Cousins!

As I mentioned in the recap of the Great Stair Tumble of 2011, the Omaha Pauleys visited last week for a few days of cousin mayhem and enjoyment. On Thursday, we all headed up to Vedauwoo for hiking and a picnic lunch. (If you look closely, you can see the evidence of Will's tumble on his cute little face.) Cousins B and A and Uncle M eating cheetos. We all hiked together for a few minutes in the morning, but Will was a little tired from the previous night's events, so he and I hung back and had a quick photo shoot. Yup, that's a hospital bracelet on his wrist and a plastic sword in the other hand. He's an enigma. Or just a typical 4-yr old boy. He and I sat down against a rock and looked at the clouds for a few minutes. We saw a dragon, a boat and several swords (of course!). One of Will's favorite activities now is to sit and look at the clouds. We've had HOT, cloudless days lately so he hasn't had much luck. While everybody else was hiking, Will and I watched a group filming a movie in the rocks. They had actual camera equipment and costumes and everything. I took a zoomed in picture, in case it's a famous movie someday. Although chances of that might be minimal because from what we could tell, the main characters were an old-timey western bad guy and a guy dressed as a squirrel. Compelling. On Friday, we headed over to Laramie and then on to the Snowy Range. The "Snowies" are living up to their name this year because as of July 22, there was still a lot of snow at the top. The bigger kids and uncles fished and hiked and the smaller set stayed closer to the car.
Cousin B fished with Uncle Glenn and then obliged me with a quick photo op! He and Will definitely look like they are related. Saturday dawned bright and early and it was cousin B's 10th birthday! I celebrated by starting the day off with a 10k race (okay, that really doesn't have anything to do with his birthday but I did justify it by eating a giant piece of ice cream cake.) at the air force base and I didn't finish last. Yeah!! The rest of us played and hung out and the grandparents came up for lunch and cake. A great time was had by all and we hope that we can all get together and do it again very soon.

In other news, Will dressed as a cowboy. Frontier Days recap in my next post!

Miss R

Reina is two and a half. I think of her as my baby, but she's already a few months older than Will was when she was born and he seemed like such a big kid at the time. She's walking, talking, running and gunning. Let me tell you a little bit about what 2 1/2 looks like around here.

This morning, she meets me at the top of the stairs so that I can get her dressed for school. She's perplexedly pants-less but she marches into her room, stands in front of her closet and announces "I show you what I wear." I proceed to offer a small selection of dresses (because I've learned over the summer that I don't dare offer her a t-shirt to wear with shorts) and she carefully peruses each one until she settles on the green. She doesn't object to wearing shorts underneath said "princess dress" which is a minor miracle but runs away when I start waving the hairbrush around. She starts shrieking before the bristles even touch her hair and one sweaty, wrestling match later, I manage to secure a quick ponytail or barrette and off we go.

This girl is full of pronouncements. I watch cartoons. I go with you. I HEP YOU! (followed by the sound of her dragging the kitchen step stool across the floor to place it in front of the hot stove, quickly grabbing the nearest utensil and frantically stirring the pot as I race in slow motion to get to her before she catches something on fire. Like her arm.) You read me a book. For the record, these are not questions. They are commands, pronouncements, direct orders. And woe to the person, or brother, who doesn't fall in line.

Reina chatters non-stop. Her conversation with you will veer from her favorite animal to where do bears live, sing the theme song for Little Einstein's (which she calls Baby Einsteins), she's hungry, what are we doing next, she doesn't like that and another song. Every once in a while she'll punctuate her dialogue with an "I wuv you SO MUCH!" and I forget about all of the exhaustion, temper tantrums and attitude... for a few minutes anyway. Hey look - she's wearing shorts! I told her this was a 'going-to-the-mountains outfit" and she bought it.

She plays alongside her brother wielding a sword one minute, and the next she's cooking up something in the play kitchen and asking "you like it?" She loves animals but squeals at bees, bugs and the bear that she thinks lives in our neighborhood even though I constantly assure her that bears live in the forest. She wants to wear her Sunday dress all day and wades through every mud puddle on our block. She tells her brother that she's 5 but tells me she's a baby when I call her a big girl.

So in a nutshell, Reina at 2 1/2 is adorable and exasperating. Cuddly and prickly. Sweet and short-tempered. She's so very two.

Hailstorms, head injuries and other summer fun

Boy, if that title didn't get your attention, I should probably stop writing right now! But rest assured, the head injury ended up being less scary than it looked, but more on that later.

