Stories!

The other night Mary was talking to Caleb before bedtime. He was in bed and they were talking about his day. After a minute, Caleb turned to Mary and said, "Mom, did you know that you can take off freckles with tweezers?"

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Joshua has a beautiful baby mohawk. It appears without much coaxing or combing. I don't like to get my haircut. Over the Christmas holidays, I did not comb my hair much and needed a haircut. This lead to the joke that Joshua and I were the superhero tandem of Afro-man and Mohawk-boy, though I am not sure what superpowers that gives us. Here is a picture of my lovely hair from the night we decorated sugar cookies at Matt and Honor's. I did not comb my hair while I was at Matt and Honor's. In fact, I would shower and then make my hair stand on end as much as I could. (It had fallen by the time we decorated sugar cookies.)

The day came for us to travel to Jerry and Bonnie's (my in-laws), so I decided that I had to comb my hair. When I came downstairs after my shower, Delainey took one look at me and said, "What is the matter with your hair?"

(Here is a picture of Lainey and Grace decorating sugar cookies.)

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Joshua tried a sugar cookie for the first time at Matt and Honor's. He loved them. Wouldn't you agree? We left Matt and Honor's house with a Ziploc bag of sugar cookies. Any time Joshua saw a Ziploc bag for the rest of our trip, he would start to grunt and scream. He wants sugar cookies!

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Though Joshua loves sugar cookies (and Oreos), he is a good eater. He likes to hang out in the kitchen while Mom is making dinner. Mary shares whatever she is preparing with him. (I don't think Grace and Caleb know.) She often hands him raw vegetables and he eats them. His favorite are cucumber slices. He has eaten 20-30 cucumber slices for dinner before. He is like Chase in that sense.

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The other way he is like Chase? He loves to climb. He is not quite the prolific climber that Chase was, but he gets around. He stands on the table, the toilet, the back of the toilet and his toy box.

His latest trick is to climb on his toy box to get onto the futon. Then he walks the length of the futon and climbs onto a cabinet. That way you can see all of him in the window behind the futon. (And he likes to bang on the window as people go by.)

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Grace had her first soccer game on Saturday. It was all you could ask for of the first soccer game in May. By noon, the temperature had reached about 45 degrees and the drizzling rain was enough to make you bone-chilling cold.

Grace played really well. The team she played has the two boys on our street who are in first grade with her. Grace dribbled and kept trying to take the ball away from them. I think it helped that she was playing against them.

When she is at school, she enjoys to run and play with the boys. (I think the girls just are not active enough for her at times.) A month ago, she came home from school and told us, "I sat with the boys at lunch." Mary asked her if they got mad. She said, "No because Demetri (our neighbor) said I could."

Demetri and Grace love to run around the neighborhood together.

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Three weeks ago, Grace and Caleb told me that we were going to take off their training wheels on the next Saturday. They repeated this refrain every night that week. Saturday came and the weather was beautiful, so we went outside and took off their training wheels. I think I pushed Grace a grand total of 3 times before she could ride up and down our street by herself.

It is a good thing that my decision to wait to take off her training wheels did not hold back her progress.

Caleb did really well, also. It took me about half an hour of running up and down the street with him before he figured it out. He likes to go as fast as he can and I really have to run to keep up with him. The only thing he has left to master is turning. He does a good job steering but he is not perfect when it comes to turning around on our narrow streets.