Backward Birdie

A few weeks ago at the Little Gym, Teacher Katie showed Clara and her fellow Beasts how to walk backward.  Birdie quickly had this whole walking backward thing nailed, and it is clear that she can't understand why we don't all motor around backward.  Before she struts her backward stuff, Birdie will look at you all, "I'm gonna rock it like MJ here with a moonwalk.  Why don't you watch and take some notes."  On Thanksgiving Day morning, when we went to the Mall of America for the Walk Against Hunger, Birdie did a few stretches backward, charming many of her fellow walkers.  But that was actually nothing compared to what she did this morning.

Two of Joe and Clara's three great great aunts were able to come over this morning for brunch.  We decided to let Joe and Clara eat at their little white table in the living room.  Julie stepped over one of the chairs on her way to the dining room with some place mats and napkins, brought her foot down too quickly, and smacked her toes pretty good on the top of that chair.  She had just tossed the place mats and napkins on the table and was in the kitchen on her way to the basement for something else, when Clara padded in and said "I going give you a hug.  You o-kay?"  Oh Brigade.  You can't get much sweeter, can you?  Julie said she was o-kay, that is was just a little owie.  Clara said, "You need Band-Aid?"  She and Joe will use any excuse--or none at all--to get some medical bling, so no doubt, she was mystified when Julie declined the Band-Aid.

That's when she looked and Julie, and smiling--and never looking away--slowly started walking backward down the hallway until she was in front of the bathroom, at which point she turned, and exited, backward, into the living room.  It was pretty smooth.

Here is a clip of Clara jumping, walking back ward, and being silly.  She does all of this while gripping chop sticks in her hand.  Julie was worried the whole time she was filming Birdie, and in fact, the clip ends with Clara falling after jumping in--where else?!--the bathroom.  Notice how Birdie decides that the bathroom is the room for jumping.  What is it about acting like monkeys in the smallest room of the house that is wall to wall--literally--hard surfaces?

The Day Before We Put Up the Christmas Tree

Well, Fans, another Thanksgiving (or as we might as well think of it around here, The Day Before We Put Up the Christmas Tree) has come and gone.  Joe and Clara ate cranberry sauce, pickles, olives, and other assorted crudite, while the rest of us also had your more traditional Thanksgiving feast fare.  It was all but a prelude to the following day on which we put up the Christmas tree.

We began early with the first orders of business: running the vacuum around the living room and moving the toy cubbies to the porch.  Then, Julie and the bambini decamped to the couch to watch as Ted brought the tree into the living room and unfurled it.  After the tree was unfurled, of course, it was time to trim it.  Until the bambini were told they had two choices (build a fort upstairs or in their room or build a fort upstairs or in their room), the process was a study in well-meant but crazy-making exuberance.  Picture Birdie grabbing a small crystal train and waving it about while saying, "Choo choo!  Choo choo!"  Picture Joe flinging himself onto the couch in excitement only to kick the tree each time he did it.  Do you have the picture, Fans?

Grandma Connie tried to control the simmering chaos by asking the bambini to hand her ornaments of various colors but you know it, too, Fans: hanging the ornaments is where it's at, and so this whole surrendering of the ornaments to someone else to hang was only going to last for so long.  Birdie merrily strung ornament after ornament on a string of lights which is exactly what Joe did last year when he and Clara helped before Ted executed an extraction to an indoor playground.  One can, of course, simply reposition ornaments, but our elves were working their festive magic too quickly to keep others' spirits bright, so the Fort Diversion of 2012 was hatched.

By lunchtime, the bambini had built a fort and Julie and Grandma Connie had the tree fairly well along.  After arriving back downstairs, the elves were instantly back in the tree trimming game.  Julie decreed that everyone had to take turns, even Grandma Connie.  Taking turns saw us through to lunch time, after which Joe was going swimming in Grandma Connie and Grandpa Charles' hotel's pool while Clara napped.  It turns out that one of the handful of things better than trimming a Christmas tree is swimming in your grandparents' hotel's pool.

As soon as Clara was down for her nap, and Joe had been carted off to swim, Grandma Connie and Julie stepped it up, and finished up.  Fans, they even had time to sit and admire their handiwork and chat with glasses of wine.  It's not Christmas yet, but it felt like a Christmas miracle.

Cleaning Brigade

Excitement just barely contained.

Grandma Connie tries to pass on tree trimming know-how: interior ornaments are hung first.

Birdie goes her own way: interior shminterior.

