Mayhem and Magic

Happy New Year and Christmas in Review

Happy New Year!  I'm finding it difficult to get back into blogging, and judging from my Bloglines feeds, everyone else is too.  So, wanna see some pictures?  Typepad is terrible with pictures, so I'll try to get the captions lined up with the pictures, but no promises.  I bet you can figure it out, anyway.

My mom made the boys some fleece hats and gloves, which are super cute.

Sparkle made some holiday cupcakes from a box mix.  My mom sent the same kind of mix last year, and he specifically requested it this year.

Here's Pumpkin eating one of the cupcakes.  They look terrible to me, not appealing at all, just sugar and artifical colors.  But there are sprinkles!  The boys loved frosting their own cupcakes and putting on the sprinkles.  Oh well, it's Christmas. 

We gave the boys this marble track, some train track and train stuff to add to their previous train gear, several books, and then a few little things (like slinkys, blocks, etc).  I highly recommend this marble track!  Tons of creative play possibilites, here!  I almost need a seperate post about the marble track!

 

We read every book as we opened them.  This is one from the "Click Clack Moo" series, which Sparkle loves.  He just chuckled and chuckled when we read this.

And finally, this gift was probably the boys' most favorite present EVER!  (Sent by my brother and sister-in-law.)  Referee shirts, with whistles and penalty flags!!  Beloved has kind of encouraged this "thing" for referees.  Our boys cheer for them when they come onto the field!  It's kind of a respect and good sportsmanship thing, I guess.  But anyway, they love, LOVE pretending to be refs!  They know several of the football penalty signals (mostly "holding" and "false start").  They'll blow their whistles (oh, man, the whistles...), throw their flags, and yell, "Holding!  Number 53!  Offense!  Five yard penalty!  Still first down!"  (It's always still the first down.)

Hope you had a happy Christmas, and I wish all of you the best in 2008!

Home Tour: Playroom

Come down the hall to the playroom. 

(Anyone still catching up?  Here are the Entry and the Office.)

Here we're coming through the doorway.

From across the room, you can see the door and the wall with most of the toys.  Tucked in that corner are two folding chairs, an easel, and a tent made from canvas and PVC pipes.  Usually either the tent or the easel is out on rotation, but for some reason they were both put away when I took the pictures.

Here's a close-up of the shelves.  Did you know that big sturdy shelves are really, really expensive?  Like many hundreds of dollars!  These, however, were about $75 each at Lowes, which is way more our speed.  The things on the two lower shelves are "in rotation" right now.  The boys are not allowed to take things down from the higher shelves (for safety reasons), but if they specifically ask for something we do bring it down.  (Though as I'm looking at the picture, I see that one of the bathroom stools is in front of the shelf...  Hmmm...)  The balls and blocks are always available.  The big grey bin is full of dress up clothes. The map wasn't supposed to be hidden, but we moved the shelves a while ago, and never moved the map.

The mini trampoline has seen a lot of use.  The horse is not my favorite toy because it takes up a lot of space for the amount of time the boys play with it.  My sibs and I had a similar horse when we were kids, and we loved it.

And moving on...  There's the TV, the dollhouse (link is about buying a dollhouse for my sons), and a shelf with some DVDs, books, and a few random toys.

The back wall used to have a big quilt hanging there, but we took it down recently because it seemed like the sunlight was fading it a bit.  There also used to be two small armchairs in here, but I hated how much space they took up.  I like the openness of the playroom without them, but Beloved and I miss having someplace comfy to sit when we watch TV.  Any suggestions?

Here's a better view of the reading area.  I love that little table and chairs.  It gets used for reading sometimes, and for crafting sometimes, but honestly it gets used more for climbing and making "forts."  When they want to read, it's more common for the boys to grab their books and then sit on one of the big pillows (which I think you can see in the previous picture).  We recently put away most of our board books, and now our book collection looks so much smaller to me!  I rotate the books that are out on the table, usually three or four at a time, and that really seems to draw them into reading more.  I'd like to have a shelf that makes the fronts of the books visible for easier selection by preschoolers.

Well, that's it for the playroom.  More than you ever wanted to know, right?  Next up is the kids' bedroom.

Christmas Meme

Krissy tagged me for a Christmas meme! 

(My boys, by the way, are now skeptical that Christmas is ever actually coming.  We've been talking about it and preparing for it for so long now (three weeks is pretty much forever for a preschooler), that now when we say anything about Christmas coming, they look at us like, "Whatever.  I'll believe it when I see it.")

1. What was your favorite gift you received as a child?

Hmmm, that's hard.  Goldfish?  My parents gave me two goldfish one year, plus a glass fishbowl and some marbles for the bottom.  The entire gift probably cost about $1.99.  I named them George and Martha.

Actually, my favorite "gift" that I received as a child is probably all my great memories of Christmas with my family, and lots of fun traditions that I can now do with my own kids.  Corny, yes.  But there it is.

2. What has been your favorite gift you've received as an adult?

I'm gonna change this one a little and tell you about a gift I gave. 

