Backyard Birthday Party

Josiah is 7! Like all parents, I find it hard to believe he's grown up so fast--and yet it's hard to remember him as a baby and toddler! He's growing into a fun, creative, curious boy--and has recently started arguing with us in a way that makes me tremble a little as I anticipate the teenage years.

He requested a host of friends for his birthday party, so we compromised and invited two families and also had his cousins Elias and Cedar here (plus their parents, of course). He had a blast:

In keeping with the last couple years, Josiah requested an ice cream cake. I baked a thin chocolate cake base (using a recipe from Smitten Kitchen, in case I need to refer to this next year) and then spread a layer of mint chocolate chip ice cream, then a layer of crushed oreos, and then a second layer of ice cream. On top I piped (via ziplock) "Happy 7th Birthday Josiah" with chocolate sauce. It turned out decently and tasted great--and it wasn't a huge amount of work. I kind of like the ice cream cake trend--it eliminates the need to make a pretty-looking cake and frost it, at least!

Josiah with sisters and friends: l-r Abby, Leo, J, Niko, Lydia, and Massi

Niko, Massi, Josiah, and Leo

Lydia and Cedar

E and L enjoying watermelon

What fun to have cousins come visit!

cutie Cedar

We gave Josiah a dwarf mine Lego set from the bin Jeremy bought from someone on Craigslist. It was a hit! He's been designing impressive "sets" of his own, typically using a "map" (directions) as a jumping-off point and then embellishing or changing it based on his own imagination. He often has an extensive set to show off to Dad when he arrives home from work!

Josiah continues to be our socialite. He regularly asks if and when we can have someone--anyone!--over for supper, looks forward to every Friday park day when he can run wild with his friends, often declares a new acquaintance as "one of [his] best friends," and still says hi to random strangers in the grocery store. I love his outgoing frankness that encourages me to reach out to others and get out of my comfort zone! 

But for all his extroversion, he does look forward to "nap" time every afternoon when he can get some time alone to work on Lego sets and listen to audio books. His recent favorites are Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, and Otto of the Silver Hand. He loves our history and literature books for Ambleside Online's Year 1, especially Just So Stories, Aesop's Fables, The Blue Fairy Book, and Viking Tales. While he struggles with phonics and has been slower than many of his peers to start reading, his capacity for good books delights my literature-loving heart.

I love overhearing the kids' discussion of books and watching them play out the stories they've heard. It's been a lot of Peter Pan recently--with gales of laughter over some funny exchange between Pan and Hook, or the way Peter tricked Hook on Marooner's Rock. In April our kids and some of their friends performed a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream in a Shakespeare festival another mom hosted. Josiah was Puck and did a wonderful job remembering and delivering his lines! (The girls were fairies in Titania's train and dressed to the nines. They got a little shy and quiet during the performance, but they stayed on stage and said all their lines.)

Happy Easter(tide)!

We got all of one picture from our Easter celebration, which included an earlier-than-normal service at church (at which Lydia wept when Jeremy and I went up front to serve communion); the traditional all-church breakfast (involving donuts and bagels, much to the children's delight); a drive up to Prescott; an afternoon at Lynx Lake with the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins (so fun!); boating on the lake; an Easter egg hunt; lots of good food; lots of mud; a great blue heron; a sad leave-taking; and an exciting night of camping (in which sleep was interrupted by many bodies, cold, and coyotes). Whew! 

Hey, it's all of us!

Irrigation

This past week we got irrigation at mid-morning on a warm day--a perfect time for the kids to play in it! I decided sort of last-minute to make this past week our spring/Easter break from school. So I didn't bother with much more than memory work and Bible reading Tuesday morning before letting them head out to muddy the waters more than they already were . . .

As you can see, everyone likes to try to float in the empty sandbox:

Clara zooms through on her balance bike:

And the inevitable happens: mud . . .

They said they were making "ooey gooey sticky icky"

I try not to think about how gross this water might be and just let them enjoy being kids. What could be more glorious than having your whole flooded yard to splash and play in--and then vats of mud as the water soaks in?!

The Children's Artwork

As usual, the kids are turning out artwork at a prolific rate. I let them draw during our "morning time": post-breakfast Bible and poetry reading, memory, recitation, and singing time. Clara likes to join in the fun, too, often handing me picture after picture "for Manna" or "for great-Manna." 

