Counting

Tonight, after Madeleine read a book to Ethan at bedtime, she asked for some Mommy snuggles in her bed.  However, she didn't seem to actually want snuggles, as she complained that I was too close to her and snuggling her too tight.  After laying beside her without actually touching her for several minutes, I decided enough was enough and I would let her fall asleep on her own.

ME: Okay, honey, I'm gonna go.  Good-night, I love you.
MADELEINE: (clutching me) No!  Mama!  I want you to STAY!
ME: Honey, I'm not even snuggling you, I'm just lying next to you.  You don't need me here.
MADELEINE: But Mama, I *do* need you!
ME: What do you need me for??
MADELEINE: You're my COMFORTER.  You make me comfortable.  You're one of my BEST comforters.
ME: Well, I can stay for another few seconds and then I'm gonna go.
MADELEINE: How about ONE minute.  How about, like, TEN minutes.
ME: How about I'll stay and snuggle you a bit if you can quit yapping?
MADELEINE: Okay!

So I snuggled her as she lay silently, yawning with more and more frequency, and decided I'd gotten her settled enough to fall asleep on her own.

ME: (kissing her cheek) Good night, honey.  I love you.
MADELEINE: (distracted) Good night, I love you too...one thousand sixty-six, one thousand sixty-seven, one thousand sixty-eight...
ME: What are you doing??
MADELEINE: Oh.  I just started COUNTING in my brain while I was trying to fall asleep.

So I left her to her counting; that is, until I had to put away a shirt I had finished ironing in her room.  I figured she'd be asleep at this point, but nope, I saw her bright eyes gleaming up at me from her blanket burrito she was wrapped in.

MADELEINE: Mama?  After the TRILLIONS, I just said, "infinity," because I don't KNOW what number comes after the trillions.
ME: I'm not sure I know either.

(Quadrillion?)

I'm mighty impressed with the speed of Maeleine's brain counting, if she was able to get all the way through the TRILLIONS that quickly, seeing as she was in the mere thousands when I had left her earlier in the evening.  Let's just face it: with superhuman mathematical ability like that, this kid is bound to be a rocket scientist.

Howsis

Madeleine's lovely little poem, for those who are not on facebook:

howsis by Madeleine rowe

"sum howsis are sginny and sum are brocin down sum have to windows and sum are small thay all are uniqu, gust the waye thay are."


I love her sentiment.  I love my own uniqu house, gust the way it is, even though it's not sginny and it's not brocin down and it has waye more than to windows.  And even though it smells of dead mowsis.  Bravo to Madeleine Rowe for her poem embracing an all-inclusive appreciation of howsis!

Dinner and Drawings

A typical dinner time conversation:

JULIA: Mommy, Mommy!  I made up a song!  Wanna hear it?  (beginning a faux rap) I turned into a canteloupe last night when I ate an antelope. 
ME: Wow.  That's great.
JULIA: (thoughtful) Uh...maybe I should've done "I turned into an ANTELOPE last night when I ate a CANTELOUPE."

I can see she really thought her song through before she began singing it to me.


And here is some typical Madeleine craft work.  You might worry that kindergarten is turning her atypical artistic streak straight, but luckily, she still has her own unique Madeleine style.  Here are just a few of the crafts I found on our dining room table today:

It's a donut and a turkey.  I *think* this is what it says (in non-kindergarten spelling): "Arnie meets Twisty.  'Hi I'm Arnie,' "Hi Arnie I'm Twisty." 

Because it's a totally logical idea to have a talking donut and turkey that are the same size, just chilling and chatting together, right?

While Madeleine might make her numbers correctly at school nowadays, you can rest assured that she still makes a lot of them backwards at home, and she still has not mastered the art of starting small enough with her letters so as to fit her entire name across one line.

And then we have the brown sun.  Because...why not??

Mittens

Even though it has been unseasonably warm over the past week, the girls apparently have winter on their minds.  While I am living in the now and refusing to even think of the coming colder months, Julia and Madeleine decided to get crafty this morning by decorating cut-out mittens.  Both girls decided to make me a pair of paper mittens, with words of encouragement to help me through my worst days of Seasonal Affective Disorder, come winter weather.

Julia delightedly presented me with the following mittens:

JULIA: (with joyous pride) So Mommy, I thought, when you're feeling glum about winter, you can just look down at the sun on these mittens!


Madeleine's mittens contained an encouraging message:

"SUMR KUMS Soon Wintrs Gunu pas."


Wow.  Thanks, girls!  I'm certain that during the bleak, cold, snowy days of winter, these mittens will give me just the boost I need to keep my spirits up!

Mouse Update

Here's an update on the mice situation in our house:


When I last posted, here is where we left things with the mouse discovered in our basement: as you may remember, Ethan came face to face with the invader.  With nothing nearby but a toilet plunger to try and trap the critter, he wound up bonking it twice before it scuttled off behind the washing machine, never to be seen again.

However, never to be seen again certainly does not mean never to be SMELLED again.  Clearly, the creature scampered into the little hole underneath the dryer vent and died in the wall, because within a few days we all started noticing an ungodly scent in the downstairs bathroom.  A few days after that, the scent became gag-inducing.  In fact, the only member of the Rowe household who will even use that bathroom at the moment is Ethan, who does not have the super-keen sense of smell that we Rowe ladies have.