About seven years ago DVD players were still a bit of a new thing, and Beloved really wanted one.  But we were both in school and money was really tight.  I don't remember how I managed to find some extra money, but I bought him a DVD player and the movie Platoon.  When he unwrapped the movie, he said, "This is great!  Now someday when we can get a DVD player, I can actually watch it!"  And then I pulled out the DVD player.  Ta-dah!  He was really truly surprised and really truly pleased, which was so fun.

3. What is your wish for the future?

I would love to have more Christmas celebrations with our parents.  My official wish is for health and lots of time to enjoy with family!

Birth Order and Adoption

What do you think about birth order personality theories in general?  And what about adoption and birth order?  I read Born to Rebel years ago, before I was a mom, and it made a lot of sense to me at the time.  But I know there are so many, many variables that birth order effects on personality are hard to study scientifically.

I'm not sure what I think, but I've been wondering about it for a long time.

In my family of origin, I'm the oldest of four kids.  I think I mostly fit the "Eldest Child" profile.  Responsible, parent-pleasing, follows the rules, hard-working but avoids too much risk--yeah, that pretty much sounds like me.  My siblings all seem to fit the profile of their order in our family.  My sister is a middle child in our family and a middle child in her first family.  My youngest brother is the youngest in our family, but his first mom's oldest child.  He's very much a "Youngest," to me though.  Free-thinking, easy-going, risk-taking, and living in the moment.  He's the brother who's an actor.  (The link will take you to an older post, "Too Black/Not Black Enough", about white privilege and my biracial brother.)

My kids had their birth order changed because of adoption.  Sparkle is our oldest, but his first mom's youngest.  Pumpkin is our youngest, but his first mom's oldest.

It's not clear to me if either of them has a strong tendency to be a typical oldest or youngest child.  I don't know if it's not obvious because I'm too close to them, or if they have both oldest and youngest features because of their original birth order and subsequent adoption, or if it's because the whole birth order thing is hogwash anyway.

What do you think?  Is your personality or your child's affected by birth order and/or adoption?  Or is it all, you know...  hogwash?

Thanks, and Sparkle in Goggles

Thanks for reassuring me that the blog has not disappeared.  Good to know!

I bought some little tablets that color bath water at a Fun2Learn store last week, and we tried them out.  Pumpkin chose yellow and then blue for his bath.  He was unimpressed with the green bathwater overall. 

Sparkle could not wait for Pumpkin to get out so he could try!  He chose yellow and then red for his bath.  He understands the whole primary color thing, so he chose the colors with orange bathwater in mind as his goal! 

It was also his idea that I get his swimming goggles for him.  He was excited to put them on and watch the red tab fizzing and dissolving underwater.

Broken Blog?

(Tap, tap, tap)

Is this on?

I'm having some trouble with the blog lately.  I realized that some of the comments are not coming to my email, which I discovered only after reading some comments I had never seen before on the actual blog (instead of just through Typepad).  So if you tried to comment but couldn't, or if you commented and I never replied...  I'm sorry.  I probably didn't get it. 

So that's weird.

Then, until just a few hours ago, Typepad said there had been no visits to the blog today.  Like, zero.  Which has never, ever happened even when the blog was all bright, brand new.  That can't be right.

Has anyone had any trouble viewing the blog or commenting?  Am I in some kind of crazy space/time dilema, here?

(I guess if no one says anything, that will mean something is definitely wrong, and I'm pretty much talking to myself.  Fun.)

Home Tour: Office

Okay, so I said I was going to show you the living room next, but my pictures of the living room didn't really turn out.  So why don't you just come on upstairs, and I'll show you the office.  Yep, right up the stairs.  Then turn to the right, and there's the office doorway.  This is the fourth bedroom of the house, but with Beloved's job, we really needed a home office.  This room was the only one where we could set up the computer when we moved here (before wireless!), so this room was it.

Come on in!

Let's see...  The desk is one I've had since middle school!  It's a piece of formica countertop on plywood.  The chair we bought used from WSU about eight years ago.  Those need to be replaced, but they're not high on the priority list.  Next to the desk is a shelf that holds the printer.  There are pictures of our familys all over in here.  Above the desk is a group of pictures of Beloved's grandfather, who was a pilot in World War II.  The chair was my grandmother's and I love it.  It's called a breakfast chair, apparently, but I don't know why.  The plant stand beside the chair is a great spot to set your drink while you're reading.  Go on, try it out.  Comfy, isn't it?

Oh wait, before we move on, I'm going to make you admire this closet because I just got it cleaned out and organized last month.  Why, yes, those are the complete series of Deep Space Nine and The Next Generation on DVD.  You see how they are all together and lined up on the shelves?  Lovely, isn't it? 

Well, now that we're upstairs, why don't we just go on down the hall and I'll show you the playroom... 

What Kids Eat

Pumpkin's dinner plate, at his very specific request:  chicken, salami ("slaw-mee"), and peanut butter toast.

Sparkle's breakfast plate:

He asked for toast with jam for breakfast.  After I gave it to him and changed my focus to making everyone's lunches, he asked, "Can I have some cinnamon on my toast?"  I said no, because, jam and cinnamon?  Yuck!  But then I thought, why not say yes?  And the result?  Drifts.  Drifts of cinnamon upon his toast with jam.  And he happily ate every bite.