Stories and the Octomom

Our kids are interesting, I'll give them that. Every hour or so, one or the other of them does something that makes us laugh. Over the weekend, we managed to immortalize two of these instances with our camera.

The first happened Saturday. Since Christmas, Gabe has been spending between two and four hours every day in my office playing with his legos. We have to keep them in here so Norah doesn't eat them (that being kind of her thing), but it also helps to keep them fairly well contained. He has to keep them cleaned up and mostly on his little lego table or we threaten to vacuum up all the pieces (actually, I discovered yesterday that he's pulled the hands out of most of the little lego men--these hands are beige, the same color as our carpet, and I've vacuumed recently. In other words, no more hands for most of his lego people). It's been a good lesson in responsibility for him.

Ha, ha. That's a good one. No, we have to clean them up a couple times a day or run the risk of stepping on them. And, as I've written about before, that can end poorly.

While he's in here, though, we kind of have to stick close by. It's not that he is entirely untrustworthy if left unsupervised. Nine minutes out of ten he could be left alone in here to conduct his business. But that tenth minute is the sticky wicket. As soon as his legos fail to hold his interest for even a moment, he'll turn his attention to something nearby (usually my computer) and start messing with it in a decidedly irreparable manner. Or he'll go into the kitchen and start pulling food randomly out of the fridge or the cupboards, opening it up, deciding whether he wants to eat it, then leaving it on the floor when he doesn't. Or he'll go into the bathroom, grab a cup, and start transferring water from the sink or the toilet to the bathtub. Well, that's his goal, really he transfers it from the sink or the toilet to the floor. Or any of a number of destructively messy things. Really, by three and a half I would have figured I'd be able to give the child free rein of the house. But no. Maybe by the time he's twelve.

So this means that I spend as much time here in the office supervising him as it takes to make him realize that I could come back in here ANY time and he better just do what he's supposed to or run the risk of getting caught before he's even had the chance to have enough fun to make getting in trouble worth the effort. I say "supervise," but what I mean is "sit at the computer playing Facebook games." Well, I also spend a goodly amount of time building him something with the legos so that he can destroy it in 1/100th the time it took me to build it.

Anyway, I was sitting here supervising him Saturday and he started telling me about all these lego pieces that he was carrying over to the desk. I got a couple minutes of it on video, and it should be fairly self explanatory.

The stories actually started earlier in the week as Gabe began to name the lego men that he was putting together. He's come up with several pretty good names, but the group of four that I most remember were Roger, Teddy, T. and Carlito. Where a three year old comes up with a name like Carlito is beyond me. Oh, and don't feel bad if you have no idea what he's saying. I don't either whenever he gets into fast talking mode. I especially like how, towards the end, he starts making up stories about whatever he sees on my desk because he's running out of his own ideas. They always say, "write about what you know," and, right now, he knows what's on my desk.

Then yesterday we hit Wal-Mart's clearance aisle and picked up birthday presents for everyone we know under the age of four to cover the rest of the year. They had A LOT of stuff on clearance. But every time we go into Wal-Mart with the kids, we end up picking up some cheap toy to bribe them to stay quiet and stop whining. It's an AWFUL practice, obviously, as we're only training them to expect something every time we walk into a store, but what other choice do we have? Either we ignore their shrieks and screams and fits--which WE might be able to do because we're used to ignoring them, but nobody else in the store would be able to--or we cave and keep them moderately docile long enough to get out the door at the cost of a few dollars.

Gabe always ends up with a car or, now, a small package of legos. And Norah always ends up with a baby. ALWAYS a baby. She's had no interest in anything else. And there were plenty of babies to choose from on the clearance aisle. It was like an orphanage attached to a brothel in there for selection and variety. So she got yet another baby.

When we got home, she started playing with all the babies that we have downstairs. Mind you, these are the DOWNSTAIRS babies. She has maybe another ten or so upstairs. Libby helped her line them all up and we got a picture.

I wasn't joking about that Octomom thing, was I? It's kind of creepy, actually, and something that I hope I can break her of before she gets into middle school. "Babies are trouble, Norah! Don't ever think anything different! They will drain your energy and suck your soul! You don't want eight of them! Ever! Just TWO of you have aged us a decade in the last three and a half years! With eight of them, you'll look like a meth addict or Hell's Angel in less than a year! They may LOOK cute and cuddly, but they have a nefarious ulterior motive: they want your life force!" There. Hopefully future Norah reads this and it saves me the trouble of having to have "the talk" with her before it seems even remotely possible that such things would be necessary.

And here's a picture of her in sunglasses. When she was wearing them, we thought she was cute enough to warrant a picture. Now, as I study the picture, she kind of looks like a light sensitive eggplant. Naw, I'm kidding. She's adorable. Even if these toddler sized glasses are too small already for her Easter Island sized head. (Hi, future Norah! I'm just saying these things to be funny! You were always adorable and not in the least bit giant headed or eggplant shaped! Promise!)

Breaking news!

I started posting this stuff as Gabe was playing with his legos. When he finished with them, he decided that he wanted to go upstairs and play for a little while, and Norah is always eager to join him up there.

She hasn't quite mastered going up the stairs yet, and is nowhere near figuring out how to come back down them, but she did discover something fun this morning--sliding down the stairs on her butt. I got some video.