A morning with the girls

Yesterday DH had to take his "Silent Nite" mouthguard in for repairs, so he was snoring in full force last night. After going to bed late in the first place and then getting up several times to see to the girls, who were sleeping restlessly, I finally put in some earplugs around 3 a.m. and slept hard until DH shook me awake at 8:30 to inform me that the girls were up and dressed and he was leaving for work. He gave them each a banana and turned on a 30-minute "Get Ready for Math" video while I tried to pry my eyes open and haul myself out of bed.

Breakfast was cornmeal mush, which the girls liked--especially after I told them that cornmeal mush was what Laura and Mary Ingalls ate for breakfast and that it was also a kind of porridge, like in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Of course, it helped that I made sure they saw me sprinkling brown sugar on it. Presentation is everything.

After breakfast we started the dishwasher and I was wiping down counters when A came in from tinkering on the piano and asked me to show her how to play it. So the three of us sat on the piano bench and sang songs for a while, and then I gave the girls a beginner piano lesson. A is really eager to learn to play, but we're taking it slowly and mostly just getting her familiar with the idea of where Middle C is and how to use more than one finger to press the keys.

When the girls got tired of that, I wondered what I was going to do with them for the rest of the day. I'd already had to separate them several times because they were arguing and pushing each other. They weren't playing particularly well together this morning and I was too tired to be very patient with them, so something semi-structured was a necessity. Then I remembered that I had recently bought glue sticks. What better activity for a just-turned 4-year-old and a nearly 3-year-old than gluing?

I got out some sheets of colored paper and showed the girls how to rip them to shreds--a harder task than it seems, but the ripping sound was satisfying. We practiced cutting with kids' scissors, too. Four sheets of paper later, we had a glorious pile of multicolored bits of paper in the middle of the table.

I let them each pick out a sheet of construction paper, gave them glue sticks and turned them loose. I thought I'd be able to get some things done like finish picking up downstairs, fold a load of laundry and check e-mail while they were working. However, it ended up requiring quite a bit of supervision--especially trying to keep M from extending the glue stick all the way out and smearing glue on everything from the table to her face. Oh, well. I should know by now not to plan to actually get anything done while the kids are doing a project.

I ended up sitting down with them and making a scrap picture of my own. A watched my methods closely and followed suit, while M was more interested in putting glue on her paper than in sticking the paper scraps on.

The girls are very proud of their pictures, and I'm proud of the girls. :)

Here is A's picture:



On the left is a green tree with a purple trunk, on the right a yellow sunshine, and in the middle a multicolored flower. The blue pieces scattered along the bottom section are water, with a green fish in the lower right-hand corner. I really didn't help her at all except for helping her find some of the right-shaped pieces for her to glue on to make the fish.

M's picture doesn't show up as well on the camera, because it's mostly glue:



She put in a lot of pink paper scraps because pink is her favorite color at the moment. The cluster to the right is a tree, and I think there's a bird in the middle.

The really amazing thing about M's project, though, was what she wrote on the back in gel pen.



I am not sure if she was trying to write Hello or just drawing random letters, but it certainly made me do a double-take. She was extremely proud of herself when I said it looked like she had written the word "hello!" and said that of course that was what she was trying to write. However, I expect that if I had asked her what she wrote before telling her what it looked like to me, she would have come up with something different.

Finally, here's my picture. If you can't tell what the images are supposed to be I'm not going to tell you. :)



I went upstairs for a minute while they were finishing up their pictures, and came down to find that they'd decided it would be fun to blow on the remaining paper scraps and watch them float all over the kitchen. So they picked up scraps of paper while I prepared lunch.

Then we ate almond butter and jelly sandwiches (grape jelly for the kids and gooseberry jam for me) on homemade bread, along with honeydew melon and baby carrots. The girls devoured half a melon before I told them we had to save the rest for tomorrow. I have to ration melon carefully around here if I want it to last for more than one meal.

Now they're supposed to be napping or at least having quiet time, but they've each made about 3 trips to the bathroom in the 15 minutes since they went to bed. They've discovered that as long as they actually use the toilet, the bathroom excuse is a free ticket out of bed--at least the first few times. When they are in the bedroom, they're giggling and playing instead of sitting quietly in their beds reading books. I think I'm going to have to separate them if I really want them to be quiet. They share a room, but we also have a bed in the playroom which can help keep quiet times quieter.

I really should catch up on laundry and a few other things, but I think I'll take a nap too.