I want to wash hands!

One of Joe's favorite past times is washing dishes in the sink. However, when he wants to do this, he says "I want to wash hands!" which is a bit confusing since he knows what washing his hands means. After dinner is a standard time for Joe to want to wash hands/dishes. We usually start with a clean sink and put in a few pieces of plastic dish ware for him to pour water in and out of. But lately, he has been getting everything but the kitchen sink to put in the kitchen sink. The past week or so he was ransacking the small drawer that holds measuring cups, measuring spoons, and cookie cutters. Those were pretty small, so they were easy to clean up. Tonight, while Ted was in the other room, Joe managed to empty his usual drawer plus an entire drawer of tupperware and a drawer with utensils like the rolling pin. This was quite a surprise when walking in, but fortunately they are all clean and just need to dry now. I will trade that for the half hour of focused play!

What we make today?

Almost without fail, the first words out of Joe's mouth when he wakes up in the morning or after nap is "what we make today?" By that, he wants to know what we are making to eat. This likely started because on weekend mornings, Ted would sit on Joe's bed while he woke up and ask him what we should make today...pancakes or waffles or eggs or cereal. We now routinely keep pancakes for Sunday and all other days are cereal, but Joe still asks, even if it's not morning. He also asks any time he is hungry and sees us milling about the kitchen. Tonight it was a burrito for Joe, and since Julie had to go out to a cookie exchange, Ted ate a burrito too! Burrito dinner for Joe has the added bonus of being served on the cutting board - so of course Ted followed suit! These are the momentous occasions on a snow bound weekend!

Snow Flakes

Indeed, Our Hero had more fun hanging up the snow flakes with tape than he did making his own attempt at making them, or watching Julie make them. Joe handed Julie snow flakes to put tape on, and then Julie lifted Joe up to do the actual sticking of the snow flake to the window pane. To get as high as we wanted to to keep the snow flakes out of harm's (read: the dog's) way, we had to stand on the kitchen (read: Joe's) stool. Clara supervised from the high chair--you know, "a little higher; no, a little to the left; perfect!" Our readers may be interested to know that Joe declared his favorite to be the snowflake that can be seen in the center pane of the topmost row, bottom left hand corner.

SNOW DAY!

To our far flung Fans, let us just say, it's a winter wonderland out there, here, today! The blizzard predicted to rival the Great Halloween Blizzard of '91 has hit and is all that was promised. So we have had a proper snow day all tucked up inside, every one of us in our pajamas. We--the people with teeth anyway--had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Then, Joe and Julie did the dishes while Clara motored around on the floor and into the Excersaucer, which is one of her favorite things to do. Julie and Joe made some snowflakes. Joe called the paper circles before their transformation "someone's moon." He wasn't really feelin' the scissors today, but maybe he'll be excited about hanging up the snowflakes Julie made because that will involve tape!

Baby Bird Flaps Her Wings

Clara started up with the coughing yesterday evening, and even though it sounded different and there wasn't a whole constellation of symptoms as with Joe, given that Joe is still walking about with pneumonia, just the be on the safe side, Julie took Clara in today, too. She has "just a cold." We are, strangely, relieved. Since the visit wasn't followed by a trip to the pharmacy, Julie found herself at home with Clara well in advance of "normal" time. And after Ted and Uncle Scott left to get Joe and bread to have with dinner*, B. Bird and Julie were on their own. They had a high flying time. Clara's new thing of late is to windmill her arms around everywhere and smile and screech. Fans, it's a cute as it sounds. She is a bucketful of darling when she does this. After we finished up our apple puree with grains (or Gerber Apple with whole grain infant cereal), Julie pushed Clara, in high chair, into the kitchen, where we listened to the Glee Christmas album and waved our arms at each other. (Julie also washed the bottles.) The boys came home right as this all ceased to be fun for Clara and she was whisked off to the bird bath!

*Uncle Scott has learned this week that Raleigh loves himself a loaf of bread. Ribbons ate up some bread--from Rustica--that was waiting to go back into the mouse-proof pot that had been used for soup and was cooling down that never went back in the pot because Julie called Scott to assist in pharmacy run and Clara pick-up yesterday. Oh we forgot to mention that the mice were back? Yeah. Everyone wants to live at Raleigh House. But the mice cannot live at Raleigh House.