people I have ever met. She has so many things that are very important to her, some are so hard to remember or even to understand.

At mealtime she often has a very strong reaction to having multiple things in front of her, she gets noticeably upset. It is not that she doesn’t want to eat, I mean she loves corn on the cob, but tonight when I placed a piece down in front of her along with pasta and hot dogs she got very annoyed and put the corn up on the countertop. As we sat I pointed it out a few times and she just kept saying with grunts and furtive eyes “leave it alone and stop bothering me about it, I will get to it”.

It seems to have a particular resonance for me as I was reading in a book about caring for the elderly entitled Being Mortal about a couple that were so entwined in their rituals and routines that when one of them had to go into an intensive care unit where no one knew exactly how she wanted her blankets spread out over her at rest time or how she wanted her hair brushed, her health deteriorated rapidly. It is all the same as with my little Lily.

This idea is also something that comes up constantly in our RIE class when our teacher talks about her 90 year old father visiting and how the similarities to dealing with the kids in class is unmistakable.

When we lose our abilities to communicate either young or old, we all tend to act in similar ways.

Meanwhile I was once again, calmly, but nonetheless annoyingly, talking to Luke about not using my computer unless he asks me first. I went on and on about how I guess I will have to have a to password protect it and that I can tell when he has been sitting there because of the things that were done. It was all Charlie Brown parental bla, bla, bla for sure. Luke sat there listening very calmly as I went on and on. When my diatribe was complete, without missing a beat Luke sticks his hands on his hips and says in complete earnestness.

“And my bulldozers broken!”

It was the perfect retort.