Here's one of Clara's (the circly-things with dots are people):

Josiah drew something of an abstract piece. I thought the teacup on the roof was an interesting addition:

He's also started drawing comics, after seeing some of the older boys at church do so:

Abby and Lydia like to write their names. (We can often easily identify a culprit who took a pen to a forbidden canvas.) Here's a picture Abby drew of members of our family (I believe Jeremy and I are sticking out our tongues?):

Josiah tried his hand at dinosaurs:

Lydia meticulously colored in each section of those ovals, and then decided the picture was for her little sister:

Both girls like using the Draw Write Now book we have to help them draw cute little animals (this one of rabbits is by Abby):

We got a new set of Crayola markers, which triggered some full-color pictures from Josiah. He's very much into Lego knight stuff right now (he looks at directions/pictures of castles, dungeons, carriages, etc. and comes up with his own design with the pieces he has), and we're also reading about early English history--including Arthur--so his pictures often have an ancient-warrior theme:

Lydia the animal-lover likes to draw animals:

 

That cow looks a little frightening, though...

The black things are birds

A farm scene from Abby (check out that pink barn):

And a last couple from Clara:

Clara the Two-Year-Old

Clara is very possessive of her age. "Me DOO!" she pronounces emphatically, especially when any of her siblings dare talk about numbers, particularly numbers involving a two. She gets quite worked up if they persist in talking about twos (twenty-two, two hundred, etc. are also culprits) without acknowledging her ownership of the number. Sometimes we have to quit talking about math problems during lunch because Clara is too overwrought. (Her siblings know how to bug her, of course. Sometimes they launch into a series of "me too's" or counting by twos or some-such just to get under her skin.)

At nearly two-and-a-half, she's talking so much more. Her grammar is just cute: "Cold me!" she says after eating yogurt on a chilly morning. "No me do dat!" she objects when a sibling tattles on her, or even if I just ask, "Who got out the Duplos?" Anytime she finds a raisin in something, she reminds me, "No me like it. Blech." She eagerly retells events and stories--the other day she animatedly recounted a Shaun the Sheep episode about a "fof" (fox) and "bahbee Timmy." She loves to hop up on my lap and listen to me read a story, and (like her sisters) she likes to choose which character she wants to be--on every page. "Me dis one," she says, choosing a new pup on each page of Go, Dog, Go. She's sad for the Baby Bird in The B Book; excited with the boy running home to Mama in Inside, Outside, Upside-Down; and frightened by the prospect of Clark coming "home to our house" in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. 

When she prattles in longer sentences or uses more of her vocabulary, she's not very clear. Often I guess at her meaning from context, but sometimes I'm still mystified. (I think we may ask to have her re-evaluated for early intervention speech therapy, even though I doubt she'll qualify.)

Interestingly, she calls Abby "Vava," and I'm not sure where she got that nickname! I'd have thought "Abby" was the easiest of her siblings' names to say, but I guess not. She still waggles her tongue a little when saying "Lydia" so it's more like "Lilila," and she calls Josiah "Sah-za" or "Sah-zas" (approximating "Siah").

She's got definite opinions and is committed to independence: "No! ME!" she likes to say about everything from buckling her carseat to putting on her pants to getting into her bed. Of course, there's lots she can't do, and she gets frustrated and breaks down crying with a pitiful, "Mama, hup [help] me!" How can I resist?

She understands the home hierarchy and opposes her siblings' efforts to rule her. Often she comes to me in stormy tears, terribly offended: "Vava 'No No' me!" she complains bitterly (Abby told her "no no"). She calls herself "Caya," though doesn't like if anyone else mispronounces it that way.

Even in her rudeness she's so cute and funny: she uses those Cousino lips of hers to excellent effect! One morning I changed her and she got upset about something (not unusual these days; she can be a real stinker and crank!). She pooched out her lips to show her dissatisfaction, and Jeremy, who was getting ready for work, swooped in and kissed those pouty lips. She was so surprised--and so offended! "No, no, Dada!" she said. "No kiss me! Wipe off!" and she vehemently swiped her hand across her lips several times.

Clara loves to yell "DOO! FREE!" and jump off just about anything. She asks me to do "two-three" by holding her hands and allowing her to jump off the changing table, or into bed, or off the couch, etc.