Have goggles, will swim.

This birdie ornament?  This birdie ornaments wants to fly!  Fly high!

Note feet well under the tree.  What could wrong here?

Turkeys

'Tis the season to make turkeys from one's handprint, which is just what Our Hero has been doing a lot of lately.  Yesterday, Julie arrived home to find him in the midst of cutting one out (How wackadoodles is it that the kid has enough dexterity now to cut around turkey finger-feathers?!).  He was nearly done which meant he was soon on to affixing it to the wall with tape.  Recently, Julie showed him how you can roll the tape over on itself, sticky side out so one can stick it to the back of something, hiding the tape when one affixes the item to the wall (or whatever).  Joe had given it a go, but the tape was peaking out and Julie sensed--by his wild pounding of it with the flat of his hand--that he might be getting frustrated.  (Julie would not recognize herself in the impulse to act this way.  At all.)  Help was offered and refused.  A minute or two later, Joe was standing back in the same spot looking a little bewildered and crushed.  Julie saw out of the corner of her eye that the turkey wasn't stuck to the door anymore and in an instant, even before Joe began wailing, she knew what had happened: he'd thrown the whole turkey away in a fit of frustration.  (Again, Julie wouldn't know a thing about it.)

Oh, Fans.  He was so sad!  All the more so because he seemed to sense he was the instrument of his own undoing!  You can just hear the interior monologue though, can't you?  "Why.  Won't.  You.  Just.  STICK.  TO.  THE.  WALL?????  Like I want you to!  Like you know you are supposed to!  You Turkey you!!!!!  ARGH!!!!!"  [Sounds of crumpling paper and slamming garbage drawers.]

They say you shouldn't let the turkeys get you down, but it happens.  We've all been there.  Sometimes you gotta pitch it in the garbage, have a good irrational cry about it, and try again.

Happy Thanksgiving, Fans.

Of Eyebrow Safety and Mines

Longtime Fans know that one of our favorite past times here at Raleigh House is cataloging the verbal gymnastics in which Joe and Clara engage as they learn how to express everything in their little minds and hearts with the language they have at the same time as they learn that language.  So we wanted to capture here that this past weekend, before heading out the door to swimming, Joe came out with the pronouncement that he would be putting on his sunglasses so his eyebrows didn't get burned off.  It was some powerful sun that morning, Fans.

Clara, for her part, the other night, was looking over Julie's shoulder as she paged through the latest American Girl catalog (which begins arriving the moment the American Girl Mother Ship discovers that a girl has been born unto the household--which is to say instantly), and bending over the table to press her cheek to a doll*, stated, "That's mines."  The singular possessive acquiring additional emphasis with what amounts to a phonetic possessive.  To the extent there is a conscious rationale (which of course there isn't) it might be, "Yours, his, and hers all have that s on the end, so what's up with that unadorned mine?  Let's slap an s on there and makes it mines all mines."

*We do not make this up Brigade.  She lay her cheek lovingly against the picture of the doll in the catalog.  The American Girl folks know the heart of this American Girl and, no doubt, American girls the land over.

Kitchen Enchantments

In our kitchen, we have a rolling butcher block with open shelves in which we keep, from top to bottom, root vegetables and measuring cups; oven mitts, aprons, and dish towels; cutting boards and, as it happens, a pizza lifter which will figure prominently in a moment.  Now and again, the bambini like to treat this open shelving unit as an annex of the cupcake kitchen.  Pretend food may be intermingled with the real food.  Oven mitts and aprons may be donned.  Almost certainly dish towels will be unfurled like so many rugs in a market place--indeed, they are often called rugs as they are unfurled.  Cutting boards will be ferried from the kitchen to the living room.

Rug Man with his wares

The other night, the bambini's imaginations led them to the cupcake kitchen annex.  Joe claimed his usual turkey apron, while Clara put on not one, but two aprons.  Thus outfitted, they set about unpacking the annex.  Clara was most industrious, until she happened upon the pizza lifter.  The pizza lifter resides beneath al of the cutting boards in the very bottom bin.  Usually, it is not reached because of the distraction presented by other delights.  (So many "rugs" to unfurl and really, so little time.)  For whatever reason, Monday night was different.  Clara was enchanted with the pizza lifter or, more accurately, her reflection, which she could make appear and disappear, of course, depending on how she held the pizza lifter.  "I up!  I down!"

Well what have we here?!  A magic mirror?!

Hello, Gorgeous.

Look everyone!

There you are again, Gorgeous!