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While driving home from picking up Will at Montessori a few days ago, we drove past the high school football team practice. We had the following conversation:

Me: Hey look, they are playing football!
Will: I want to play football.
Me: (silently cheering inside!) Great! You can play football when you are a big boy.
Will: I AM a big boy!
Me: I know you are a big boy. I just meant when you are older, when you go to a bigger school.
Will: I'm a big boy. I'm bigger than (insert list of classmates here). I'm bigger than E. He's small.
Me: Yes, you are taller than E. That's right.
Will: E needs to eat his broccoli. That will make him a big boy.

Weekend highlights and a blast from the past

We had another busy weekend! Do I ever start a post with the words, "It was a quiet and boring weekend at the Pauley household?" Oh well, maybe this winter. On Saturday, we crammed in the Race for the Cure (Lucy), six hours at work (Glenn), canning (Lucy and Vicky), two birthday parties (Will and Reina) and two dunks in the pond at the Children's Garden (Will). We had to leave the first birthday party slightly early because someone waded into the koi poind and was chest deep in pond water. That someone was pretty excited to drive home naked. Here's a blurry example of my first experience with canning. Vicky and I tried canning peaches for the first time with mixed results. It's fun but I still have a lot to learn. We're trying green beans and pickles later this month. Should be interesting...

I was looking at the Race for Cure website today to see if I could find race times from previous years so that I could compare this year's time (competitive much, Lucy?). I didn't find the race results but did find this picture of a familiar toddler and a familiar aunt running last year's race. Will looks bored but he had a good time talking to us. Vicky was the trooper and pushed the stroller the whole time so that I could focus on staying upright. Neither one of us attempted to push the kids in the stroller this year. Between both of them, it's about 65+ pounds of kid. No thanks!

Reina - 18 months old

Yesterday was Reina's 18-month birthday and I thought it should be commemorated on the blog. She's moving so quickly out of babyhood and into toddlerhood. She's been walking for over a month but she's also moved on to running. She's quite fast, especially if she's heading somewhere she's not supposed to go.

Glenn wants me to record that she has a sweet, but also very stubborn and demanding personality. He's right. She can go from snuggly and smiley to red-faced angry in about 3 1/2 seconds if the situation requires it. She's also getting better about making her demands known through repeated "chew! chew! chew!" (chupee = pacifier) "out! out! out!" (I would like to go outside, Mother)

Reina's vocal skills have improved this summer. She's adding more words to her vocab every day. She'll say horse, hot (but always whispered, I don't know why...), owie, the occasional bobo (brother?) and both my parents thought they heard her say "grampa" this weekend. I think she calls herself ReeRee. She says it a lot but I'm not 100% sure of the context.

Reina's sleeping so much better lately. Both kids are in fact. I realized I've just jinxed us and tonight is sure to be short and sleepless but it's an amazing concept for our family to put kiddos to bed at 8:15ish and have everyone wake up in the morning. I feel so rested! Well, not exactly rested yet, but I can string a few words together and demonstrate more mental capacity than I have in a while.

We love our Reina girl and look forward to all of the new milestones and developments that will occur in the next 18 months.

Garage sales, petting zoos, demolition derbies and Water World!

