Here’s our daughters in their Halloween costumes.

Aren’t they just lovely? Trick-or-treat was last night here and they got lots of ‘Aww! Your mommy made you such a pretty costume!’ and ‘Are they twins?’

I stayed in with the boys, who we briefly considered dressing as devils but we a.) thought of it too late and b.) it would have been a wash since Bede wouldn’t wear devil horns for more than 10 seconds max.

Anyway, they had a good time. Sean took them up my parents’ street and there were lots of other children. I think they felt very ‘halloweened’.

This morning I woke up and the girls had come in to the dining room, found their bags of loot and laid it all out. I’m not sure how much they ate, but Faith looked up at me as I meandered blearily in and said brightly “Good morning Mama! We thought we’d have some candy.” and judging from the number of wrappers I found they won’t be low on sugar for a few days, heh. I had sorted it last night to get rid of the chokey junk, thank goodness. Like the house giving out Brach’s Starlight mints. Sheesh.

(Note to self: when attempting to monitor candy intake in 3 and 4 year old girls, it is best to store the candy out of their reach.)

Faith and Abby are playing with glue sticks and construction paper today. Faith tried cutting the paper into shapes wth scissors but can’t quite manage scissors consistently. She’s only used them about 3 times before so I’m not surprised. I cut the paper for them first before realizing they could tear it into bits without my help. They really had fun with it, it was a good mommy moment when I figured out how to extract myself.

They are now doing basic arithmetic with Teddy Graham type cookies. Faith counts the cookies and asks Abby how many she wants, then thinks about how many will be left, then counts them again. Yummy math.

Faith wrote the words ‘hot chocolate’ on the much-loved magnadoodle

(hey by the way, if anyone ever feels like sending a gift to the Gleeson children, an old-style magnadoodle or 3 without the stupid drawer to store accessories would be just the best thing EVER)

this evening. Just decided to write them down… we don’t actually have any hot chocolate mix so she didn’t copy the words. I was making some for them and she walked up and handed me the board with the words on it and you could have knocked me over with a feather.

And she has a pretty good grasp of basic addition and subtraction too. She’s very comfortable with numbers up to about 20 or so.

Abby is on a Spanish kick. There is a show on PBS here that they both enjoy, called ‘Salsa’ and it’s basically Spanish taught by Sesame Street. Anyway, Abby knows how to count to 10, a lot of colors and quite a few adjectives and adverbs. SHe’s recently started to construct real sentences in Spanish as well, not just parroting Dora.

Bede still mostly nonverbal (well he says ‘ball’) but he signs along with me to ‘The Wheels On The Bus’ and he will imitate owl and monkey sounds. So different from the chatterbox children we have had previously. I’m excited that he’s finally interested in language tho!

I was reading icedsoychai again and she was talking about having a son.

I now have two.

One of them is asleep right behind me and one is spinning in circles in the livingroom, waving his arms and yipping with the music.

To see how they will change from sweet babies into boys and then into men is something I look forward to, but I am also a bit scared. It seems to me (maybe this is because I am not a man) that boys change more as they become men than girls do as they become women. For all of my children, I want them to be kind yet strong, gentle yet firm, principled yet compassionate, just yet merciful. Somehow I see it as easier to guide the girls to those ideals than the boys. It seems more complicated to be a man than a woman, but I feel sure this is because I know how to be one and not the other.

They will grow, my sons. They will get pimples and whiskers. They will be smelly! Probably both of them will be taller than I am, or at least as tall. My girls will go through similar transformations but again, I don’t think it’s quite as shocking. Of course, I remember with painful acuity the day I got my period and telling my mother somewhat sheepishly because I knew she would probably start crying while beaming at me and say something like how I was so grown up… which she did, and with which comments I accepted her embrace with embarassed stiffness, already as a twelve year old an inch taller than she was and still growing. I expect whatever my response to my daughters’ entrance into puberty is, they will be embarassed too, but also have the same sort of subconscious acceptance that of course that is what mothers do when their daughters tell them that sort of news. I would have been dismayed to get any other response from my mother, after all. And furthermore it was not really painful, just awkward.

What about the boys? It’s more subtle with boys, I would think. One day you notice they are tall with prominent Adam’s apples and realize that you haven’t heard a crack in their now-deeper voices for quite some time. Or that they can reach the top shelf without stretching. Or something. How do you plan to acknowledge manhood? A gradual increase in rights and responsibilities, or with some ceremony, either formal or informal, or with something else? Jews have a bar mitzvah, I suppose Confirmation is a similar event, but not really. Hmm. Good thing I have years and years to think about it.

This is disintegrating into a ramble. I want to come back to it though.

Kids really really really liking Peter Gabriel. The three older ones are dancing with mad abandon. Off to join them!

Peter Gabriel - Shaking the Tree

And I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that I bet icedsoychai likes Peter Gabriel too , since she is a big ole Sting fan. Just a guess. Am I right?

Faith is now writing almost every day. She knows how to spell many words herself, and attempts to spell others, getting them more or less right. Her big thing lately is writing words down on index cards and asking me or Sean or whoever how to spell them. In a moment of homeschooling synchronicity today, she read the word ‘chick’ after I told her that c-h together make a ch sound, then saw about 30 seconds later on Between the Lions the word ‘chase’, which she then wanted to write on an index card and then she said “It has a ‘ch’ in it Mama, just like ’switch’!” whereupon she went and touched the index card by the light switch.

It was kinda nifty.

She also noticed that p-h makes a f sound.

Abby is sounding out words too. She really likes that Dr. Seuss ABC video we checked out from the library and the Leap Frog videos are favorites too. Her method is to say the name of each letter in a word if it is longer than about 3 or 4 letters but she does actually sound out the smaller words.

It too is kinda nifty. Learning is happening! Yay!

those jerks keep getting rid of stuff that Faith likes.

More later Gil upset.

OK it’s later. They got rid of some (probably insufferable to most, but she’s four, yk) Diva Starz website this time. It’s like some sort of conspiracy to keep me from getting to watch the debates. I have since found the site in question but I dunno if I want her to go to it anyway… I’m kinda glad they removed the link to it from their main page. Wiseass skanky ho dolls who are only interested in the acquisition of the latest midriff-baring monstrosity are not quite what I had in mind for her. Hmm.

But I’m still peeved at Mattel. Jerks. Bring back the old cat!

Faith and Abby picked out Gil’s smilie representation in my MDC signature. They also like this one but we negotiated.

We figured out the most structurally sound configuration of sofa cushions to make our fort/house/tent/enclosure.

Faith looked at the cushions after having tried several less-than-acceptable configurations and decided if the ends went just so and the edges went here, then the rectangular cushion could fit precisely here and voila! It worked and held together pretty well!

What is the thing with the columns in Greek architecture, where they don’t really go straight upwards? What’s that called?

As you may have seen, we have index card labels around the house. Today Faith and Abby wanted to make their own labels. Abby can’t make letters so that caused some frustration on her part, but she soon adapted by directing Faith as to what to write. They made signs representing all the Gleeson children.

FaiTH

BDED

thE Nwe Byab

AByB

Looks like Christopher Robin signs, I think. The letters were actually written on the cards in the right order but Faith doesn’t give much importance to positioning.