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Journal Key:

Green = Steve | George = navy | Janet = Purple | Evelyn = Black

The Owen-Audrey relationship, as usual, is going in strange directions. Yesterday, as we walked to the car, Owen said something, in the middle of a confusing lot of incomprehensible things, about pushing Audrey. Today, Miss Minal told me that Audrey really likes ice. She likes to fall down so that she can get ice. This sounds simple, but apparently her technique is to stand right in front of Owen, closer than he feels comfortable with, until he pushes her, persisting until he pushes her enough that she can fall down. And get ice. She was happily coming outside with ice, actually, as we were arriving.

This evening Steve was late coming home (traffic!) and Cara went out with PJ and Casey to Popsicles at the Playground at Lindeneau, but Claire was up and she and I and Owen had a lovely time. We sat on the floor in the living room and shared our dinner. I'd gotten enough chicken for me and Owen, but he ate Claire's instead. Then she ate some of mine. Owen sat and ate asparagus piece by piece, with his hands, dipping each piece carefully into some honey mustard dressing.

He'd ended up with two bowls of grapes on the couch, and he took the grapes out and put them on Claire's plate. Then he stacked the bowls and put them away in the kitchen, on top of the stack of clean bowls.

When it was time for Claire to go home, he came downstairs to say goodbye. He climbed carefully down, stair by stair, walked up to her, waved and said goodbye, and walked away. I asked whether he wanted to give her a hug. He did. He ran back and hugged her, and then he ran back to me. "Mommy, can I do a kiss?" he asked. Sure, I told him. So he ran to her, she knelt down, and some sort of kiss happened. He's never done that before!

9/1/12 (Saturday)

As usual, we are having an action-packed weekend. On Friday, Cara and Evelyn went out on the Loefflers' boat! Cara, our thrill-seeker, was placed on a little inflatable thingie in the river, which was tied to the boat by a long line, and towed around at high speeds, to her great delight. She was told ahead of time that thumbs up meant go faster, and she used that signal.

I picked the ladies up by the side of the river in the early afternoon (having gotten home not long before after a half day at work), and we returned home. It wasn't too long before we were heading out to get Owen from daycare and get ourselves on the road. We were heading to Middletown! The kids got to stay with their grandparents and we adults went out to dinner and played arcade games.

We had a long morning on Saturday, which was mostly filled with work and chores, and then headed down. The kids were in the back yard. They had been given the choice of going to the beach or possibly the little water park at Asbury Park, but had declined both in favor of jumping into little kiddie pools out back. Cara was still hard at it when we arrived, and Owen was in his stroller in the shade, napping.

Not content to end our activities there, we were soon packing ourselves up to head over to Aunt Claire's house (grandparents included)! We jumped in her pool and had a cookout. Owen tried on Cara's old swim vest, which is a little worn out but still does the job. We spent most of the time carrying him around the pool anyway--he especially wanted Mommy to carry him. He did his "jumping in" thing with her, and he got swung around in the water. When jumping in, his mother suggested that he bend his knees. Owen tried to comply by bending at his waste. No, your knees! Owen tried grabbing his knees to help them bend.

When being swung through the water, he cried out that he was "hanging on for dear life!" Cara remembered that this was a line from one of his library books, Away Went Wolfgang, in which an overexcited dog repeatedly runs off with a milk cart, while his hapless mistress sits in the back, "hanging on for dear life."

He also became quite intrigued by a skimming net that we were using to skim leaves out of the water, and wanted it. Once holding it, he claimed he was "making dinner." What was he making? "Chicken, and pasta," and a garbled word that was eventually translated as "macaroni."

Both kids had a lovely time and both wanted to show Aunt Casie lots of things. Fortunately we all enjoy Phineas and Ferb, so we sat and watched quite a few episodes of that. Well various configurations of us watched the show, while some of us managed to go into the other room and see pictures from George and Janet's European vacation.

Finally it was time to go home. "Thanks for coming!" Owen told everyone.

9/2/12 (Sunday)

We celebrated Grandpop's birthday today! Once again, the three kids had a ball running up and down the hallway, screaming. Owen and Griffin would run into the back bedroom with me chasing them, and I'd go in to find them both standing with their backs to the wall, under the window, waiting to be "gotten."

There were some disagreements. The kids had gotten a little keyboard to play with--we were so delighted when Griffin kept hitting the demo button and playing "Greensleeves" during lunch. The real problem was that there were three kids and one keyboard. The boys couldn't handle it. It had to be painfully removed. In the interest of distraction, I proposed to them that we go downstairs to get something else to play with. Owen went with me. I took the barn and gave him the little divers to carry, but he handed them back to me and took a little covered plastic bucket where, to my mind, yucky things live. It's full of rubber bugs and monstery things.

Me: Griffin's going to play with me, with the barn!

Owen: No, Giffin's going to pay with me, with dinosaurs! Giffin, let's pay dinosaurs!

Yes, dinosaurs and monsters and bugs and things got played with. Sort of together.

Grandmom, I think, suggested hide-and-seek. That was an experience! I think it may have been Owen's first time. Cara counted, while Grandmom hid with Griffin and I hid with Owen. We went and sat behind a bed. "Let's go run!" said Owen, getting up. I shushed him and got him back. It sort of went on like that until Cara found us. For some reason it wasn't hard. Cara took her turns hiding with the boys. She told Griffin shhh and he shhhhed. She told Owen shhhh and nothing really changed. Once I got to hide with both boys. We went into the back bedroom and all stood quietly with our backs to the closet, telling each other to shhh. Clearly, Owen had learned a lot.

