...and snowed...

I just read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, so on our third snow day of the year, I did my best impersonation of Ma, by boiling sugar and molasses and giving the resulting goop and a pan of snow to the girls.

When the girls dribbled the molasses goop over the snow, it hardened into "candy" which the girls liked to eat well enough.

Frances made a candy "F."

She was a tad pleased with herself.

It was a great activity, really - literary, seasonal, gastronomic and brief, a winning combination.

And then it snowed...

like so:

Yep, after a relatively dry winter, snow decided to set up camp in Boston.  The first snow day was great.  After getting something like three feet of snow over twenty-four hours, the T shut down and Mark got to stay home for the day.  We finally got out the microscope we got Frances for Christmas.

And it just happened to be the day before his birthday, so we celebrated early.  The girls "helped" me make cupcakes.

Notice the fingers in the icing.

The girls also helped me make a paper chain to decorate for dinner.

We had some pretend tea to steal ourselves for....

...a trip outside.

You know it was cold because both girls agreed to wear hats and  gloves.

We stayed outside, mostly digging out the car, until the girls looked like this:

Such a good day.

There are many more posts like this yet to come.  By the time I'm done, it will be a guide to staying at home with two kids for an extended period of time.  Big fun, coming up!

Express Train for the Looney Bin, All Aboard

Here are the girls getting ready for school one morning:

Don't they look on-task?  How we get out the door each day is a mystery.

First Hair Cut; Boo

Chandler, dear, pulled out much of her hair this summer.  She was getting six teeth at the time, so we thought the hair-pulling was some sort of pain management technique.  She eventually left it alone and it did what hair does (grow back). 

At Christmas, she started at it again.  We had no teeth to blame this time around.  She was tired from waking up all night, but she seemed really happy during the day with lots of family around, dogs to play with, and sheep to watch.  Chandler kept at it after we got back into our home routine; she started to look like she had mange.  We decided we had to do something, and so...

Thankfully, she was completely cooperative during the haircut, she looks cute with the short hair, and she seems to have quit the pulling.  At least for the time being.  I'm trying to be quietly optimistic.  Do I sound quietly optimistic?

Who said TV was bad?

Frances has been obsessed with My Little Ponies for a long while now, and I have to admit I don't hate it (I think I once saw a Big Lebowski reference).  This summer, she wanted to make a quill out of a feather, because Twilight Sparkle uses a quill.

Frances must have grown tired of the shows she's seen on Netflix over and over, because she branched out to some new version of My Little Ponies in which the ponies have morphed into people - people who play guitars.  After discovering this new version, Frances wanted to make a guitar.  Your wish is my command, little person.

Now she's determined to put strings on it.  I'm working on that.

Breakfast with Queens

Or maybe they were cold?

Twenty-Three Months of Toddler Chandler

Twenty-Three Months Fun Fact

• Language:  Chandler uses the word "go" whenever possible.  "Snack-go" is a snack, "beep-go" is a car, "choo-go" is a train, and "walk-go" is I Went Walking, by Sue Williams, a book I highly recommend for little people.  She's learned "owl" and "out."  And her sentence structure is getting fancier.  The other day she said, "Mama, I co" (Mama, I'm cold) and pulled a blanket around herself.  
• Update from the Department of Please Stop: Chandler started pulling her hair out again over Christmas.  I know holidays are stressful, but it seems like an extreme response, especially for a one year old.  She stopped all on her own this summer.  Fingers crossed.

Sixty-Two Months of Preschooler Frances

The trains are having a renaissance.

Sixty-Two Months Fun Facts

• Frances Quotes: "Mom, you're quite the server."  Mixed emotions about this one.
• Frances Fascination: We got a new Wegman's, a grocery store that manages to feel fancy yet economical.  They've got a lobster tank and they present whole fish on beds of ice right there in the fish aisle, not behind any protective glass.  Frances loves it.  Of course, she likes the lobster tank, like any kid.  But she also loves the whole fish.  She pokes at them and feels their tails and gills and tongues and teeth and etc.  Her favorite part?  Poking their big, naked eye balls.  Mixed emotions about this, too.  I have to love the un-princessyness of it, but must she poke the eyes?!  And must she insist I do it too?  Oh, well.  I'm thinking of buying a whole one for her to bring home and "dissect" to her heart's content.  "Happy Saturday, sweetheart.  Here's a dead fish to play with!" 

