Childhood seems to me to be like punctuated equilibrium. Very few things happen gradually. It's more like, all at once, one of the kids makes a jump. Suddenly, Sascha's speech is incredibly clear (and advanced...she likes phrases like "On the other hand"). She has figured out past and future. She wants to measure everything. (Sadly, I am not as tall as I claim to be. Shhhhh.)

Zoe is now jumping with both feet and doing this little Electric Slide move across the floor. She loves to be read to. But, I think I will have to hide the Dora the Explorer phonics books, because if I have to read "Great Day for Soccer" or "Stuck Truck" one more time, I may explode.

Some recent pix....


Zoe wearing my hat, and an outfit she picked out herself. What is it about toddlers and clashing patterns? Maybe they know that they look cute no matter what. :)



I could say that this pic showcases their very different personalities. :) Sascha is incredibly outgoing with people she knows, but when she first meets someone I really do think she'd rather have her fingernails pulled out than say Hello.

Zoe is still quite social, but she's in a "Mama all the time" phase that often keeps her from noticing there are other humans in the world. Mama realizes that soon, Zoe will be saying things like "Mom, stop talking to me, you're hurting my ears"....not that anyone in the house would say THAT to me, oh no.... ;)...so Mama is trying to enjoy being the center of a little one's universe as long as it lasts. But it does get somewhat old when I cannot go to the bathroom by myself, or sit at the table and eat anything, without having a person clinging to my leg.

We got a lot of snow. You might think, that living where we do, this would be normal. But 2- and 3-foot snowfalls are not normal. This is our fourth winter here and this is easily the most snow I've seen at any one time.

Unfortunately it's too cold to play outside! But tomorrow it's supposed to be "warmer" (aka 25 degrees or so). Hopefully the kids' colds will be somewhat better by then. They have very different reactions to the same cold. Sascha's lives all in her nose, while Zoe is not stuffy, but usually gets a cough and is sometimes wheezy. :( It's only happened a couple of times (the wheezing) but it freaks me out to no end. I have flashbacks to her bout with RSV, I guess. Plus, we're talking about breathing, which is no small thing to mess with!

Anyway. I swore I'd write about some of the "schooly" things we're doing. Sascha is very into writing the letters of the alphabet right now. She writes lists, and valentines, and notes, and surprises (notes folded up very small and stuffed into envelopes), and anything else she can think of. Some of her letters are written quite creatively!

Wednesday, Matt and the kids made brownies from scratch. You can see how much they disliked this......

So...people keep asking what's up with the adults in our family. I'm assuming they don't want to hear that we're sleep deprived, so I'll try to think up something else to say....

Matt continues to be a most awesome stay-at-home parent. His job is far more difficult than mine! Sometimes it is more fun, too. :) He is playing floor hockey again - I think this is his sixth or seventh season, and his team has won the championship at least 3 times. He is goalie so don't let him tell you he has nothing to do with the winning!

He takes the kids to 2 different play groups, a story time, gymnastics on Mondays, and they have "play dates" with other kids at least once a week as well. Tomorrow morning, we are hosting two other stay-at-home dads and a total of 4 other kids, ranging in age from 7 months to 5 years. Matt swears they will be "sort of quiet"! :)

I am still writing for Aetna, freelance writing, squeezing in some "fun" writing (I'm working on a 10-minute play right now), reading, and thinking about starting up running again. It is hard to fathom getting back into shape to begin with; it's even more difficult when it is -15 degrees outside. So far, thinking is all I've done. But just wait until it gets above freezing!

And that's about it really. We spend a lot of time together, the 4 of us - reading books, playing games...sometimes it's a bit much, but mostly we are thankful to be able to see one another so often. I would not want to miss the silly games the kids make up, the new words Zoe speaks, the new phrases that Sascha comes up with (the newest: "Could you get that for Zoe, please? I'm really busy.").

The First Post

So, here we are! This is a blog for the sake of keeping track of our incredible kids, who are growing faster than, well...they're growing fast. (Yes, I need more coffee.) Now the grandparents will no longer be at the mercy of my lame updates to that Site That Shall Not Be Named -- you know, the one with all the ads that sometimes makes you enter a password and sometimes doesn't.

I also plan to use this to loosely track what our kids are learning. We're homeschooling, though we call it "unschooling" as we're not using a curriculum. In Vermont, kindergarten is not mandatory, so most homeschoolers register with the state the year their child would enter first grade. This is 2009 for us, so we have awhile to go! But it never hurts to start keeping track of stuff early.

The blog's title comes from one of those things I've said that I never thought I would say. There are just some combinations of words that should not come out of a person's mouth. Our poor cat has been danced on, laid on and sat on and had his fur, tail, ears and whiskers pulled more times than I can account for. Yet he's still lovable and snuggly. Theo rocks.

Some recent pix of the kids:




Here they are the other day, helping with lunch. Good thing this massive stool is large enough for both of them (unless they are squabbling about something).





Here's Miss Zoe, also known as Zee, Zeeba, Zeebadee, Zoe-bean, Z-dog and Chicken. She is a woman of few words...seven so far: Mama, Daddy, Doggy, moo, choo-choo, kitty, and yeah. She just started saying "kitty" and "yeah" today! Maybe that's the reason she woke up every 45 minutes for 4 hours straight last night. I'm sure that's it...

Besides her spoken words, Zoe knows a lot of signs...including milk, more, hurt, all done, fish, cat, horse, cow, pig, bug, turtle, banana, cracker, berries, popsicle (she made that one up herself), water, fan, light, monkey...I'm sure there are more.

Likes: the cat, Swiper the fox, blueberries, nursing
Dislikes: socks, hairwashing, toothbrushing, face wiping (any personal hygiene is not her thing right now)

Zoe will be 18 months old next week. She has been walking for almost half her life (!!) and is always on the move. The other night she (gulp) climbed up the stairs by herself (as in, with no parent watching!). She was also naked at the time...once she figures out how to take off her own clothes, I think we will have problems keeping her covered. Oh well. I guess we'll save on laundry.



Sascha does not sit still so much for photos anymore (or she makes horrible faces that make it seem as if she's being tortured), but here's one of her last month when Blue Grandma visited and they made s'mores in the oven. YUM.

Sascha is a busy kid. Lately she has been making cookies and pizza out of Play-Dough, baking them in the "oven" (the floor under the kids' table) and then distributing them to other family members. (Zoe sometimes takes the "pretending to eat" thing a bit too far, resulting in a Play-Dough cookie with a bite out of it. Yecchh. She hasn't actually eaten the Play-Dough, though.) She still loves puzzles - we did a 300-piece puzzle as a family in a couple of days, and she definitely did her part!

Ice skating is her new thing...she started in early November, and is now zooming around the rink every weekend with no help whatsoever. I've gotten numerous comments from people about what a good skater she is.

Her new TV love is Blue's Clues. I'm sure Steve is a nice guy and all, but someone should tell him to untuck his shirt. At any rate, we have played our own version of Blue's Clues, complete with drawing pictures of the clues in a notebook. Sascha has gotten into drawing in a big way lately - lots of people and suns and moons, plus a camel here or there.

There is always lots of reading going on, too!

All for now...in my next post I'll try to recap what Sascha has learned since the summer...which might be difficult to do in one post!