Last week, I traveled to Casper for a quick overnight trip. I pulled back into Cheyenne about 10 minutes after a pretty wicked hailstorm had whipped through town. I was driving a work car at the time, so my car was parked at the office. I pulled up to this sight: The hail turned my hood into a dented, pebbled mess and even cracked my windshield in a few places. It was discouraging to see what a few minutes of bad weather can do, but I have to be thankful that no one was seriously hurt. Cars and yards and roofs can be fixed. Our house and yard was untouched so we still have one nice vehicle in the family.

Glenn left for a long work trip on Wednesday and was gone through the weekend. The kids and I packed up the dented Mazda and vacationed at Pop-pop's house in Brighton. On Saturday we went to a new waterpark that was a big hit for kids and adults alike. It was a million degrees outside so I frankly would have been tickled with a garden house and a squirt gun. We slid and splashed and had a great time. On Sunday morning, the grandparents had tickets to the Rockies game so the kids and I headed off to the zoo. It was another scorcher so we didn't stay long but managed to see some animals and pose politely for a few pictures. (I love pictures like this one below - their little silhouttes are burned into my mind. I know they won't stay this (relatively) small forever, but I love to watch them hang out together. When they aren't screaming and slapping.)

So this week has been a whirlwind. Glenn didn't get back from his work trip until Wednesday and on the day before, the Omaha Pauleys arrived for a visit. We've been playing with cousins, hiking at Vedauwoo and having a great ol' time. Last night, Will got out of the bath and the exercise ball was inexplicably at the top of the stairs. Will leaned forward on the ball and proceeded to ride it down the short flight of stairs, landing face first on the living hardwood floor. There was blood and screaming and general chaos for several minutes. After administering a few icepacks, Glenn and I decided that the swollen nose and lip and general malaise was enough to warrant a quick trip to urgent care. Except, it was after 9:00 p.m. so we had to head to the ER. Long story short, the doctors thought he was alright, we avoided having to spend hours in observation and thousands on a CT scan and today he's a little droopy but none the worse for wear. Our house needs one of those signs you see outside of large factories..."It's been 1 day(s) since our last accident..errr trip to after hours medical care.

Will-isms

A quick list of all of the funny little things that come out of his mouth lately... there are so many that I have to take a minute to keep track.

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I'm talking to him about the upcoming wedding and how it's right around the corner...
Will: I'm going to be Aunt Vicky's wedding bear!
Me: You mean you are going to be the ring bearer?
Will: That's what I said!

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Getting ready for bedtime tonight....
Will: Mom, can we read that Harry Possum book?
Me: giggles. (imagining the exciting story of an orphaned marsupial who becomes a wizard and defeats the evil dark lord Voldemole)

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Speaking of possums, a few weeks ago Will's preschool class had a teddy bear picnic field trip. The kids were invited to bring their teddy bears and a sack lunch and they hiked everyone to a nearby park. The morning of the field trip, Will spent a few minutes in his room trying to decide what to bring. He doesn't really have a teddy bear that he has any attachment to and he was trying to decide between Woody, Buzz, a scattered assortment of Lego men and a plastic dinosaur. He finally came racing down the stairs with Barry, his stuffed possum. I actually bought it for Glenn a few years ago - Glenn had a pet possum named Barry when he was growing up. Needless to say, Will's teachers told us that he was the only one at the picnic with a possum. Yup. We're going to start sending squirrel sandwiches in his lunch, too. Yeehaw.

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Will: Hey mom, can you do me a favorite? (favor)

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One last story. We had a sibling milestone earlier this week. Both kids were having breakfast at the kitchen table and out of the blue Reina said "Bobo, you tooted." Well, she actually didn't say "tooted" she said the other word which I don't like and don't want to type here. Anyway, Will got all affronted and shrieked back "No I didn't! I didn't toot!" Reina smugly replied, "Yes you did. You tooted." I headed off the impending argument by redirecting their attention to what I was packing in their lunches but I had to hide a smile. I believe that was Reina's first successful attempt at sibling tormenting. Not her last attempt, clearly.

The Fourth

Our summer weekends lately have been a weird combination of loafing followed by extreme, frantic busy-ness. The Fourth of July holiday weekend was no exception. Here's a quick run-down:

Saturday: Glenn helped a friend build a polebarn. Kids and I stayed home and did chores, went to Target where Will and I had our 900th conversation about how we can look at the toy aisle but we are not buying anything, had a bbq at friend's house where Will and Reina discovered the joy that is all things trampoline.