Lately she has gone through phases of painstaking drawing and coloring. At times she'll spend a long while on each paper, either scribbling sections of different colors, or carefully making circles with dots in them, which are her people. She'll often point out who's who: "Me dis un. Mama dis. Vava dis." etc. The other day it was, "Dada haf big eye!" as she pointed out one of her circles with dots. But then other days, she whips off paper after paper "for Manna" with a single swoosh of marker on it. Tonight she made a whole stack of purple swishes for "Manna Fwagstaff."

Clara's people

Clara loves having relatives come visit. She really took to my mom over Christmas, preferring "Manna" over Mama in just about everything. I often rhetorically ask her, "Are you Mama's girl?" or "Are you Mama's sweet babe?" or something along those lines. She would say, "No! Manna's duwl!" or "Manna's feet baybay!" (She also corrects me every time I call her a big girl: six weeks ago it was, "No! Me hehehe [approximating crying = baby]," then changed to "me baybay," and now she says "me bah-bee." It's so interesting how her pronunciation morphs so quickly!)

Though mostly she insists she's still a "bahbee," she knows big girls have certain privileges and so switches to being a big girl when it's convenient. One night, for instance, I let Abby and Lydia have a Ricola cough drop. Of course, Clara wanted one! I told her they were only for big kids. "Me no bahbee. Me big duwl!" On the other hand, she came to me very upset this week because Abby called her by her own name. "Me NO Caya! Me BAHBEE!" she wailed.

She certainly tries to keep up with her older siblings in all sorts of ways--she wants to be one of the pack! She has taken off with a balance bike like her sisters before her (and on their old bikes) and is a speed demon like the rest of them. Any time the older kids show off their gymnastics skills (they took a semester of gymnastics in the fall), she tries to do her "bridge" and even lift an arm or leg while doing so--expecting her audience to be impressed, of course! She has long been a helper, but one of her siblings wised up and decided to utilize her to ease the chore burden. So now Clara is taking over the silverware-sorting part of unloading the dishwasher.

Clara and Lydia

In the evenings for Advent and now for Lent, we've lit candles and done a reading and song. Then the kids get to blow out the candles. Clara is very much into this, and she puffs and blows with a will, though not with good direction. But she has an eagle eye out for anyone who extinguishes her candle before she herself manages to snuff it! (Tonight, though, she reached across the table for a marker during our reading and snuffed out a candle with her hair! She didn't react but the smell of singed hair was unmistakable.)

A couple weeks ago, as I nursed her before putting her down for nap (yes, she's the longest nurser of all the kids--but we're down to two times a day), I asked Clara if she'd like it if Mama had another baby.* She shook her head "no." "Would you be a big girl if we had another baby?" I asked. "Would you help Mama with the baby?" Same answer: no. I continued in this vein for a little while, and she was pretty adamant about her position as baby of the family, with no desire to be usurped. Finally I said, "What would you do with a new baby if we had one?" Her response was prompt: "Pinch it." She pinched forefinger and thumb together. I was taken aback--not quite sure this was her meaning--but she repeated it with relish and determination (and also told Jeremy the same thing later)!

So far Clara is not very interested in potty training. She'll happily use the potty before a bath or on occasion when the desire strikes her--but not often. We're trying to motivate her with the promise of a chocolate chip when she uses the potty. She excited talks about the "choc'chip!" and has earned a few, but I'll probably need to ramp up the program at some point.

Doing the fishing puzzle during our morning time routine

Clara's toddlerhood has reminded me how much ritual two-year-olds like--she loves to repeat a question-and-answer conversation every day (and sometimes multiple times daily). For instance, for several weeks, any time we were in the back house, she asked, "Manna bed? Pa bed?" pointing to the big bed in there. "Yes," I say, "Grandma and Pa sleep there when they come." Then she points to Jeremy's sleeping bag. "Dada s'eepin' bag? Go hun-un? Pa?" So we again affirm that yes, that is indeed Daddy's sleeping bag, and he took it when he went hunting with Pa. "Oh!" she says in a satisfied way, as if she'd never heard it before. (I love the way she says that "oh!"--pleased as if at new understanding, happy to find an answer to a pressing question, glad to find the world rightly ordered.)

Wearing her poncho and hat knitted by Great-grandma McNinch!

In true two-year-old fashion, she's fiercely independent and yet emotionally fragile, and very much Mama's girl (or bahbee)--as long as Grandma or Great-grandma isn't here! As frustrating and disrupting her spurts of crying or tantrums are, she's also a delight and a good challenge for me (and her siblings). It's crazy to me that my youngest isn't truly a baby anymore!

*This is not an announcement. We are not expecting. :)