The Yellow Dot Skirmishes

Here is Birdie, in the penalty box so to speak.  You can tell that she was really broken up about being there, right, Brigade?  These days, as dinner winds down, Clara winds up.  Her first trick is to dash from the table to Joe's bed and fling herself on it, cackling and screaming.  Sometimes this will set Joe to wailing and crying and other times, it will make him also act like a goof, keeping both bambini distracted from getting themselves out of their clothes and into the bathroom for their bath.  Naturally then, they are good and wound up for bath time in the smallest room of the house with hard surfaces everywhere where nothing could go wrong with three people packed in it, two of them wet, one of the wet ones them incapable of reason and the other only just barely so, and a dog wandering in and out.

The shenanigans continue after bath.  Joe attempts to put on his pajamas while Birdie attempts to distract him from that by running around hither and yon and doing anything except "stand on the yellow dot."  Longtime readers and visitors to Raleigh House may have observed that the rug in the bambini's room has yellow, green, and cream-colored dots on it.  One of the yellow dots in positioned such that Clara can stand on it and use her crib for support as she does it ("I do it!  I do it!  I do it!").  What Birdie likes to do is stand on the green dot, look at you with a grin and say, "Green dot?!"  This is when she isn't busy running around, running off with Joe's pajamas, or throwing herself on his bed.

With just one bambini, one can quash this sort of behavior with some degree of success by ignoring it.  This strategy also works if both bambini are acting like hooligans.  But it is less successful when one bambini is doing his four-year-old utmost to toe the line so he can do his quiet activity with Daddy and read books with Mommy, and the other bambini is doing her two-year-old utmost to distract him and everyone else from anything and everything save her antics.  One starts to feel more than a little ridiculous, too, standing there snapping and snarling about a yellow dot.  There is also this: the two nights before last, Julie hadn't read books to Clara which made Julie very sad, and Clara, too, once she caught up--too late--to the consequences of acting like a wild thing.

So we'd decided to separate the bambini during pajama donning time.  For now, Joe will get his on in the living room or porch while Clara is made to stand on the yellow dot to get into hers.  If she is not on the yellow dot and on her way to being in her pajamas by the time Joe is into his pajamas, then she'll go straight into her pajamas and to bed.  We hope that removing Clara's favorite audience member will help, and that she'll understand the consequences of acting so silly between dinner time and bed time sooner rather than later.

That was our plan.  But last night, Ted had to go and pick up Berenice (someone forgot when she was coming across the river form St. Paul), and when Clara started in and up before bath, Julie decided that she wasn't up for the whole bathroom scene.  So Clara went straight into her pajamas, and then was asked to sit in front of the doorway to the bathroom, which she did, very nicely, and while chirping, "I not crying.  I not crying," no worse for the wear.  And then Julie read her books, which made Julie very happy because she will be out of town for the next three bedtimes. Birdie seemed happy, too.

Our Hero Turns Four

It's official.  Our Hero is four.  It really does seem like no time at all has passed since he arrived.  The other night, Julie and Ted were remembering how they would bring him into the big bed and with him in between them, sing Joe Joe Joe Your Boat to the tune of Row Row Row Your Boat.  This would be in those months when Julie at least really thought that we would just never sleep a full night through again, and that this was just something parents didn't talk about, but was assumed all the same.  What did we know?  Certainly not that those days would be a blip, gone in blink, just like all the days that have followed since Joe flung open the door to our hearts and came on in to stay forever.

Joe got to wear the super cool NYC subway shirt with the four on it that Ted got for him on a business trip to NYC.

He grew like two inches in five months!

Mr. 40 Inches-40 Pounds-and 4 Years Old is now rockin' the booster seat.  This means that his sister is trippin' over his old car seat which has a cup holder.  OMG.

The crown came home from school.  The hand is blocking any assistance offered by Clara.

He blew the candle out all by himself. It's the first year he's been able to do that.