What a weekend! After hosting our second garage sale of the season (and Will didn't pee on the driveway - yahoo!), the kids and I headed down to Brighton for the weekend so that Glenn could get a lot of work in without worrying about helping out at home. The Larimer (CO.) County Fair was this weekend so my parents and I took the kids there Saturday evening. There were lots of activities for everyone. Right off the bat, we saw a firetruck and Firefighter Will was in his element. He used to be content to sit in the seats but now he has to look for all of the different equipment and point out the extinguishers, hoses, alarms, etc. Is there such thing as a firefighter savant? The Fair had a petting zoo so we had to take Reina there. She was a little more cautious around the animals than I thought she would be but she was definitely interested! She didn't want to just pat the animals, she had to squat down and peer in the faces. She's the Sheep Whisperer! There was an antique tractor display and the kids could have a ride on? in? a barrel being pulled by the tractor. The adrenaline junky Will loves anything with a motor so he happily took a lap around the fairgrounds. We ended the evening with a demolition derby. Yeah, I don't really know what to add to that. If you've never seen a demolition derby, it's at least worth the price of admission. To sum it up in words from Will, "I want to see cars crashing each other." Will was really excited about having a "sleepover" at Grandpa's house. I was less excited because I knew it would result in the picture below. Co-sleeping with Will and Reina is not exactly restful. BUT, we hit the ground running on Sunday morning and headed to.... WATER WORLD! Or as I'll be encouraging them to change their name to WILL'S WORLD! This is pretty much the only decent picture I have of Will at Water World because he spent the rest of the time running around, splashing and water-sliding. All with a huge grin plastered to his face. When we first arrived, we found a pool area for kids his age and he was practically apoplectic. He would stand at the top of the water slide and make all these robot gestures before flinging himself down the slide. We had to forcibly remove him to get him to eat or take a break. Removals which always resulted in giant meltdowns. Let's just say that he's a big fan of Water World. Reina, on the other hand, was a little less impressed with the aquatic activities. She submerged herself within a few minutes of arriving there and from that point on, she was happy to splash around in very small depths but she was also happy to sit on the towel in the sun. I made Reina go with me down a small water slide and she did not like it one bit. Later I was splashing with her in the water and I asked her if she wanted to go down the slide with me again. She immediately turned and reached up for her Pop-pop. Message received, Reina.

Will and Reina fell asleep before I barely drove out of the Water World parking lot and went to bed at almost record-breaking early times tonight so I will take advantage of it and go to bed myself. One last note, however, for posterity I feel the need to preserve these examples of Glenn's amazing sidewalk art. It's Woody and Buzz! Greeting everyone on our front steps!

Mom and Reina's day of fun!*

*Okay, not really day-of-fun, more day of trying to fight off the bug that both kids gave me while also trying to get Reina to take it easy so that she could fully recover the from the bug that she was in the process of giving me and also do some laundry and catch up on work email.


As I predicted on Sunday, Will and Reina stayed home from school on Monday because they both had fevers and general ickiness. I can't get them to share a single toy ... but germs? viruses? No problem! By Tuesday morning, Will was fine (despite his protestations that "I'm sick too!") but Reina still had a fever and needed another day at home. I decided to take Will back to school so that I could (hopefully) rest and fight off the virus that they both so generously shared with me. Whenever I opt to take one or both to school so that I can stay home by myself, I always feel loads and loads of mommy guilt because THEY SHOULD BE WITH ME but I reasoned that it was better for Will to be at school so that mommy could feel better and not succumb to the evil virus that manifests itself in tiredness/crankiness/short-temperedness.

Wow. This is the blog post of run-on sentences.


So back at the house, Reina and I tried to get to feeling better and I have to say that it's now become one of my favorite memories from this summer. It's been a few months since Reina and I had some time to ourselves. She loved playing with all of the toys that she normally as to share and I think she probably liked having me all to herself, too. At one point in the morning, she was acting sleepy (actually, she climbed up the stairs into the living room and curled up on one of the clean pee pads we use for Canyon's middle-of-the-night potty adventures. Grandparents, I stress that it was a CLEAN pad, no dog urine present) so I brought her back downstairs in the hopes of getting her to doze off on the sofa with me. I made the mistake of turning the station to the Animal Planet that was featuring a show on cats. For the next half hour or so, my attempts at napping were interrupted by the shrieks of KIT-TY, AHHHHH, DAT DAT DAT followed by lots of pointing, gesturing, hands clasped on side of face and general enthusiasm for all things feline. We are obviously going to end up owning a cat sometime in the future. As soon as this kid is old enough to clearly enunciate her preferences, all we are going to hear is "I WANT A CAT."


The rest of the day was pretty nice too. Reina is learning how to play with toys and she kept bringing me glasses of tea to drink and food to pretend to eat and then spit out. she become really interested in my bare feet and examined my toes for a long time. As I sat there imagining Dr. Reina the podiatrist, she grabbed my big toe and tried to stuff it in her mouth. Yup, she's still a baby.