Sunday: Went to church, brought out the kiddie pool which both kids loved and Trigger ADORED (see below), complained about the heat, Glenn went fishing, I took kids to see Cars 2, Reina lost her movie privileges for the next few months because of her behavior at Cars 2 (imagine taking a bobcat kitten to the movie theater. It looks cute and it might sit quietly on your lap for a few minutes and then in a split second, turns into a hissing, growling fury, has to go to the bathroom four times and then bites you once so hard that it almost breaks the skin. Okay, that metaphor is weird because who would take a bobcat kitten anywhere but what I'm trying to convey is that she looks all sweet and angelic and blonde but underneath all of that is a 2-yr old. A 2-yr old who has recently realized that she has STRONG opinions about every single thing that we do, say, or attempt to do or say.)

The Fourth was a nice day. We worked in the yard before the temperature got too hot (remember when I was complaining about the weather a few months ago? Go back in time and slap me), took naps in the afternoon, and then had some friends and family over for a bbq. Uncle-to-be Matt can grill anything and make it taste fabulous so we had some good food and the kids had a great time playing in the sprinkler and the pool. We bought a few fireworks and shot them off in the front yard.

I learned something very interesting about Glenn. He likes to blow up food. After we lit most of the sparkly stuff, we had a lot of extra good ol' fashioned firecrackers leftover. Glenn raced into the house and came back with Reina's half-eaten bowl of applesauce, jammed a few fireworks into the top, laid it on the ground, lit it and jumped back. Instead of exploding in a fireball of pureed apple, the little bowl just flipped over on it's side. It was all very anti-climactic. I couldn't get a picture because I was laughing too hard and then I had to comfort a wailing Reina who was suddenly very possessive of her (explosive-laden) applesauce.

Summer is going by so very fast.

Camping Adventures

How can it be July already? Where is this summer going? Time is flying by and we don't seem to have a minute to spare. Well, I have a few minutes to spare but I'm generally not spending them on the computer. But we've had so many fun little adventures lately that it's time to catch the blog up. Two weekends ago, we traveled to Lake Minatare in Nebraska with Aunt Vicky and soon-to-be Uncle Matt. We camped on the lake and played in Uncle Matt's boat. The mosquitoes were the size of robins and Will was munched on by many bugs but we all had a great time. It was only our second trip in the camper and this time nobody spiked a fever or threw up. Yeah for small miracles! The kids did pretty well actually. They enjoyed splashing around in the lake and fighting imaginary bad guys in and around our campsite. On one slightly alarming note, Reina loved the boat and threw a few fits related to (1) not wanting to get out of the boat, (2) wanting to get back in the boat, (3) wanting to go fishing with Daddy and Matt, (4) wanting to drive the boat and (5) not wanting Will to drive the boat. There was also one well-placed crying jag when she was not allowed to submerge her upper half in the lake while the boat was speeding across the surface. With Reina's recent interest in "Big Trucks!", Vicky's convinced that Reina is only going to date guys with four-wheel drive and boats. Shudder.
Here's a little trivia for you. Lake Minatare is home to Nebraska's only lighthouse. It's a pretty little structure (only about 39 steps, yes, I counted) and you can see the entire lake from the top. We all took a few short hikes to the lighthouse. Except, when we were there, it wasn't a lighthouse. It was a castle, Rapunzel's tower, a jail and some sort of ninja den. Very popular place for 4-yr olds and 2-yr olds who want to be 4.
So a few things we learned on the trip. Glenn looks intense when he's eating celery. Reina has curly hair in Nebraska. Will is possibly immune to bug spray because he came home with about 50 mosquito bites even after multiple attempts to spray him down with Deet. I guess I should point out that he was in and out of the water so much that there's a pretty good chance none of it stayed on. What a fascinating sentence. What else? I need to wear more eye make-up, specifically when I'm riding in a boat. After two nights in the camper, most of us were ready for our beds at home. Except Trigger. He was allowed to sleep in the trailer with us and luuuuurves to snuggle. Buying a 3-day out-of-state fishing license practically guarantees that I won't have a chance to pick up the fishing pole one single time. (Glenn wants me to point out that it also doesn't guarantee that he will catch any fish). Finally and most importantly, camping with two kids is not as hard as I thought it would be. As long as they have a few toys from home, a book to read at night, and a bag of marshmallows, they are pretty happy. Oh, and a boat. They need a boat and a patient uncle-to-be.

Tomorrow - a detailed and fascinating account of our Fourth of July weekend. Here's a sneak peak - Glenn tries to blow up applesauce!

P.S. Special thanks to Aunt Vicky for taking some of these great pictures of the crew. We can't wait to do it again!