Lani Moo at 3

Ilan really hates putting on cold weather clothes. He hates sweaters and sweatshirts, winter jackets and coats, and he especially hates hats and mittens. Every morning getting dressed is a fight. One morning, through his tears, he answered the question I always ask, which is something like, "why are you so upset about this jacket that keeps you warm?"

He said, "Mommy I wouldn't cry if I had a red jacket."

Oh. Well this was news. Because of various hand-me-downs, Lani has 3 winter jackets, one brown, one black, and one green. The last thing he needed was another one. So I put some red tape on his green jacket, which at the time was the least offensive of his jackets. But that just made him more pissed. "This isn't the red jacket that I wanted!" he screamed at me. And he unzipped it and shook it off even more often than usual on our commute.

A few weeks later Lani was still crying for a red jacket. He cried and fussed every time we put on his jacket, which was multiple times a day. I found a red jacket on sale for $25 on the Lands End website. I bought it.

When the red jacket came I set it aside, I wanted to save it for his birthday, or for Hannukah at least. But after one particular intense crying fit, I couldn't wait any longer. The next morning, when it was time to put on jackets and go to school, I presented Lani with his brand new red coat.

Lani looked at the coat, confused, and burst into fresh tears. "Mommy, red is not my favorite color anymore!" he wailed. "My favorite color is yellow!"

Lani Moo, you change your mind a lot. You'll ask to play with playdough, and by the time I clear off the table and get down the playdough and all the playdough tools, you are no longer interested. You ask me to play trains with you, but on our way downstairs we pass a pile of books that you ask me to read instead. You ask for a pretzel snack, but before I can put some pretzels in a bowl you've decided instead to eat a banana, or that you'd rather whine for watermelon.

You like to walk a funny walk, where you walk pigeon toed or cross your legs or just kick out your feet silly. If there are any rocks or bricks nearby, as there often are, piled up around planters and trees, you have to climb them, or at the very least step on them all. You love walking and running over uneven surfaces.

Your favorite book is "Room on the Broom" and you love when the dragon comes. I love watching you anticipate the arrival of the dragon. When we read you are always focused on the emotions of the characters, you want to know if someone is happy or sad, or worried, or surprised, and we have a lot of conversations about what the characters are feeling and why they are feeling that way.

Like your big brother, you like trains and cars, and love riding your scooter. Roan has a red one and you have a green one, but you often switch scooters, depending on which is your favorite color at the moment. Roan pumps with his left leg and you pump with your right. You like to stick your right leg out straight behind you, or out to the side, or sometimes, if you are feeling really silly or reckless, you will hook your leg over the handlebar.

You are very cuddly and snuggly. You will curl up with me or Daddy on our couch or in bed and lay quietly. I love these quiet moments. Daddy says I baby you more than I should - at dinner I'll let you sit on my lap and will sometimes spoon feed you when you say with a sly grin, "Mommy I need help eating." To be clear, you don't really need help eating. You can also put your own shoes on and take them off, but most of the time I do it for you, just to have a reason to sit your warm little body on my lap.

Happy 3rd Birthday, Lani Moo.

Roan turns 6

Just like the year he was born, November 4th was election day this year, and Roan had the day off school. We took him to Kids n Action to celebrate, and a few of his friends were able to join us. Here he is with Judah, one of his oldest friends.

At Kids n Action Jay must have won at least 4,000 tickets. He kept playing some drop ball game and hitting the jack pot. It's been a while since I've seen my husband so excited, and over endless strips of useless tickets? The kids traded them in for snap bracelets, Chinese finger traps, erasers, and some horrifically annoying whistles.

In the afternoon we made cupcakes.

A week or so later, Roan had his birthday party at Buzz-A-Rama, just like he did the year before.

This photo was taken right after the birthday boy blew out all his candles.

Baby Sofie's Big Day

Sofie got her baby blessing on Sunday July 20th in Salt Lake City, and the boys and I flew out to see it.

Grandma and Grandpa Mac drove up to Utah so they could be there too.