May The Good Lord Forgive Me For This Foolishnes

Frances really, really wanted temporary hair color for Christmas.  I didn't find it until after Christmas, but I did find it.  So when we got back to Massachusetts, I got the kids nice and clean...

and then we colored their hair.

The "dye" was very strange.  It reminded me of a crayon.  Chandler had the purple and Frances had the orange here.

Chandler didn't know quite what to do with it, but never mind.  In the end it was much too temporary, even for me.  Most of it came out when I brushed the girls' hair.  But I did like how it looked, so maybe we'll try again with something slightly more robust.  And then I'll ask for forgiveness again.

A Child's Christmas in Arkansas, Part III

This was the best.

A friend of ours told us about a TED talk that encouraged parents to allow their children to try out certain things, like learning to use a pocket knife, dismantling a household appliance, building/extinguishing fires, throwing spears and driving cars.  We don't have a lot of spears handy, but we do have cars, and in Arkansas, we had room to let Frances try her hand at steering Sir's farm truck.  

Frances did absolutely great.  She was a little nervous, but she didn't get too scared.  I think we had to encourage her not to quit once, but that was it. 

She got us all the way up and down Mimi and Sir's driveway.

I think she liked it.

Here she is with her noble steed:

It was also my noble steed when I was learning to drive, but I was a bit older than Frances is now.  I think it will last through Chandler, but probably not beyond.

So much fun.  Such a confidence booster.  I can't wait for Frances to do it again next year, or maybe in Maine this summer!

A Child's Christmas in Arkansas, Part II

This is where my editing skills fail again; many, many pictures ahead.

The day after Christmas, we went out to Auntie Linda's to ride horses.  It's become a bit of a tradition that the kids love.  Below, going left to right, are Frances, Clare, Nora, Zoe, Chandler, Grant and Todd.  (James came with us but chose to spend his time throwing rocks in the pond.)

Jocelyn wore her winter jacket and mittens.  The children did not.  

For what it's worth, I know Chandler appears to be a giant walking fashion faux pas.  The laundry gods did not smile on her this vacation.

Some of the cousins were very helpful.

Some weren't.

First up, Frances Elliott!  She was nervous at first but settled in nicely.  I was oh-so-proud.

And Baby Chewie got her first ride on a horse!

Her sense of horsewomanship left a little to be desired: after riding forwards for a bit, she decided she would much rather hug me like a baby monkey and ride backwards.  I'll take all the hugs I can get, but riding backwards is not a good long-term plan.  Maybe next year?

Happy trails to you, until we meet again!

Happy trails to you, keep smilin' until then!  (Or at least grinning at your children's antics.)

A Child's Christmas in Arkansas, Part I

We made the pilgrimage home to Fayetteville for Christmas this year.  The travelling went very well, thankfully.  The only mishap involved Chandler drinking numerous bottles of water on the airplane and the obvious result, which Mom didn't quite factor in.  Not a terrible travel problem, in the grand scheme of things.

First, we stayed with Mark's parents, Grandma and Grandpa.  (They live in Fayetteville now.  Yay!)  Smarty Grandma got the girls a gingerbread house kit, which was very nice to have on a drizzly afternoon.

We didn't manage to get a photo of the girls playing with pop guns on one of our two trips to Cabella's.  Frances grasped hers and said, "What do you want to kill?"  Highlight of this parenting gig so far, let me tell you.

Christmas Eve we shifted over to my parents' to see the aunts, uncles and cousins.  It was a lot of humanity.  We made it through the Christmas Eve service at St. Paul's by the skin of our teeth.  A woman in the pew behind us told us we weren't at all bothersome.  She was lying.

Christmas morning was loosely controlled chaos, of course.  The Littlest Person really wasn't interested in opening presents, bless her.  What she really wanted to do was watch  Sir's sheep out the window.

 (Shhh: We're recycling some of her unopened gifts on her birthday and next Christmas.)

Dinner was a tad disorganized, really.  Mom/Mimi did almost all the heavy lifting for this meal.  Jocelyn was ill (that's her wrapped in the red blanket) and Lindsay and I have no excuse.  We got all the kids seated seconds before the meal was to begin.  They got their picture taken, took one look at the food and asked for hot dogs.

This is Frances saying, "Where's my hot dog?"

No one had the energy to convince them they actually wanted to eat the food that was already prepared.  Hot dogs were served and inhaled; then, they moved on to the cinematic portion of the evening before the adults got anywhere near their dinners.  Not quite the envisioned meal, but like the airplane mishap, probably foreseeable and not all that terrible.

Moving on...