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!