Birthday Cake and Pumpkins

4 years old!!!!

We asked him what he wanted on his cake and he showed us his Batman book

 Computer problems have led to a delay in posting, so this is another photo and anecdote dump!  The household is as busy as ever. Last weekend we celebrated a birthday party for Oliver, so the house is filled with new toys. Oliver and Zaeda spent the next morning aligning dominos and knocking them down (with Zaeda specializing in the second part). There are Lincoln logs and Playmobile pieces all over the place and the kids couldn’t be happier.

 

Oliver turned 4 this month. His specialty these days in the medley, where he bursts into a song, then transitions to another song and another. He does this all the time. Popular Oliver medley songs include “Davy Crockett Theme” (TMBG version), intro songs for “Little Einsteins,” “The Cat in the Hat” and several other cartoons, the ABC song, a Frankenstein song to the tune of “My Darlin Clementine” and the big one – “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves.

 

Questions question questions.

• Why? What do ___ eat?
• How does (something improbable)?
• How do we get bacon? Do pigs poop bacon?

Here’s a typical recipe question: "What do you get if you mix chocolate milk and broccoli and eggs and toothpaste together?"

 

Zaeda has reached the same breakthrough age that Oliver reached around her age; she is suddenly communicating lots of single words like these: milk, juice, mommy, daddy, Ollie, please, help me, up, no, yes, bounce, bubble, night night, goodbye, hi, etc. The big surprise has been that she is using sign language. It’s something they teach her class at school. Jenny and I had the books, but we didn’t really work on it with either child. Now we’re catching up with Zaeda as she gestures very specifically. This physical and verbal explosion is tons of fun to watch. We’ve broken out Eric Carle’s “From Head to Toe” book, which encourages kids to mimic animals with specific motions, like wiggles their arms and stomping their feet. Oliver has always enjoyed the book and now his sister is watching him and doing her best to keep up. They make quite a team.

 

The downside to her new confidence and physicality is the trouble she’s getting into around the house. The newest example is pushing or carrying her little kiddy chairs around the house, setting them up somewhere and climbing up to get at something.

 

Yesterday, Zaeda joined Oliver’s medley by singing bits of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, with all the gestures and a pretty clear “Up above…”. Very cute. They get along so well, except when they don't. Next weekend, we'll move Zaeda into the bedroom with Oliver. We expect that neither will get to sleep the way they do now.

 

Pumpkin Farm with the Petersons

We started our Halloween preparations on a beautiful fall day. We met our friends the Petersons in a great little bakery in Aurora . Then we all went to a nearby pumpkin farm. As with so many of these farms, it was really more of a theme park experience, but I’m gradually learning to appreciate the ingenuity and fun these farms have in executing these big weekends. The farm we went to had a log cabin filled with hazelnuts! You just tossed your kids in there and let them play in all the nuts. The nuts themselves were empty shells – the results of a bad crop, I suspect. Or maybe they were the duds mechanically culled from nut harvests. In any case, the kids had fun.

 

 



 

Oliver and William hopped around and got dusty on some inflatable horses

 

 



 

YMCA Daycare Halloween Party

 

All the kids dress up and parade around Portland State University before coming back to the school for a snack.

 

 

Carving Pumpkins with the Robars

 

 

Halloween Night!

Tinkerbell ready to get some candy!

 

 

 

Tonight is Halloween. Captain Hook and Tinkerbell aligned forces to seek out candy in our neighborhood.  We went up and down the block and gathered enough sugar to keep us all hopped up for a month.