Tales of O & E

Overheard after naptime this afternoon:

E: STO-OOOOOPPPPPPP!  Why do you keep FOLLOWING ME??

O:  I'm following you because you're my best. sister. ever.

E:  Leave me alone!

And then, surprisingly, they proceeded to play nicely together.

It's times such as these that I feel blessed to have had them close enough to be real playmates.  I think O-man has benefited the most from this.  We played with a little friend yesterday that is four months younger than O (and while not the only child, his two siblings are teenagers) and the speech difference was strikingly noticeable.  "Oscar come play?" he asked when he wanted to know if we could come back over one day soon.  Oscar would have said something like, "Can he come over to our house to play tomorrow, too?"  In fact, he kept asking afterward if we could go back the same afternoon and play at his house again.  (We've been working on the concept of invitations--we can't go unless we are invited.)

I think Elsie likes to have a partner in crime most of the time, but I think that's because she can blame anything/everything on him.  Also, they get to practice their manners on each other before we send them out into the world.  They're fighting over something, and we get to remind them that we haven't heard either of them ask nicely.  Usually, they stop, change their tone, and ask in a nice way.  Oscar will almost always relent once Elsie uses a nice tone.  Elsie, on the other hand, loves to frustrate Oscar and tell him no, which causes more tears.  She will, usually, eventually, give in, but not always.  We definitely have a stubborn girl on our hands, a real drama mama.  :)

"When I asked Santa for a baby doll, he thought I said Barbie doll." -- Elsie, 4.5

Elsie said this to me today, out of the blue, as we pulled into the church parking lot for a women's brunch.  She is still clearly disappointed, even a month later.  And she will be in therapy one day, I'm sure....

Times such as these

It is with great relief that the end of January comes for me.  It signals the end of the craziness that is the autumn/early-to-mid winter:  college football, back-to-back holidays, hunting season.

This last weekend, we had a rare three-day weekend.  We made plans to spend most of it with my sister and my niece and nephew whom we haven't seen since early June, so when they cancelled their trip unexpectedly, we had two days wide open.  (You know, because of course one of the three was reserved for hunting...).

Sunday, after church, Eli and I took the kids to an Auburn women's basketball game--because we had free ticket vouchers that included free popcorn.  General admission to women's games includes floor seating (woot!), and the sparse spectatorship allows greater access to the 2014 UCA National Mascot Champion mascot (I don't care if you're not an Auburn fan--you can't deny the awesomeness of that tiger) and the Chick-Fil-A cow.  Also, fewer kids there means the adults that catch the parachuting plush cows feel more compelled to give them away to little kids (hello, free waffle fries!).  Women's basketball, outside of Baylor and a partial handful other elite programs, is, well, not so great.  We were watching the #10 team in the nation play Auburn (and eventually win by a point, coming from behind at the half), but it really felt like we were watching high school basketball. And that's pretty much just...meh.  However, I'm starting to hatch plans for Elsie to be a basketball player so that she can get a scholarship to play somewhere, because it apparently can't be that hard.  But, seriously, the experience reinforces for me that I LOVE living in a college town, even if it's not a college that my in-laws particularly like.  Just having an event like that to attend as a Sunday afternoon excursion is awesome--and we hardly spent any money to do it--just gasoline to get there and two drinks for the four of us to share.

Sunday afternoon, I was able to go (kid-free!) and meet with a friend and her husband about budgeting.  You know I love to talk about Dave Ramsey!  I had loaned them the DVDs from the old 13-week FPU so that they could start a conversation with each other about their finances, and I loved that they asked me to come over and peek at their preliminary cash-flow plan and talk about how to get that Baby Step 1, a $1000 beginner emergency fund in the bank, completed.

And finally, Sunday afternoon, I was able to finish catching up on all the back episodes of a series I found that I really like:  Elementary.  It's a different Sherlock Holmes show than the BBC's, and it is pretty fantastic.

So, this is a sneak peak into the mundanity (yes, I just made that up) that is my bliss.

Cheers.

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

Hebrews 12:11 (NIV)

Cold Turkey

This month I quit (deactivated, not deleted) Facebook (FB) cold turkey.  I thought about all the pros and cons of keeping it, and really, as far as Facebook itself there are more pros than anything.  But that does not take into consideration my personality, my easily-addicted-to-technology personality, which is the biggest CON of all.  When I would get home from work, I would zone out with FB on my phone when I should have been paying attention to the little people--or feeding them, at the least.  Same with when Eli and I would be sitting in the same room, instead of engaging with each other, I would be passing time on FB.  This last fall, I developed the worst habit:  I would wake up at 2 a.m. (for whatever reason), and cruise FB on my phone for somewhere around an hour before I fell back to sleep.  I'm not going to use the clinical term "addicted", but I will tell you that we were approaching a certain level of manic FB-checking that may have eventually become something extremely serious.

Coming into the new year, I considered just cutting back to weekends only, or only after the kids were in bed, or something.  But I know myself better than that and knew that if I didn't just stop all together, it would slowly creep back up to the levels of insanity.  So, for now, we take a hiatus.

I've only been off for 11 days now, and I can't tell you how difficult it has been as I craft clever status updates in my head that have nowhere to go, no one to sympathize, no one to "like" them.  I hadn't thought about Candy Crush Saga until now, and now I'm sure I will dream about it.  I'm out of the loop as far as the hottest articles to be read and the latest deals to be found, but honestly I don't really miss it--it was just such an ingrained part of my daily routines that I'm noticing its absence.

Again, I know myself, so I know that I will be back, but only after I feel like I have some sort of control over it.  In the meantime, you know what I'm going to do?  Read a book. Or ten.  And get my life and environment ready for the arrival of 3.0.  And yes, I'll be blogging and reading blogs and watching hulu, etc., but my bedtime routine will not consist of staying up after bedtime or getting up in the middle of the night to check FB.

Cheers.