Did I say play?  I mean just move around and eat from the pretzel buffet.

After dinner we took a long bike ride around Elmwood and over to the playground on Thurston.

We did some swings…

We did some slides and Daddy captured us with some great new photos with a new vignette app…

Today we packed up early and headed to Becker Farms for some hot, sweaty blueberry picking…

Then we took the kids over to see some farm animals.  Jonas and Stella were especially loving it!  Lucy and Zoey liked it a lot too and Nafie was getting used to the idea.  I spent some time when I got home hosing down the wagon and some goat poop shoes.  When the kiddos wake up, I’ll be hosing them down too.

In fact, Stella was a little obsessive about the chickens- chasing, harassing and even trying to kiss and hold them.  That girl loves animals!

Now that I am inside, fed and watered and the kiddos are napping, I feel that today was really a good time.  However, being hot, hungry and dealing with almost constant crying from the twins along with them both wanting to be held a lot, it was stressful while we were there.  I almost hit my max today after carrying both babies back from the berry field in my arms at the same time.  I tried to just walk, hold hands and just walk away and they simply lay down and cry.  Do I just let them scream it out until they get up and walk?  Do I just pick them up and go?  Its getting beyond frustrating to have to carry one when she’s tired only to have her sister want to be carried too.  They are not getting any lighter either.  They are probably around 25 lbs each.  Suggestions??

On a lighter note, our 8th wedding anniversary is 13 days away: August 3rd.  We have been together a total of 13 yrs. so I decided to do a little surprise/celebration each of the next 13 days for JD.  Tonight we are going to see Rogue Wave at Thursday in the Square sans kids and then out for dinner/ice cream by the river.  It should also be an early night since we are only going downtown for the first band.  I can’t believe its been over 2 years since we saw a “grown up” live show!!  YES!  And we have Broken Social Scene coming up in September too!  Yipee!

Last night we went to the first concert in the Children’s Concert Series in Kenmore.  The kids danced it up to some blue grass/folk music and continuously ate snacks, as usual.  We took the bikes down there with the seat/trailer and it took us no time at all (or at least faster than the 5 min. it takes us to pull them there in the wagon).  The kids are really getting better in the bike trailer and seat already and seem to love it.

At 1st kenmore childrens concert

Zoey making a friend

This morning, with a big trip to a farm impending tomorrow, we laid low and joined a pool party across the street at the Creed’s.  Highlights included sea creatures & teddy grahams. It was lovely and got me thinking a lot about sharing and how to help the kids (peers or siblings) work through disagreements.

Brothers

The “babies”

Jonas and Lucy

These two caught in action

Playing “sleep over at Jonas’ house”

I am not really sure how to handle these things and especially at home I try to be as fair as possible.  Sharing is a constant big issue in our daily lives.  How do you teach your young kids to share?  Mine seem to naturally not want to, which I think is probably normal, but how do you get them to do it and like to do it besides showing them and talking them through it over and over?  OR is that it?  Any tips or is this just obvious; they grow up and do it after being shown over and over?

Here are some more great ones from our adventures today and yesterday…

Daddy pile

Beading

Zoey doing dot art with her new dot markers

Just got her nails painted

Zoey w her tired eyes and thumb

Stella doing her sniff thing w her blankie

Cooking dinner with this “distraction” happens a lot

Rentals are $0.99 per day and you can return to any Redbox kiosk anywhere… and there are 15,000 of them across the country.

The only downside is the limited selection, but in most cases you’ll only need a few per road trip. And you can even reserve them through Redbox.com.

And, if you are on the super frugal side, there are Redbox promo codes out there to get free rentals, including Redbox’s Free Movie Monday on the first Monday of every month.

I am so glad I am making all these baby foods now, but the hidden bonus is all the time I am cooking away I think about how easy it is for us to get food, for example (at least in our very priveledged country and with my fortunate circumstances).  I mean, walk into Wegmans, pick up an apple and put it into a bag.  Half the time I couldn’t even tell you exactly what I paid for that apple, never mind the travels its been on.  Making sweet potatoes  yesterday got me thinking of where they came from and what kinds of resources had to be used to grow, process and get them to that neat pile in Wegmans.  Does the $3 I paid for them really reflect the impact on the soil, cleaning and processing methods and transportation costs and impacts?  I really don’t think we appreciate our food like we would if we farmed it ourselves or could at least see the journey from seed to what we buy on a display in a store.  Things are so disconnected now and there are so many decisions regarding our foods we don’t have control over because of this process now.   It seems kind of scary/overwhelming to think of these things with something as intimate as what you put into your kids’ bodies.  What about where those veggie scraps go?  Lord knows they don’t break down in landfills, where they probably end up.  Being biodegradable means nothing if air never reaches those lonely sweet potato peels.  Nevermind a compost pile when you live in a town with a rat problem.  Geez, what a snowball of worries.  The funny thing is that while this is on my mind, it seems to be other’s too.  I wish I and others thought about it more.

Well, there are costs to living here, on this Earth for sure and I have no answers.  I think though that if we think about what’s on our plate a little more than what kind of dressing will go with the salad sitting there it might bring to light the true cost of our food.  We are trying to make a conscious effort to eat more healthy, fresh and local foods and also organics.  I am thankful that making baby food has become more than just cooking, blending and freezing for me.  At least I can be prepared to talk to my kids about choices they have control over when they are gulping it down.

