In the Throes of the Threes

Emily is at that age. She passed through the terrible twos, which really wasn’t too terrible most of the time, into one of my most dreaded ages, THE THREES. I was trying to think of a good word that would encompass the three’s. Some days the most fitting would be the “The Thankless Threes,” which could easily be followed by the “Thickheaded Threes,” but I’ve settled on the “Theatrical Threes.” That would cover the sweet-as-can be moments as well as the sudden change in character to a mouthy monster.

That being said, she has been pretty funny lately, because she can now communicate well enough for us to hear the innocent idiosyncrasies that children have as they figure out this world. So here’s the latest on Emily:

She is enthralled with her shadow, she has been calling it her “big.” For example if we are outside she would say “look at my big,” and then get a kick out of having her “big” step on my “big.” However, as most cute language stages go, she realized that the “big” has another name and now calls it her shadow. However, she is still impressed with the size of it, as she noticed the other morning, “Look, look at my shadow. I bigger. I can get Taylor out of the crib.” I quickly discouraged the idea that she was that big – only because she has in fact tried to get Taylor out of the crib. She climbed in and tried to help boost her over the side. Talk about an adrenaline rush for the mom!

An irreverent funny that she did lately was, in attempt to mimic her big sister Rylee who always says “Holy Cow” when something is exciting to her, Emily would shout out “Holy Ghost” instead. The first time I was sure I heard wrong, the second time I was laughing too hard to correct her with any real conviction, and the third time we gave her some alternative words to exclaim – something that is not a member of the Godhead.

And to top it off, she can be downright embarrassing. We have our wonderful adopted-Grandma T. here in our SD ward, who was sitting with us during Sacrament meeting. I look over in time to see Emily pushing on her tummy and then her chest. I had to apologize after the meeting because it was really my fault. Earlier that week she kept squishing my chest when I held her. I had recently quit nursing so I am sure it felt different than it had for the past year. When I asked her what she was doing she said, “I like to feel your feeders.” Again – laughing too hard to correct her and paying for it later!

Celebration Time

We’ve been home schooling Rylee this year which has been fun and also extremely challenging for me. I like to think that the challenge is not because I am have retained less knowledge than a fourth grader, although I am pretty certain there is some truth to that, but rather that I am quite introverted and really like some downtime away from children. With home school I have all morning and part of the afternoon working with Rylee. Any time that she is working on her own it seems there is one or two of the babies that need something. However, in spite of my own personal defects, she has really worked hard and done well this year.

She had to take the state mandated standardized tests these past few weeks, and obsessive compulsive freak that I am, I was concerned that there would be something on there that I hadn’t taught her, which would then make any resulting poor scores my fault. Therefore, we really pushed through the textbooks and were able to completely finish the math book, history, and all but the final chapter in Science before the test. I’ve been so impressed with what a hard worker she is and with her willingness to do lots of work to get through it all. It’s been fun to watch her grasping concepts that were holding her back before and doing really well on her math and reading.

Rylee’s latest quote that made me chuckle was when she wanted to learn how to play the song “Listen to the Still Small Voice” on the piano. She was telling me about it, but called it “Listen to the Still Small Voices.” I was left wondering, is that was a primary song for schizophrenics?

I’ve included some of the pictures from her Birthday for the Grandmas and Pas since they couldn’t be here. She must be growing up, as this year is the first time she requested a store bought cake as opposed to one of my creations.

This last pictures is of Rylee and Morgan and friends at their first concert. We took them to the world renowned “Riders in the Sky.” What do you mean you haven’t heard of them? Oh well, the girls thought it was pretty fun. They even got their tickets autographed!

April Fool's

I set a goal to be fun this year – well for at least one day this year. I wanted to make a tricky April Fool’s Day dinner. Thanks to the Family Fun website I got all sorts of great ideas. Here’s what the meal looked like.

The brown thing that looks like meatloaf was Cocoa Crispy treats with little pieces of fruit roll up and dried pineapple bits, to look like onions and peppers. The bread, which was not very convincing, was angel food cake cooked in a bread pan and sliced. The cupcakes were meatloaf (that way the smell would be consistent with the meal) frosted with colored mashed potatoes. Then I changed out our water pitcher with the colorless Kool-aid and had our Kool-aid pitcher full of water – knowing that they would expect it to be the colorless Kool-aid. I don’t know if anyone was completely fooled, but, mission accomplished, I had fun that day!