Murphy's Law strikes again!

So, as some know, Ella got into my purse a few weeks ago, and scattered the contents of my wallet all around the basement. I found all my credit cards, my store cards, discount cards, and other random pieces of plastic. I even located my cash, all three dollars of it, stuffed in the track of the treadmill - but I could not find my driver's license. I looked for it for almost three weeks, before I went to the DMV at 6:45 AM and stood in line for 45 minutes to pay $18 dollars for a new horrible driver's license picture. I actually liked my old picture - I think it's actually one of my better pictures in general. 

Anyway, two days later, I was sitting in our recliner with Lear while Ella was napping, and he suddenly held up his hand with a triumphant giggle - and in his hand was my license. Two days later! I was so frustrated! It was stuffed in the teeny tiny gap between the back of the chair and the cushion on the back of the chair. I LOOKED in that chair - I even tipped it over and checked through the mechanism underneath to see if it got caught in there. That little, adorable, sweet, enchanting, FRUSTRATING girl! Isn't it just Murphy's Law that two days after I paid $18 and had a horrible picture taken at 7:45 AM we find the silly thing? 

By the way, I'm not using that new license with the horrible picture. My old one is good until 2012, so I'll use that one and file away the new one until the next time that Ella hides my license. Which might be next week.

Life in our madhouse

The top picture is of Lear at the playhouse at Wheeler Farm. We went there as part of our Ward's summer playgroup. They had tons of fun with their friends and the animals - there were even wild rats in the pigpen! I am always glad to observe wildlife in their natural habitats, but I thought that not everyone would enjoy the picture I took of them, so I didn't include it above. 

Next is of Ella COVERED in dirt from one of the tree rings in our back yard. She is fascinated with dirt and digging and generally getting filthy. She even had it in her HAIR, and I had to wash it twice before I got it all out - and the water was an opaque brown color when we were done washing. Since she is a girl, I blame it all on the male influence of her older brother, who is her partner in crime in all things lately. Lear was dirty, too, but being older, he can keep it in moderation. If you click on the picture, you'll see a much bigger version of it, in which all the dirt is easier to observe.

In the last two pictures, Cory is trying to get Ella and Lear dressed for bed, and Ella, being resistant to the idea of wearing clothing (another two-year-old phase she is going through is what I call The Gratuitous Nakedness Phase), Cory tried to interest her in pants by putting them on his head. I'm not sure where the connection between wearing pants where they belong and wearing them on the head is, but they had fun doing it. I love that the waistband on Ella's head makes her look like a squished potato.

Lear quote: "My mommy and daddy don't run on the treadmill very much anymore, so their bellies are getting bigger and bigger and bigger... Actually, I think it's the food."

The Ella Groove!

This is one of Ella's favorite activities - dancing to the ABC song. We have a Leap Frog fridge magnet that sings the song, and she loves that she can press the button to play it whenever whenever she wants. If you listen carefully, you'll be able to hear that she is singing along: she says "T, U, W, X," and at the very end she starts to say the "now I know my ABC's" part. 

My kids are on a roll...

Ella and Lear are getting good at being naughty. Or at least at finding new and original ways to make my blood pressure rise. Last Thursday evening, two days after the spice incident, we thought they were just being rowdy in their room after bedtime (for which they both received hot bottoms), but they were actually reaching new heights of craziness. We thought that they were just jumping on their beds and having a blast doing everything they're not supposed to, but we didn't find out the real extent of their activities until Friday morning. That morning I got up early to see Cory off to work and to help him move the car seats from one car to the other. I opened the garage door, and there on the ground beneath their window was the window screen, a few stuffed animals and pillows, and some books. The window was closed, and Cory says that he didn't even know that they had the window open when he went in to lay down the law. Lear told me that he opened the window to look out (yes, the window was locked, but Lear knows how to open them), and that the screen had popped out when he leaned up against it. He swears that it was Ella's idea to throw everything out the window. That window is two stories above the concrete driveway - if either child had fallen out, if they were so lucky as to have survived, they would still have been in critical condition in the hospital. It took me a full five minutes to get the screen back into the window, because the fit is so tight, which means that Lear had to have been leaning HARD on it to make it pop out. I truly believe that God assigned an angel or two to keep them inside the house, because it's VERY lucky that neither of them fell. I'm glad that I didn't find out about it until morning, because I would've been up all night stewing about what might have happened. As it was, I was nearly in tears all morning between the time we found out about it and they woke up. I am so, so thankful that my beautiful and infuriating children are well and still with us. 

