Desultory blogging

Morning granola

I see that I only made 9 posts in January, the fewest of any month so far. Lazy! I'll try to be better. Things we've been doing: ordering seeds for the spring garden, and having the occasional wild rumpus...

Setting up a little play-kitchen area in the kitchen...

And making books about army battles. This one is from today (Henry informed us that this is the title page). He wrote the first two lines himself; altogether it reads "Henry Army Guys [RME GIS]; I did this at my house." He got confused about whether he was trying to say "I did it" or "I did this," and then he got frustrated and asked for me to spell the last phrase out for him. He sometimes wants to try to read books like Hop on Pop with us, but he generally doesn't want to do something until he's good at it, so I think he's working on reading quietly, on his own. I can hear the echo of his good teacher, Meghan, when he says things like "Mom, there's a silent S in this word; you can't hear it; we say [whatever] but it's spelled like..."

Michael and Henry also like to "play apes" (inspired by watching Planet of the Apes), which entails sneaking around with their nerf guns hiding from me until Agatha outs them. Agatha, meanwhile, just keeps getting more fun. She's said Dada for a long time, but now she more often says "da-ee" (Daddy) and says Mama frequently, too. Her sound for nursing has long been "liddle liddle," but now she'll say "Mama liddle liddle." She loves to say hi and bye-bye to people she meets, and has more words all the time, including "hot tea!" and "nut ball!"-- the latter is one of her favorite snacks, a pre-chewed ball of walnuts. Yum! (Actually, she says it more like "butt ball!") When she wants to eat, she says "bowl!" and when she wants more of something she holds out her bowl and says "peees?" Which is pretty much irresistible. (I credit her babysitter for teaching her this.) She also sometimes says "hat bowl" and then proceeds to dump her food over her head. We've gotten quicker about intervening as soon as she makes the announcement, and now she sometimes says "hat bowl" just to get a rise out of us. She still loves cats and birds, which she fluently names "caw caw," although now she also knows hummingbirds (by their picture) and likes to say "humming!" She also knows when she has two of something; if you give her a cracker she'll agitate for another one and then say, "two!"