Gone Fishin'

We dragged Whaley out again this afternoon while Clara was napping.  We also dragged out the toy fishing rod and fish, and Joe had a whale of a time (yes, yes we did just write that) snagging the fish from the whale pool and putting them in, alternately, the water table, a bucket, and Julie's lap.  By the time Birdie was up from her nap, he'd moved on to bowling with the pins and balls Grandma Connie and Grandpa Charles had given him.  But we all moved on not long after Birdie arrived on the scene because she's been in a bit of a state all weekend.  She's also her her hand crammed in her mouth most of the weekend, and at one point, gnawed on Julie's shoulder.  So we feel fairly confident that she's wearing her crazy pants because she has one or more two-year molars coming in, it hurts, and she's not quite sure what to do with herself.  Joe and Ted went to collect Berenice from "camp," and Clara and Julie did a loop of random errands.  The highlight of which was a toss up for Birdie: either seeing our friends Anne and Brent's dog through the window when we dropped off some things on their front stoop, or getting to stand on the ledge at the post office and drop all the letters into the outgoing mail slot.  So we did our best to take her mind off the fact that she was wearing her crazy pants.

That chair you see in the foreground of the first shot of Our Hero fishing is Joe's very own adirondack chair, which was given to him for his birthday by his demi-goddess celebrity sitters Sara and Emily.  He opened all of the presents that were brought to his party before going to bed last night, and was crestfallen when he learned that he could not then play with them.  Serious tears were avoided by the suggestion that he select the one he was going to play with the moment--the moment!--he awoke.  Our Hero selected the chair and it was indeed constructed by Our Hero and Ted with only a breakfast's worth of delay this morning.  (You can't see it in any of these pictures, but the chair has sharks on it.  It's pretty awesome.)

Joe's Fourth Birthday Bash

Special thanks to Sara for this terrific shot.

Joe won't turn four until Monday--at 1:02pm CST!--but his fourth birthday bash was this afternoon.  The weather was fabulous and, it must be said, so were the Ekkers children.  Joe, in particular, wowed: saying thank you to everyone who wished him a happy birthday, keeping his cool in the face of birthday party induced craziness, and doing his best to play with all of the disparately connected friends who came to celebrate with him.  It was an afternoon where even as you were thinking to yourself, "How can he be four?", you could see he really was more big than small.  (Remember, Fans, when birthday cake was still "happy birthday cake"?)

Clara is awfully big, too, though most noticeably in a different way.  Birdie was sporting the bird dress Julie had gotten hoping Clara would be able to wear it at her second birthday party.  When Birdie turned two though, the dress--a 2-3 T (what?)--was far too long.  Two months later, today, it was just right.  But at least three juice boxes, one straw cup full of water, and too many delights and distractions to number later, Birdie had to don a new dress (minus the birdie) since she'd peed probably her weight--probably while she was sitting down eating her cake, which Julie discovered promptly when Clara sat on Julie's lap.

A few weeks ago, we asked Joe what he wanted on his cake this year, and he said, "Snoopy. [beat] And Spiderman and Batman."  Uh huh.  We checked in again a day or two before we needed to place the order: "A crab.  Four crabs.  A Mama Crab, a Daddy Crab, a Brother Crab, and a Sister Crab."  (He was wearing his crab pajamas at the time.)  And that's how it came to be that Joe had crabs on the cake at his fourth birthday party, and nautical-themed chalk art on the walkway leading up to the house, mostly courtesy of Grandma Connie who, as we've noted here before, has hidden, but very real, artistic talents.

And so, another birthday bash is history, but Our Hero is three for two more days.  We wouldn't miss 'em.

A Beautiful Morning

Late yesterday evening, one of those terrific, brief but hard summer rains came through, and not long after it did, the heat broke.  Knowing it would be a beautiful morning, Ted hatched a plan to pile into the car first thing--in our pajamas--and drive around some of the nearby lakes before having breakfast out.  Fans, what a lovely lake viewing adventure we had!

We passed by the fishing pier at Lake Calhoun which remind us of how excited we are for Aunt Kate, Uncle Scott, and Cousin Nick's State Visit later this summer.  We told Joe that undoubtedly he'd be able to fish with Uncle Scott, right off that pier.  Joe allowed that Uncle Scott could sit "where the bags are"--by which he meant between the car seats in the backseat.  (Aunt Kate will have to go "in her car.")

We wound up our adventure at Rustica*, which we learned is practically empty in the first hour it's open for business.  Joe promptly accidentally pulled down the cafe curtains strung up on a tension rod, but otherwise, both bambini had their best restaurant behavior on display.

*Featured in a piece in this month's Food & Wine--!!!!!  (For all the other Food & Wine readers out there.)  Minneapolis is so often overlooked in the pages of this magazine but this month, it got a whole feature!