Doggies came too

Baby Sofie, looking baffled by her circumstances. We saw this expression a lot, from everyone, during the Camp Excellence days

Bright blue eyes

Graceful

Thoughtful

With Daddy, in jammas

Slices of Life

 ~ Ilan likes to count.  He'll say: "Mommy, let me count your buttons."  He'll start counting: "that is one, that is two, that is three, and that is four (pronounced poor)."  He'll smile at me and say proudly, "I know all my colors!"

 ~ Every night after dinner Roan and Ilan are allowed to watch about 20 minutes of TV.  They take turns choosing which show or movie.  Though lately it doesn't matter whose night it is to pick - they both always want to watch the movie Wreck it Ralph. Since they agree on the movie, there's nothing to fight about, right?  Wrong. Instead of fighting over the content, they fight over whose turn it is to pick Wreck it Ralph. A completely pointless fight. Yet they've staged it, with feeling, every night for the last two weeks.

~ Whenever I play a song on my guitar that Ilan doesn't like, he points at me and screams, "Mommy, stop that noise!"

~ Roan sleepwalks. He's in the habit of drinking water before bed, so almost every night he wakes up a few hours after he falls asleep and shambles around the house, looking for the toilet.  If we don't help him, he doesn't always find it.  Most common is that he pees on the toilet lid, since he isn't quite awake enough to lift it up.  But he's peed in corners, on our bookshelves, and into his dump truck. The dump truck is my favorite - some nights I try to leave it in his path. It's the easiest the clean up. One night, Roan peed on Ilan. Ilan didn't even wake up. I only figured it out when I checked on them before going to bed myself. Roan still doesn't know - I haven't quite found the right way to tell him.

~ Ilan is very preoccupied with everyone's happiness.  He is constantly asking us if we are happy.  When we read books, he needs to know if each character is happy, or will comment on whether they are happy, sad, worried, mad, or asleep.  When he gets mad he'll say, "I'm not happy," and puff out his lips in what we call his "mad lips."  Or he'll say, "Mommy, you don't make me happy."  Once I snapped at him: "it's not my job to make you happy!  Your happiness is not my responsibility."  It felt so good to say it, that now I say it all the time.  I find it very relaxing to remind my children (and myself) that their happiness is not my responsibility.

~ One day, maybe Mother's Day, Roan was supposed to bring a dollar to school and buy me a flower to plant. But I forgot to give him the dollar.  When I picked him up from school he was one of the only kids without a flower. I told him I was sorry that I forgot, and asked him if he felt bad that he didn't get to pick out a flower. "No Mommy," he said, "I'm glad I didn't spend one dollar on a plant because now you can spend that dollar on something more important." I looked at him in horror - he sounded so frugal and logical and unsentimental - he sounded just like me! Then he said, "and anyways Mommy, do we even have room for another flower in our backyard? We have so many flowers already, we don't need another one." And I realized that he must be listening to me, at least some of the time.

~ Sometimes, when my children say "that's not fair!" it dislodges some deep seated need in me to deliver a passionate and scathing lecture on what is "fair" on a macro level.  "You want to know what's not fair?!" I'll start, "children who don't have enough to eat, that's not fair.  Daddies and Mommies who have to work 16 hours a day and never see their children, that's not fair." And I go on and on. Until one day I overheard Roan lecturing Lani, "you want to know what's not fair Ilan? Little boys who only have rocks instead of toys." So I try and take it easy on the Not Fair lectures now.

~ This morning I was dancing in the kitchen and Lani was looking at me funny. "Mommy, are you doing karate?" he asked.  "No!" I said, trying not to be offended, "I'm dancing."  Lani laughed. "No Mommy, you are doing karate."

~ Whenever I take the boys places, like to the park, or the beach, or to Kids n Action (our local Hassidic version of Chuck E Cheese) Ilan says "I want Roan." He gets very sad when Roan choses to play with kids his own age, instead of helping Lani climb the ramps and go down the slides or wade through the ball pit.

~ Roan likes to tell people that "Lani is attracted to doggies." Naturally, people look at him funny when he says this. He misinterprets that look to mean that they probably don't know what the word "attracted to" means, since it's such a big word.  So he tells them: "attracted to something means that you follow it around everywhere."

