Pals

Apparently they have something going that I'm not in on. Stella brought Waifer's dish out to the middle room today and threw handfuls of food out for him to eat. And even more amazing, he actually ate it. Come to think of it, Stella is the one who discovered that Waifer likes his dry food wet and mushy these days. She kept putting his dry food into his water, and he kept eating it up. We eventually had a taste test against the dry kibble and Waifer was clear about his preference for mush. I'm glad they're becoming buds, though.

Fences make for good...family?

Waifer has never been fond of Violet. He has slowly come to a grudging acceptance of her, but you never would have seen anything like this between them. Not even with a fence between them.


And when Waifer walked away...

And a couple more - just because they're so darn cute.

Two big milestones

I don't have much to say about this. I think the pictures tell it all. This is Violet's first bike, and in moving up to a bike, she has abandoned her trike to Stella. Needless to say, they are both thrilled. And please take note of how immensely cool Violet's bike truly is. All we added were the tassels and the training wheels. And the license plate, of course.


Violet helped Stella with her seatbelt. She is quite the adoring big sister most of the time.


Isn't this totally the picture of childhood?


Stella was happiest when she was going really, really fast (as was Violet). It was just hard to get a picture of them in their rapture. Here's one of Stella.


And here's one of Violet. Zoomed in and cropped with everything I've got.


This picture is notable in that it shows off one of Stella's new talents: pointing. Jason had finally caught up with Violet and Stella was pointing to them.


And I had to make sure you got a really good look at Stella's boots. She adores them, but they don't stay on very well. This was taken after her ride and she was a trifle exhausted if you can't tell.

TMBG

One of the girls' favorite bands is They Might Be Giants. Convenient, considering Jason and I like them a whole lot, too. In fact, a couple of longstanding 'lullabies' have been ZYX and Road Movie to Berlin. So we all jumped at the chance to go see them live at a concert especially for kids.


Well, the pictures aren't great, but there were no cameras allowed in the Music Hall and all that. Thankfully, they weren't interested in actually stopping anyone from taking pictures. I wasn't the only one I saw doing it. For the record, Jason left his cell phone and Leatherman home in case the TSA was on security duty.

Violet and I spent a while yesterday making our own version of concert-tees for the entire family. We didn't get a perfect picture of the four of us, so in case you can't see it, Stella's shirt says "They", mine says "Might", Jason's says "Be" (he thanked me for making his shirt the one that is quietly philosophical) and Violet, who got first choice, got to be "Giants". And even better? Drummer Marty Beller signed it for her with a Sharpie I conveniently had in my pocket. (wink) That foam hand she has? Every kid was given one at the door. Cool.

Violet's verdict on the whole thing? Much too loud. She would just as soon watch TMBG on DVD at home. Funny how the things I think to prepare her for aren't always on target. Remember bowling? I told her it would be loud, but really there were way too many lights. Well this time, I made sure she understood that we were going to see the real live John and John, not the puppets she is used to watching. Never occurred to me that it would be loud. Or rather, it never occurred to me that she wouldn't know it was going to be loud.

And yes, they did play some adult-pleasers like Particle Man , Birdhouse In Your Soul and Istanbul (Not Constantinople). I was seriously hoping for Cow Town, but you can't ask for everything, can you?

Disclaimer

Jason told me today that my blog looks just like everyone else's. Apparently it screams "Take a look at our idyllic life!" I want to make sure everyone knows that our life/family/home falls quite short of idyllic. It would be more accurate to say it falls under passable-with-enough-moments-of-splendor-to-keep-us-going. Here's some photographic proof of that. This, THIS is our living room.


Now on to better things. Like Easter eggs, and Easter bunnies, and Easter candy. Today we went to the egg hunt in Portsmouth, NH. The temperature was about 30, but the wind chill was wicked. The upside of this is that the people running the show were incredibly prompt. Jason brought his two favorite bunnies along.

When the signal was given, Violet was off like a shot. She really 'got' it this year. She was determined to get the most eggs the fastest. Stella on the other hand, was happy to model for me. Her basket was a little pocketbook.

After the hunt I managed to get a picture of the two of them together.

There was an actual Easter Bunny there, too. As an aside, Violet saw the Easter bunny at the mall one day and went up and talked to him about his garden "These are nice vegetables you have. They're turning." Indeed, the bunny had a spinning garden.

Look carefully at the man on the left in the above picture. He's from the Portsmouth Herald. He asked us for Stella's name and age, so maybe she'll make it into the Sunday paper. If she does I'll link it up here. (update - Stella made the online version of the paper. She's in the little slideshow. Click 'zoom photo' above the picture of the kids on the egg hunt and you can see her. Personally? I think my picture of her and the bunny is better.)

When the action was over we hightailed it over to the sunroom at the library to check out the loot.
So there you have a little bit of idyll. And here, you have a little bit of normal to top it off.

Birthday partying

Violet had her first bowling experience this weekend. She was invited to her friend Ashton's birthday party at Vacationland Bowling. I had prepared her for the noisiness of the bowling alley, but even I wasn't prepared for the blacklights, the disco ball or the flashing lanes. Bowling certainly isn't like when I was a kid.


Fourth birthday parties, however, are much the same. Though it seems not one of these kids knew how to play duck-duck-goose. The mother patiently tried to explain it, but in the end they just did what they wanted. Violet was not the only one who would get up randomly, run around the circle and sit back down in her seat.

Glow in the dark necklaces make a very good game, too. Violet keeps up pretty well with the boys. The one in back is Caleb, the one in front is Aman; both of them are in her preschool class. She can just as likely be found holding hands with one of them as swinging at them.

But when asked what her favorite part of the party was she replied "the horse ride". This would be the 50 cent horse ride I let her take after the party because she had been begging to ride the whole time we were there.

We talked about going back there with Jason and Stella to try out the quiet bowling area, which seemed really nice. And as a bonus, you don't have to remember back to 9th grade phys ed to do the scoring. The nice computer man behind the pins does it for you while he's setting the pins back up.

More snow

What do you do when there is yet more snow the week before spring?