• 9 Methods for Mastering Your Money in 2009 from Get Rich Slowly.  A great collection of tips, methods and tools for you to use to get your finances in order this year.
• Do Children Really Cause Financial Burdens? from The Simple Dollar. This post focuses on a common misconception that having kids is extremely expensive. Trent says yes, the outlays are numerous and costly, but when you factor in tax deductions, credits, and how children change the way we spend money (less entertainment, luxury, and frivolous expenditures, etc), the cost per child (over 18 years) goes from the original estimate of $200k to around $52k using some quick math. Even if you double that figure, it still comes out to about $5700 per year, compared to the original $11k. Not nearly as bad as many experts will lead you to believe.
• Instead of New Year’s Resolutions, Set More Manageable Goals from Parent Hacks. The gist of this post is using an alternative mindset when thinking about our resolutions through setting daily, weekly and monthly goals each month. Doing this makes these tasks and projects more manageable and actionable as they tend to be easier to wrap your head around than the usual big picture goals we tend to set on January 1st.  I like the idea!

One of the tools Melisa and I have used since pretty much Day One of parenting our three young hooligans is using a safe word to signal each other when we are in need. Not just in need, but in desperate need of help. Like, drop-everything-and-get-here-NOW help. Luckily we really haven’t used it more than once or twice, but it is a reassuring tool that is very easy to communicate.

What word or phrase did we choose? Nick Nolte, of course! It was a simple decision, because at the time of creation we felt a lot like some of his bat-shit crazy photos, like the one above and his infamous mug shot.

We got the idea from our good friends and neighbors, the Creeds, who thought of it while watching the Will Farrell/bear fighting scene in Semi-Pro. So a big thanks to them.

Anyway, I thought I’d pass the idea on to new parents or other families who are as crazy as us (three under two years old.)

From the This American Life site:

Paul Tough reports on the Harlem Children’s Zone, and its CEO and president, Geoffrey Canada. Among the project’s many facets is Baby College, an 8-week program where young parents and parents-to-be learn how to help their children get the education they need to be successful. Tough’s just-published book about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem’s Children Zone is called Whatever It Takes.

The biggest takeaways from the study they mention:

• Kids in ‘professional’ families hear 20 million more words than kids living in poverty during their first three years.
• The kids in the professional group hear 500,000 words of encouragement during this time and 80,000 words of discouragement. The poverty group was pretty much the opposite: 80,000 words of encouragement and 200,000 words of discouragement.
• The role of language in the first three years is more important than race, parent’s education, and economic factors in how kids develop and gain skills to be successful in the future. And those skills get increasingly more difficult to obtain as kids get older. So much so that job training classes (usually thought of as the way out of welfare for adults) has very little impact, if they don’t have the skills normally gained during their youth.

Really underscores the importance of reading and talking to your kids. And gives us hope that the cycle of poverty can be broken for many kids in the future. A lot of focus has been on pulling the parents out of poverty, but in reality it’s much simpler: it’s all about language.

• Sniffing the toes on pictures of baby feet in books just like Daddy does after her bath!  She is also building talent in the area of lifting her toes to your nose so you can sniff them.  I don’t know how many other kids have this, but our kid’s toes actually smell bad!
• Eating all kinds of foods now that are not related to the general “noodle” category with her newly mastered pincher grasp.  Yay- no baby food!
• We knew she already had many dance moves up her sleeves usually arranged in random 2 second stints and repeated, but now she has added a spin around.  She loves spinning around in a circle while adding various dance moves!
• Putting feet on the table while eating and trying to grab food with her toes.  That one is hard to keep a straight face for when saying no.
• Screaming in delight when Daddy opens the cabinet to get snacks for her causing Daddy to break things because of being startled.
• Dramatically banging her body against baby gates that block her from going outside when the doors are open.  That kid just can’t get enough fresh air.
• Learning to run in random directions and generally delighting in her own independence (which is so wonderful to watch).  She is also remembering things she sees one time and doing them again- which is amazing.  Sponge!

I could go on and on…..what a ham!

In other news, while shopping on Sat. at Wegmans, Lucy was getting kind of antsy so I took out the savior of ants in the pants, none other than the snack container.  My girl can hunt down a goldfish like no ones business, even when buried in numerous other crackers.  Anyway, she shoved another of her favorites, a pretzel, into her mouth.  Kinda a big piece I thought, but I weighed that against getting my finger bitten off with her surprisingly sharp baby teeth (which after nearly happening once before seemed pretty scary) so I kept a watchful eye.  Wouldn’t you know 30 sec. later she started choking.  I mean the no sound coming out, eyes watering, struggling for breath choking.  Terrified I tried to remember what to do and tried to pry her out of the seatbelt thingy on the cart to no avail so I tried to do the infamous finger sweep.  This DID NOT work.  It pushed the pretzel back farther and I started to freak a little.  By the time I called JD over, I had finger swept her like 3 more times, more forcefully (which I wasn’t sure I should have done) and it was all over and I flung that pretzel piece 1/2 way to Japan.  Anyway, we finally freed her from the belt and picked her up and she was surprisingly calm, with tears down her cheeks, but not crying freaking out or anything.  I thought I would have a break down, but we made it through a couple of more aisles and I was much more calm and she was back to her normal pointing and asking what everything is self.  Anyway, how scary.  It reminds you that you do what you can in an instant, right or wrong and try to remember how to do all this lifesaving stuff (we even took a baby CPR and First Aid class before she was born) but sometimes its sheer luck.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like if it’d been a worse situation.  Needless to say all the big pretzel pieces around our house are hidden now.  For a while.