Interestingly, though, I am the only one avoiding the bathroom because of the smell.  While the kids loathe the smell as well, their main reason for boycotting the bathroom is their terror of the dead mouse.  Because apparently dead mice can come back to life and inflict some major zombie-style mouse vengeance or something.  Julia has woken me up on multiple occasions in the middle of the night, terrified that a mouse is going to crawl into her bed and on her face.  Several days ago, the household was awoken to the sound of Julia screaming my name from her bed at 5am. 

What, you might wonder, was worth waking the whole household over at that hour?  Oh, just the dead mouse she saw in her bed.  Except the dead mouse was actually this:

Rarity.  The most glamorous and fashionable of all My Little Ponies, and the pony least likely to ever be equated with a dead mouse. 

Anyway, the last two nights have been pretty quiet, so hopefully Julia is getting over her fear.  On the other hand, during a play-date today at our house, she and her friend gave her room a total makeover, and I'm sure this won't be an impetus on her falling asleep AT ALL:

Yeah.  In the dark those streamers won't look like mouse tails dangling from the ceiling or anything. 

All I can hope now is that the smell will finally clear out of our bathroom and that the mice will live in fear forever more of the toilet-plunger man, and will halt any further attempts to enter our house.

Acrostic Poems

Julia is a big fan of acrostic poems, and frequently comes home from school with a page full of her own acrostics. 

Yesterday's really took the cake.  Here are some of my favorites:


Most busy day
Outstanding
Normal
Desk
A day
Yucky or yummy snack & lunch?

First of all, I applaud her for digging deep and coming up with such well-thought out descriptions of Monday as "normal," "desk," and "a day."  Secondly, does she really have to wonder whether I packed her a yucky or yummy snack??  Does she open her backpack and think, "I wonder if Mom packed me Goldfish or fried worms today?"



Normal to be chilly
Odd with how many birthdays there are
Velvet cupcakes for my bday party
Excellent
My birthday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Brings Thanksgiving & fall leaves
Extrodinary!
Rapters & other birds are away


I agree, Julia.  November is excellent and extraordinary, because it is the month in which YOU were born!



Snooze & sleep in
Always bagels are bought (for my family)
Temple or church
Usuly not busy
Really great!
Different from other days
A happy Halloween
Yummy goodies!


I sure wish Julia would snooze & sleep in on Saturdays.  Instead she's up at the same crack of dawn that awakens her on weekdays.  Also, I'm glad she clarified that the bagels are bought for our family.  Otherwise I would have thought they're only for her.  And apparently Saturday is not a day on which Julia needs to wonder whether her food will be yucky or yummy.  That's only on Mondays.  On Saturdays, the goodies are always yummy!


Mama
Always is obsessed with something
Daring
Excellent
Laugh
Extrodinary
Interesting
Nice
Engaged in shows

I am beginning to think that "excellent" and "extraordinary" are simply Julia's go-to adjectives whenever a word has multiple "e"s in it.  Let's test this theory by looking at one last acrostic she made:


Honasty
Excellent
Really, really good
Muggleborn
Interesting
Outstanding
Nice
Extrodinary


Yup.  Theory proven.

Oxi Day at Church

Today after church, the Greek school put on a presentation for Oxi Day, followed by a festive luncheon.  Our Sundays are seriously jam-packed; church, then 2.5 hours of swim team, then a 2-hour rehearsal for Ethan and I.  Therefore, I hadn't bothered to buy tickets for the luncheon and figured we'd just leave right after Sunday School and eat at home.  I broke the news to the girls on the drive to church.

ME: So girls?  There's a luncheon after church today, but we're not going, because I didn't buy tickets.
JULIA: (in alarm) Why not?!?
ME: Well, because it costs money, and we have swim team, and I figured you wouldn't want to stay for the whole thing.
JULIA: But what about coffee hour?!??
ME: There is no coffee hour.  The luncheon is happening instead.
JULIA: But why can't we go???
ME: Well, I didn't think you'd like it very much.
JULIA: But coffee hour is one of my favorite parts of going to church!!
ME: Yeah, but this is not going to be desserts and stuff.  It might be food you don't like.
JULIA: Like what?
ME: Like, there might be lamb.
JULIA: But what else?
ME: I don't really know.  I didn't read the menu because I didn't buy tickets.
JULIA: Awww!  But I look FORWARD to coffee hour every week!

Since it seemed to matter so much to Julia, I went and bought the darn tickets so that we could attend the luncheon.  Turns out the girls were divided in their desire to go.  After Sunday School, I announced that we were heading upstairs to attend the lunch after all.

MADELEINE: But  Mamaaa!   What if we have to eat things like DEAD SHEEP?
ME: Uh...
JULIA: (scathingly)  Madeleine, there's not gonna be a dead sheep up there.
MADELEINE: But Mama said they might have DEAD SHEEP!

There was no dead sheep, luckily.  However, there was also no food.  That is, until we sat through the whole hour+ long Greek School presentation, complete with recitation of poetry (in Greek), singing of patriotic songs (in Greek), recounting of history (in Greek), and Greek dancing.

Before the readings began, though, we were treated to a parade of Greek school children waving Greek flags and then standing still up on stage as swelling orchestral Greek music played from a boom box.

MADELEINE: (loudly) Is this the presentation Mama?  That's all they do?  Just STAND there?  Just WAVE flags?  They're not even DOING anything, they're just STANDING there.  This is BORING.

Needless to say, we didn't even make it until the actual lunch part.  Instead, I wound up taking three doggy-bags full of food in the car so the kids could eat on our drive home.  Getting food into their bellies much improved the moods of both girls, and the misery of the long, hungry wait was forgotten. 

Next time I'm going to trust my instincts and skip buying the tickets after all.