With the holiday rush finally over, and the craziness of the new year hasn't kicked in yet, I thought I'd take a few minutes and write down what everybody is up to. We've had such a nice few weeks, with holiday activities, sledding, football and lots and lots of down time. By the end of Christmas break, I think we were all ready to get out of the house a little bit more but it sure was fun while it lasted.
Will eased back into the routine of school this week pretty well. I like his kindergarten teacher a lot. She and I correspond through email and I feel like she sees him as we do, not a trouble-maker but not angelic either, just somewhere comfortably in-between. He's coming along with his reading. He doesn't have a lot of confidence to sound out words on his own but he's getting there. Instead of kindergarten homework, we have to document that we read to him or with him at least 20 minutes a night. While we've always read to the kids, it wasn't always 20 minutes. What seemed like a chore at the beginning of the year has actually turned into one of my favorite parts of the day. Although, if the Cowboy basketball team is playing, I might try to bargain with Glenn for him to read to both kids that night. (Dear kids-reading-this-in-the-future: You were always more important to me than sports, I promise. But sometimes I just really really really wanted to watch the game.)
Will has become obsessed with all things Star Wars. While he hasn't seen every minute of all six movies (some of them are still too scary for a 5-yr old with a tendency to have night terrors), he soaks in as much information as he can. He now wants to be Obi Wan Kenobe when he grows up. He memorizes facts about all of the characters and quizzes me on tiny bits of Star Wars folklore. "Hey mom - Who's Anakin's dad?" I had to Google that one. Will wants to read Star Wars books, watch the movies obviously, build Star Wars Lego's and sleep in Star Wars jammies.
He's such a little sponge right now, brain-wise. Last weekend, he had a playdate at a friend's house. This friend has parents who are divorced. When Will came home, we were talking about the playdate and he told me all about the fun things they did (played Lego's! made Cookies! played outside!) and Will mentioned that he didn't think that his friend had a daddy. I explained that he did have a daddy but that his daddy lived in a different house. Then I (probably badly) tried to talk about how some kids have mommies and daddies who live in different places and that they still can see them and platitudes, overly explanatory explanations, blah blah blah. Will thinks about it for a minute and then looks at Glenn and me and says "So does that mean that *my friend* gets to have two sets of toys?" We said that he probably does and then steered the conversation in a different direction. We will also be watching Will closely for attempts to sabotage our sacred union in the hopes of getting even more Lego's. Hey - the kid does love his Lego's.
Let's talk about Reina. She is equal parts endearing and exhausting. Cute and crazy. Delightful and deranged. Okay, not really deranged but you should see her at 7:00 p.m. when she hasn't napped that day. She's whip-smart and doesn't miss a beat. She hasn't adjusted well to the going-back-to-school routine. Tuesday morning she had a tiny papercut on her hand and while I was putting a (completely unnecessary) band-aid on it, she told me, "Well I guess this means that I can't go to school today." If we let her, everything turns into a negotiation. How many more bites of food she needs to eat, what she's going to wear, what toy she can take to school. I'm trying to limit the amount of stuff that's negotiable while also letting her have a voice. It's tough to find that balance at times. She so desperately wants to be bigger, but she's also still very much an almost 4-yr old. Reina loves to snuggle and she's always carrying around an armful of cats, dolls and little plastic accoutrements. She and Will were playing hide and seek last week and she found an old chupee under the bed. I came into the room to put laundry away and found her sucking away as fast as she could. It's been almost a year since Bailey ate her pacifier but she picked up right where she left off. Luckily this time around, she gave it back to me after about 30 seconds and lots of giggles on both sides.
Glenn and I are having a good month. We both are busy at work but it's not the crazy busy that was going on before the holidays. He's turned into (almost) as much of a rabid football fan as I am and was equally bummed about a Wyo basketball loss this week. I don't know how I feel about that. On one hand, it's much more fun to have someone else to scream at the tv with but on the other hand, I can barely handle my own emotions when it comes to bonecrushing losses, much less pep someone else up. The easy solution is to stop getting so emotionally invested in things over which one has absolutely no control. But nah. Where's the fun in that?
So as of Friday, January 11, everybody is healthy. We've all had our flu shots. The house is clean. The weekend stretches out before us in all of it's 48-hour glory. The dogs are tired. It snowed today and it's 2.5 degrees out. The kids are almost in bed. Not a bad way to end a Friday.