We were sure that Owen was ehxausted, having had only about half an hour's nap in the car on the way down. On the way home, though, he stayed awake for the first hour, chatting. Everyone survived!

9/3/12 (Monday)

At my instigation, we went out for breakfast this morning. We ended up at the IHOP. Owen repeatedly asked us what the building was, and we repeatedly told him, to no avail. Inside, Owen looked at a menu and saw a picture of a hamburger. He explained to Evelyn that, "When I am a big boy, I will EAT that ALL UP!" Cara and Evelyn played hangman. Owen leaned heavily against me on our side of the booth, ate his bacon and some of his pancakes (with assistance).

We returned home, but then I took the kids out again to go to the supermarket. I might have taken just Owen, but when given the choice between going grocery shopping and amusing herself at home while Mommy did graduate school work, Cara opted for the former. She was a big help. She was supplied with our shopping list and a pen, and dutifully (and sometimes preemptively) crossed things off the list. Owen, as I explained to himself afterwards, was a big help in that he was not nearly as much of a hindrance as he could have been. At first he sat in the basket of the cart, but he soon tired of this and I took him out. Then I had two children roaming the aisles with me and my shopping cart. It could have gone much worse. Owen decided to help push, which he did by getting between my legs and the back of the cart and giving an ineffectual shove to the cart with his hands. Then he would sort of pause and give me time to almost trip over him; then he would walk up close for another shove.

In retrospect I'm not really sure how I got through the store with them while also managing to buy everything on our list, but somehow it happened.

Owen had a very scanty lunch, which he really couldn't pay attention to (in addition to his breakfast out, he did a lot of snacking today), and went down for his nap. Cara was forced (under loud and emotional duress) to try on some clothes, but after her lunch and once Owen was napping, she got to sneak down the street for some time in the Loefflers' pool (the last dip of the season!). The weather was really quite terrible for it, but the kids were determined--they had hot chocolate afterwards.

Owen, meanwhile, had an old-fashioned Cara-style bout of post-nap hysteria. Unable to calm him in various positions with the TV on, I finally took off his clothes because he was sweaty, and a few minutes after that he became verbal enough to ask me to take him downstairs. In his diaper, he played with He-Mans a little and calmed down. He was dressed again by the time Grandpapa appeared. Cara will not be at school yet tomorrow, but Evelyn will, so Grandpapa nicely offered to whisk the child away for a sleepover, and then entertain her tomorrow. Owen, barely recovered from his nap, was quite unhappy at this turn of events. We took him out for a walk in his stroller (at his own request).

Our evening together, the three of us, was just fine. I hung out and played with Owen for a while. I suspect he's starting to get a little annoyed at the disparity between our relative coloring skill levels. I made noises to Evelyn about helping her with dinner, and then instead shamelessly fell asleep on the couch next to Owen (he stayed awake).

We are definitely considering sending him back to gymnastics. He leaps about on our bed, jumps on the couch, climbs over people, and generally flings his body around. What's holding me back is that he may have gotten old enough that he'll end up in the older kid class and have to be in the big room doing warmups without his parents there--I really don't know how that would go.

9/4/12 (Tuesday)

Audrey was sitting in a little chair, looking at me and Owen as we left YBR. "Audrey!" said Owen, turning around, "You can't come home with me! You can't come to my house!"

I suggested that this wasn't very nice and gave him an alternate thing to say: "Goodbye, Audrey! Have a nice afternoon!" He tried that. It went well.

In the car on the way home he told me a long story about Audrey kicking his animals while he was playing. Then she'd gotten a time-out, and she'd cried. I asked who'd given her the time-out. Her daddy. When we were home, I called to see what had actually happened. Actually, Owen had taken Audrey's animals. She'd cried. A teacher had suggested that she ask him for them back. She asked. He gave. The end.

Cara and I were working on a Scooby Doo floor puzzle when Owen came tromping along to put He-Man figures on my head. Then he stooped and started to break up Scooby Doo's head. We protested. Owen marched off to sit on the stairs, indignant. "That wasn't very nice!" he complained. I pointed out that he hadn't been nice to break the puzzle. Apparently, in some way, he was giving himself a time-out.

9/5/12 (Wednesday)

Owen is definitely casting himself as the inured party in many inappropriate situations. Today, Miss Mona told him he couldn't throw mulch. I explained that, no, he shouldn't throw mulch. Mulch wasn't really meant to be picked up or played with or anything. "That wasn't very nice!" Owen told me. I ended up doing lots of other not-nice things this evening, like not giving him the snack he wanted before dinner.

He loves tattling. He came to me to report that Cara had put her legs near him, which "wasn't very nice." Cara, I knew, was lying on the floor on her tummy signing a form for school. Did he go near her? Yes, he'd gone and stood behind her. Well, I explained, there was the problem. He then added that he had said "excuse me." I decided that I really didn't need to get any further into this, told him it was good to say excuse me, and retreated by distracting him with something.

Cara had a great first day of second grade--she has friends in her class and in ABC. She likes her teacher. She's sitting next to PJ! Her room has a "book nook," though she seems unsure what that is. She's going to have Spanish this year! Tonight we covered her Social Studies book with a cut-up shopping bag and Steve and I filled out about 13 more forms than I'm giving out to my kids to do tomorrow. Not that I'm bitter.

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