Winter Update

Wow. I totally started this post in January but now it’s February. The end of February! What’s been keeping me so busy?

Snowsuits. Taking them off, putting them on, taking them off, putting them on. Looking for mitts. Looking for boots. Putting hats back on that came off while I was looking for that one boot and then wondering where the other boot went while I was looking for the boot we just had. That kind of thing.

I drag the kids to school every day via toboggan attached to our very good dog, Gus. And we’ve gotten so used to it that the other day someone told me in passing how cool our rig was and I had no idea what he could possibly be referring to. Doesn’t everyone get around in a one-dog-open sleigh?

Remember all that fluffy snow in January? That sure was something wasn’t it?

My intention when I began this blog was to write a monthly update of where the kids are at and what they are up to and that way I could keep a record of the headlong, high-speed trajectory of their growth and development. But things being as they are, all headlong, high-speed, and trajectorial, a quarterly report is going to have to do.

We are all tip-top. Here’s what we look like:

Notice how everyone is upright on their own two feet? That is our big news this winter. Our baby Jo is officially a toddler. She toddles in the morning, she toddles in the evening, she toddles all over this laaaaaaaaand. So we are the proud parents of  two toddlers and a school girl. But they seem like more toddlers than that. Think not of the sum of two toddlers so much as an exponential factor of toddlerism. Which is why I call them the toddler squadron. And also why Brent (see above) only has 5 hairs left on his head.

Perhaps you’re wonder why it says “Go” at the top of the picture. Hazel is learning to read and write beautifully in Kindergarten but sometimes mixes up jays and gees. It’s supposed to say “Jo.”

Perhaps you’re also wondering why I am so finely decked out head to toe in pink since, you may have noticed, I rarely wear anything that isn’t a black yoga suit that I’ve purchased at the grocery store. I don’t know. It seems important to Hazel to colour everything that is female pink be it a horse or a parasaurolophus or me.

You may be scrutinizing the picture and thinking I really haven’t changed much over the years. But really, I have. Only a few years back, when Hazel first  started drawing, she’d always depict me as this enormous, hulking, globular thing with huge eyes and tremendous hair. I read somewhere that toddlers and preschoolers often draw their moms this way because they are the biggest, most important people on Earth. Like planets. Like the Sun the Moon and the stars.

Well, I’ve shrunk to merely human proportions. And she’s grown. She really has.

Oliver too. In fact, he periodically announces to me, “Mama, I tink I’d all growed up now.”

But it’s not true. Don’t lend him your car or hire him to do odd jobs around the house. Oh, he’d be all, “Good idea! Yay! Wow!” or “I can do it! Oliver do it all by myself!” but I suggest taking it with a grain of salt.

We all speak a new language. It’s called Oliverese. That’s our other big winter news. I love listening to the things my boy has to say now that we’re all fluent in Oliverese.

I remember this fall one of his first sentences was “I’m a sea turtle.” But he said it, like, “I’m a hee-to” and it took me a good while to figure out what he could possibly be trying to tell me (you know, there wasn’t much context because I had no idea that he was, in fact, a sea turtle) and he got pretty pissed about it. But now he can say “sea torto” and we know just what he means. It makes him happy. He’s a gentler, sweeter boy now that he can express himself to his family.  Never mind that a waiter asked us the other day what language our son was speaking. “Is it European?” he asked.

“It’s Oliverese,” we said. He said he’d never heard of it and so we had to explain that it was a dialect of English and that he was still learning.

The most widely used phrases in Oliverese include:

“Ooooh, I have a good idea!”
“Ooooh, maybe it’s a mystery…”
and, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, “Go buffalo hunting today, Mommy?”

When he’s mad he says, “I like NOT you!”

The other day I watched him re-enact the mass extinction of the dinosaurs by hurling orbs of red playdough at toys. Little known factoid about this moment in prehistory — the comet first shouted “I like NOT you!” at the dinosaurs before crashing into the Earth.

This next photo was snapped during the Christmas holidays at a local playgroup. It may look like a fairly unextraordinary moment but if you ask me, it’s the HUGEST thing since the tertiary extinction.

This is a photo of my three children PLAYING TOGETHER. That’s right, they are playing TOGETHER. With each other. Not a one of them is begging for my attention. Nope, they are quite oblivious as to the fact that I’m having a conversation with another mom about how amazing it is and none of them feel duty-bound to interrupt it.  All are happily engaged in play AT THE SAME TIME. This marks the turning of a corner indeed.

“And they are even dressed up!” I whispered to my mom friend in awe.

“It’s your Christmas present,” she said. “Get your camera.”

Indeed.

In other Flurfelly news, it’s the end of the pigtails era. I used to always put Josephine’s hair in the cuttest little pig tails in the world with the tiniest little baby elastics in the world. And the way those pigtails framed her face was kind of like air quotes. And to me it looked kind of like she was perpetually saying “cute”.

But now she’s wise to me and she removes them just as quickly as I can install them. She’s still wicked cute, I think, she just doesn’t always appear to be explicitly stating “cute”.

Love and well-wishes,
XOXOX

The Flurfels