Thomas the philosopher

Today's discussion with Thomas the Philosopher went something like this:

Thomas: Mom, is there really magic?

Mom: Um.....

Thomas: I think that life is magic. All the other magic comes from that.


Pretty heavy thoughts for a 7 year old.

It's strange that he can utter things like that one minute and then throw a little fit the next minute because soccer practice is at 5 and not 5:30 or I didn't let him carry his sister down the stairs. It's almost like there's this split personality and one side is this wise, loving, caring old man and the other side is an immature 7 year old. Sigh. I love him.

Thomas strikes again!

That child is going to be the death of me.

We are sitting at the dinner table and trying to convince him to eat his zucchini.

Finally, he turns to us and says:

"What if there is no afterlife? Then I'm wasting the little time I have here eating!"

He is 7. What kind of arguments are we going to have when he is 14?

God, I love that kid.

Washington D.C.

Had a nice family trip to Washington D.C....more on that later, but here's a link to the pics:

dc

Enjoy!

1 year old toddler girl and 1 year old (almost) toddler boy

It's more than 2 weeks since their birthday and I still cannot believe the twins are a year old. It has just gone by so fast. We had two gatherings for them - one at home on their actual birthday with Emmett, Thomas and I (of course), and their 'Ma (Ann, Emmett's stepmom), Cristine and Noah. I made mac n cheese, Caesar salad and vanilla cake with cream cheese frosting. It was really nice and the babies seem to have a good time. They did do a little bit with unwrapping their presents, but mostly they just seemed happy to be getting so much attention. Thomas "helped" them out by unwrapping most of their presents.

The following Sunday we had a pool party at the Brisbane pool with friends from Thomas's soccer team, my cousin Mark, Cristine, Chris and Noah, Henry, Sara and Hank...it was also a lot of fun. I've gotten more and more into keeping it simple over the years. I used to do all this crazy cooking and over the years I've gradually whittled it down so that this year I just made a Costco run and grabbed a deli tray from the meat guys next door and - voila! - sandwiches and chips and a 1/2 flat of organic strawberries and we were good to go. I was going to at least bake the cake but then wussed out at the last minute and bought that at Costco too.

We're leaving in a week for Washington D.C. I'm getting pretty excited. Thomas may be a bit on the young side, but hopefully he'll have a good time visiting the monuments, etc.

Here's some pics, I better get back to the twins before they tear the house apart. Just click on the photo below and it will take you to the birthday album:

twinsbday

Love,
Melissa

Birthday Babies

Hard to believe they are going to be a year old tomorrow!

Easter Lillie

Milestones!

Well, this needs to be quick because my typing risks waking the babies, plus I need to study for my nutrition exam tomorrow. Yikes!

But I wanted to make sure that I wrote down our two big milestones this week...

On Sunday, Lillie started walking! She has been standing on her own for a couple of months now, we thought she'd walk really early, but she only just got the courage to start taking steps. She walked to Thomas on Saturday morning - so cute! - and I'm really glad it was for him, it gave him such a thrill. He was sitting on the floor in the entryway of our apartment and she started walking toward him and he was counting off steps and saying, "Mom, Mom, look at this, 6, 7...Mom, you should look, 8, 9...". At that point I looked over and sure enough, he was right, she was walking for the first time - 12 steps! Very exciting! Emmett wanted to take some video but our apartment is in such a mess these days that he decided not to film. I have no such qualms, so hopefully I'll get some video this week.

Liam it seems is often left in his sister's shadow. This would make me sad, except I'm sure in another year or so it will even itself out a bit more. They say that boys mature more slowly than girls, and that is certainly what we are generally seeing with these two. However, Liam apparently didn't want to be completely shown up, so this week he uttered his first true words. I should preface by saying that I'm a total skeptic when it comes to this stuff. In March my Mom was saying that she thought he was saying "Mama", but it all just sounds like baby talk to me. BUT - I actually do believe that he said something today. Cristine has been working with Noah since he was a baby with sign language stuff and one of the ones that I happened to remember well was when she made the sign at the end of the meal and said "all done". And Noah would do it really well from a pretty early age, wiggling his hand around to say "all done". I never took up signing as a cause, but the words stuck with me, so when the babies have eaten all of something I will hold up the empty bowl or jar and say "all done". When either of the babies looks like they are done eating I'll ask them, "all done?"

So today I picked up an empty bottle out of Liam's crib and I was looking at it and he said "all done". I looked up because it surprised me and he said it a couple of more times, EXACTLY the same way "all done", but sounds more like "ah dah". I could almost have blown it off and thought it was coincidence but then at dinner he did it again. This time I showed him the sign and when he was done eating he wiggled his hand (didn't get it exactly right, but the attempt was clear) and said "all done". Our verbal baby!

Okay, back to me homework.

Love,
Melissa

Quotable Thomas

Yesterday I took the kids to the beach for a couple of hours. The babies got completely covered in sand. Lillie wasn't so sure about the whole thing (cold water, skinny baby), but Liam absolutely LOVED it - he was crawling all over the beach and digging rocks out of the sand. At one point he stood by the stroller and was giggling. It was wonderful to see my serious baby having such a great time, even if his twin was a little bit ambivalent about the whole thing.

Thomas had a great time, too. He is (at 6) becoming such a little man. When I picked him up from school I asked him what kind of underwear he had on to see if he could swim in them. He told me he didn't want to go to the beach but if we were going to go he was going to need to go home and get his swimsuit. So we did. Good thing, too, because the beach was, if not crowded, certainly full of people enjoying the record breaking temperatures (93 in San Francisco?!?! In April???). Thomas had a great time splashing in the water and rescuing ladybugs. There were a bizarre number of ladybugs on the beach.

Anyway, at one point I was making up a scenario of some sort for Thomas and he uttered this awesome quote:

"Mom, I don't believe in magic except for God and Santa Claus".

How I love that boy.