Lear quote of the week: "Mommy that door hit on me." 

Honorable mention: Bronson: "Lear, what country do we live in?" 

Lear: "West Jordan!"

Ella quote: "One, two, fee, five, se-en, eight!" Can you believe she's counting (sort of) already?

Clean-up on Aisle Four!

I have been letting the kids play "shopping" lately in the pantry. They take Ella's baby buggy and pretend it's a shopping cart, and take things out of the pantry and put them in the "cart." They have a lot of fun doing it, and I figured that as long as they put everything away when they're done, it wouldn't be a problem. They've done it a few times, and as I think it's kind of cute they way they play together like this, I left them in the kitchen alone today to play while I sat in my room and put together my own shopping list. I heard a few bumps and knocks, but thinking (correctly, mostly) that they were just piling the cart too high, I didn't go to investigate. When I was done with my list, I went to the kitchen to get the kids ready to go shopping for real. As I approached, I smelled pepper, and I began to be suspicious - and there in the kitchen, were the children, looking very guilty, and standing in a mess of pepper - and coriander seeds, and sea salt, and curry powder. They had gotten into the spices, and had been happily dumping them out on the floor and spreading them around with their hands and feet when I caught them mid-sprinkle. The spice shelf is the second from the top, too, which means that they had to climb to get to them. Needless to say, they were in a little trouble - no TV for the rest of the day - and they are no longer allowed to play shopping in the pantry. I was even thinking when I was making my list that they were playing so sweetly and quietly together. The quiet part should have set off the alarm bells in my head: never trust quiet children. They are inevitably getting into trouble.

The one upside to this, other than the comedy factor, is that my kitchen now smells like coriander and pepper, with a little bit of curry in the background. 

Our kids are so fun...

This week was a tough one for Cory. He had to translate at the Stampin' Up! convention on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Ask Cory sometime about how much he loves translating. He says that he's much better with written French than spoken, and that translating verbally has been a big challenge for him. He was very stressed out the first part of the week because of the anticipation, and he was working so much at the convention downtown that his company paid for him to stay at a hotel for a few nights. The cool thing is that everyone had Friday night off to enjoy themselves, so we got Papa to have a slumber party over at our house so I could have a night out with Cory at the Hotel Monaco downtown. It's a pretty nice hotel. We went to a few houses on the Salt Lake Parade of Homes (we go every year - even Lear and Ella love going to see houses) and had a nice dinner. It was great to have a nice night out without our beautiful little terrorists. And terrorists they are - Lear and Ella were under the mistaken impression that they didn't have to go to bed or follow any rules while Papa was at our house, and when he told them it was bedtime, it occasioned a major fit. He decided to let them stay in their room for a while to "cool down." When he came back upstairs to check on them a while later, they had not only stripped their mattresses, but pulled them on to the floor - as well as the box springs. I didn't know that Lear was Bam-Bam in another life - box springs are heavy things for a four-year old to move! They had set up the Thomas the Tank Engine tent on top of the mattress  "bridges," as they called them and were jumping all over them. Anyone wondering why I'm beginning to think that two are enough? I love these guys, but they can be a handful!

The picture above is of Richard taking the kids on a ride on Gramp's Jazzy chair. He came on Wednesday to watch them for me because I was playing a Brown Bag concert with Kairo By Night downtown. I truly appreciate that he is so willing to brave our children so often to help us out. We love you Papa!

Lear quote: 

Mama: "What do you want to eat, Mister Lear?"

Lear: "Peaches, and..... Peaches, and, um.... Peaches, and - aww forget it, Mama, just peaches."

Ella quote: "Papa toe-foffing me!" (translation: "Papa gave me toast with frosting!" In our house, toast with frosting is Toaster Streudel. Ella spent about five minutes repeating this over and over and over to my sister and her husband, which is her version of a conversation.)