Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Miracles do happen!

Dashiell, God love him, is a very headstrong child.  He has particular beliefs that no one can talk him out of.  He is not influenced by his peers.  He is his own person.  This will serve him well in the future, I can see that.  But what that means now is that he is the most stubborn child ever. Last year he wanted very little to do with water, even in the blazing heat of the summer.  He did take swim lessons, but he never willingly wanted to go into a lake, ocean or pool.  And we could forget about splash parks or sprinklers.  He also has an aversion to wearing shorts and prefers "longs", and wears socks every day and night.  He doesn't like being uncovered.  He has fought us on all attempts at getting him to go pants or sock free, as well as on any suggestions of water-related fun.

So imagine our surprise when he asked to run through the sprinklers at mom and dad's house in Minnesota!  AND he wanted to strip down to his underwear to do it!  I was amazed, and of course encouraged him to get to it!  Since then, he's spent many days running through the sprinklers in his undies in our backyard.  Before it was skull-meltingly hot last week, we had a rather chilly weekend in which the temp only reached the mid-sixties.  Didn't deter him one bit! 


He is thoroughly enjoying his new fire hydrant sprinkler!

After his sprinkler fun he tends to hang out in just a t-shirt and underwear (NO pants, NO socks!).  It's shocking, frankly.  And we love it!

Aurelia and I made a few passes in the sprinkler as well, though we waited for the heat to overtake us before we really tried it out.  On the cooler days Aurelia preferred to hang out in the Bumbo on the lawn.


It's going to be a fun summer!

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Garden of your (Sleepy) Mind

We're back from vacation!  At some point I'll post a fraction of the bazillion pictures we took but today I wanted to share a story from last night (with a little background information):

Aurelia has finally decided that she needs to go to bed earlier than we've been putting her down.  Her previous bedtime was around 9 pm - if we tried to get her to sleep earlier than that, she'd always wake up 40 minutes later, all pumped up from her "nap".  Then right before vacation (as in, 2 days before), it became apparent that she needed an early bedtime.  Which was awesome timing, let me tell you - suddenly we had to put her to bed at 7:30, however Minnesota is in a different time zone so she really, really wanted to go to bed at 6:30, which could pretty much never happen.  So there was lots of tears and screaming every night - whee!

But I digress.  With this earlier bedtime we're now trying to figure out bedtime rituals and what to do with Mr. D while putting Aurelia to bed.  When both Rick and I are home it's not a huge issue, but 2 - 3 nights a week it's just me and the kiddos!  So I've been trying to find ways to include Dashiell in Aurelia's bedtime ritual.  We have been letting him read "Goodnight Moon" to her after I feed her, which he loves to do and we love to hear.  Last night while I was feeding her, he read "Harold and the Purple Crayon", then after I fed her he once again read "Goodnight Moon".  Then I suggested singing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", since I have been singing that to her before her naps.  He said no, he wanted to sing something else.  Then he proceeded to sing his own rendition of this:



We had watched this video after a few of my Facebook friends posted it last weekend (watched it about 10 times, I might add, since you can never watch something just once with a 4-year-old).  It's totally trippy but I kind of love it!  This from someone who never liked Mr. Rogers growing up (Captain Kangaroo I could get behind, but for some reason Mr. Rogers always annoyed me).

Anyway, D didn't know all the lyrics so he made up a few of his own - I believe he was growing sugar snap peas in the garden of his mind, along with tomatoes and rainbows and steam machines.  It went on for much longer than I would have liked, but it was funny nonetheless.  I can't say that "Garden of your Mind" is going to be part of our nightly ritual, though - just imagine the weird dreams Aurelia would end up having!