Carnivals and birthday parties

What a week! There's been a lot to blog about but not a lot of time to blog. With Frontier Days in town, we had carnivals to attend and parades to watch. There were also birthday parties and lots of fun stuff going on. It's no surprise that both kids are upstairs sleeping with runny noses and fevers. It's looking like my weekend will end being of the 3-day variety. But back to the fun stuff.

I took both kids to the carnival on Wednesday. Will had a blast on the rides. There was actually quite a bit that a 38-inch, 3-year-old could ride. He's fairly adventurous and loved the ones where he could "drive" himself. He wasn't a fan of the merry-go-round so unfortunately I have no cute pictures of him riding old fashioned carousel horses.

His first ride was on the train. It was slow and just went around in a small oval so he was a little nonplussed. He perked up when he saw the motorcycles and speedboats further down the line.
On a four-wheeler! It might be glittery but it's a four-wheeler! Recently Will has become obsessed with boy v. girl things. "Reina can't play with my blue hammer because it's a boy toy." He's also very concerned about baby vs. big boy toys, activities, privileges, but at this point, gender is the main issue. He told us the other morning that boys are the only ones who can be bosses. Hmmm. On Saturday, both kids attended a birthday party at a local park. The birthday girl was a classmate at Montessori who used to be in Will's class (before he moved up to the preschool level) and is now in Reina's class. Will's an old hand at birthday parties but Reina was pretty excited to be part of the gang. When they were handing out birthday hats, I didn't think that she would be a fan but she happily kept it on. It came off at one point and she came running over to me holding her hat and patting her head frantically like "Put my hat back on! Everyone else has one and I HAVE TO HAVE IT ON TOO!" Cake. That's all there is to say.

Today, Reina walked over to Glenn and carefully said "ourrrtttt siiiiiide" (outside) because she wanted to play in the front yard. She's trying to communicate more and more and she's adding new words to her vocabulary every week. She still gets frustrated and shrieks when she's trying to tell you something and you are too dumb to figure it out but she's making progress.

I know that there are a dozen other antidotes that I must record for posterity but it's getting late and I foresee a rough night ahead of me. Cross your fingers that everybody wakes up bright-eyed and fever-free.

Yeehaw!

It's Frontier Days around these parts which means rodeos and concerts, parades and pancake breakfasts and daily at least one driver headed the wrong way down the one-way street outside of my office. This year it also means a trip to the carnival for Will (on Wednesday) and lots of horses for Reina to see.

On Saturday, the kids and I ventured to Frontier Park with Grandpa Hansen (aka Pop-pop) to see the sights. Since we're saving the carnival adventures for Wednesday, we just toured the Old (fake) West shops and the Indian Village. Will was briefly thrown in jail for being a 3-year old. Here's hoping this is his only actual time behind bars. Reina loved the Indian Village. She bopped her head and danced along to the songs. This kid really loves music! She was even singing along at one point. I realized that perhaps this whole time she's actually been speaking Navajo and that's why we can't understand her.

Back at home, Will wore his new cowboy hat around the house and looked at treasure maps (actually the directions to his electric toothbrush - yup, he is definitely Glenn's kid). He's been very interested in cowboys lately. We talk a lot about what cowboys like to eat (oatmeal, beef and lots of broccoli!) and talk about what they wear (cowboy shirts, cowboy boots, etc.). He walks around reciting Woody from Toy Story - "Reach for the skkkkkkyyyyy!" "You're my favorite deputy!" It's fun to see how Will's interests change from week to week. This stoop is the official "popsicle station." Whenever Will gets a popsicle after dinner, he heads out the front door and plops down. Why does he do that? Because about 2 months ago, he and I sat here to share an ice cream sandwich, and for the Person Age 3, that in itself establishes a tradition. Reina usually follows along and here she's wearing the medal that Will won for playing t-ball. They don't always get along but sometimes he can be really sweet to her. Wish us luck at the carnival! Will + 90 degree weather + bumpy rides + short nap time = ????