~ Ilan and Roan are in the habit of asking us, "can I tell you something very important?" And then they say something silly, like, "I'm poopy man," or "I'm fan marker," which is the height of hilarity and wit among my boys. Lately though, Ilan has been shouting, "I'm gay!" I don't know where he picked this up, but he's figured out that people react to a 2-and-a-half year old shouting that he's gay and so now he says it all the time. On the airplane from Salt Lake City to New York he lost no opportunity to inform all the passengers that he was gay.

Roosevelt Island

Grandma Lyons' Bosu Ball

Chicks

This week I got snookered into taking some chicks home for the weekend. These two chicks are the sole survivors of at least a dozen eggs that Roan's kindergarten class brought home from a field trip to a farm in Queens.  Roan's teacher approached me at pick up, saying how excited Roan would be to take care of them over the weekend.  She must have noticed the look on my face, because she said something about what an honor it is to host the chicks, and that all the kids want to be chosen for it.  I must have still been giving her a pretty dirty look, because she leaned in to whisper, "better to take them now, while they're still small and they can't fly."

It's been a crazy week at work, with BEA in town, and the last thing I want to do over the weekend is add to the number of dependents I have to take care of. But when I complained to Jay about the chicks he was non-chalante. "It's no big deal," he said, "I know those chicks." Which is a line that I found (and still find) hilariously funny. He met the chicks on Memorial Day, when they stayed with a neighbor unfortunate enough to have to board them during a 3 day weekend.

These chicks are pooping machines. I have never seen animals that poop so much. Seriously, every 2 or 3 minutes one takes a dump. When they poop they squat down and flap their wings. And voila. They poop in their water dish, they poop in their food. They peck at each others' poop and get all agitated. I'm typing this from our office, where we are boarding the chicks, and the whole room smells like a mix of their food and their shit, because even though we clean their box twice a day, they poop so much that it's always filthy.

They poop so much that they are plagued by a problem called "pasty butt." It's when their poop gets stuck in their fuzz and hardens, and blocks other poop from coming out. It's a serious condition that can kill them. It kills them very quickly, because like I said, they never stop pooping. So you have to be vigilant. On Friday night, Jay noticed that one chick had Pasty Butt. I will not detail all the steps we had to take to save this poor baby chick from a dishonorable death by poop, but I will say that it involved at least half an hour of both Jay and my attentions, Q-tips, olive oil, nail scissors, and an extremely feisty chick.

We are determined: these chicks cannot die on our watch. I cannot face the disappointment and tears of 27 kindergarten students. We must do our part to fight against Pasty Butt.

We must also MacGyver the other problems that arise with these chicks.  Such as, one of them escaped their box today.  We only knew because the chick who was left behind raised such a ruckus. So we built a new home for the chicks, out of a Diapers.com box. It has higher walls.  Also, the chicks love to poop in their water dish, and then, once their poop is adequately dissolved and evenly dispersed, they flip their water dish over, flinging poop water all over the floor and walls. This can't be good for them.

Roan built the chicks this castle, so they could come out of their cage and poop all over our floor. They seemed to like it, until Lani sat down too close to the castle and the wall collapsed on them.  It was terrible, for a moment I thought one chick had broken its leg. But they seem fine, though I thought they acted anxious when we put them back inside the rebuilt castle. Guess what they do when they are anxious?  They poop even more than usual.

In honor of the chicks, Roan decided to make a book and write a story about them.  The title of the book is "I Love Chicks."  It's about chicks that are race cars, spies, and bad guys.  When I asked Roan how he learned to spell the word "chicks" so perfectly he said, "Mommy, that's what I go to school for."

We cannot wait for tomorrow, when these chicks go back to school.

Beach Chairs

This really isn't what we had in mind when Jay and I brought these chairs to the beach....

Coney Island

Scootering down the boardwalk... derailing on to the sand (Lani Lou's idea)

Running for the water. This is the first time we've been on the beach since December/January

Walking home with Italian Ices

April Showers Bring...

Puddles!

If given snacks, Lani Lou will hunt puddles tirelessly all day long

Can you tell Jay got the boys dressed today?

All three are wearing Spurs shirts