Generosity

ME: Logan, Saturday is Miranda's birthday party.

LOGAN: Yeah.

ME: We have a book for her, but should we stop and get something to add to her present?

LOGAN: Yeah.

ME: What would you like to get her?

LOGAN: Maybe a guitar!

ME: That might be a little big. Can you think of something else we can get for her?

LOGAN: Maybe some kind of garbage or something like that.

Hurricanes

En route to the mall the other day:

LOGAN: Daddy, see that big building? That's where you go to work.

WILL: Right, Logan. What do I do there?

LOGAN: You work on the hard problem.

WILL: The hard problem on what?

LOGAN: Hurricanes.

WILL: Do you know what a hurricane is?

LOGAN: A hurricane is made of candy.

Huh? Part 2

Logan after eating a free ice-cream from Ben and Jerry's:

"I forgot to nurse my baby this morning. My baby's name was Tree. Tree Book Center. Your baby is still here. But my baby blew away."

What exactly do they put in that ice-cream?

Morning

It was apparent to me a long time ago that my son is a morning person. He is cheerful in the morning. Like, CHEERful. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, he bounds out of bed with a smile on his lips and a song in his heart. Or the other way around. Whatever.

Now that Logan is actually sleeping through the night on a regular basis, Will gets up with him around six (actually, more like Logan runs in and wakes Will up) and they "hang out" before starting breakfast. I usually stagger out of the bedroom between six-thirty and seven, and Logan yells, "Hi, Mommy! Good morning, Mommy! You wanna come play wif me? You wanna do Play-Doh wif me? You wanna come get on the airplane wif me? I have two suitcases!"

My response falls between a bleary-eyed grunt and a muttered, "Why don't I smell coffee yet?" Needless to say—and call me Mommie Dearest, if you must—no, my beloved son, I really don't want to play. I could care less about Play-Doh. I don't want to get on an airplane. I want a shower and breakfast, and I want it now.

Given Logan's and my wildly divergent strains of thought where morning is concerned, I was rather dreading Will attending a conference these past few days because it meant I was on morning duty. My nights with Shay are still not great and involve a lot of waking up, so while I feel pretty good, I'm not exactly getting eight hours of soul-soothing sleep here. So I went to bed kind of dreading what was to come.

And sure enough, right at six, in comes Mr. Sunshine, tugging at the bedcovers and loudly announcing, "Mommy, it's time to get up! It's turning into daytime! You gotta wake up! It's turning into daytime!" My hasty, "Shh!!" went totally ignored, so I had to haul myself out of bed while trying to keep Shay asleep since trying to "get on an airplane" with the two of them at six AM is not my idea of a good time.

The good news is, and I'll say it again because it's been VERY big around here, Logan is actually sleeping through the night (not waking up ONCE), which is really a blessing all around. If you can get past the six AM Play-Doh and airplanes.

On Crying

Conversation on the way home from preschool:

LOGAN: Mommy, sometimes babies cry.

ME: Yes, they do.

LOGAN: Sometimes babies cry and sometimes children cry. And sometimes Rainbow Room children cry.

ME: Yes, they do. And you know what? Sometimes even mommies and daddies cry.

LOGAN: (in a "you're so joking" tone) No.

ME: Yes, they do.

LOGAN: No, Mommy. Mommies and daddies don't cry. They only talk.

ME: They do?

LOGAN: Yeah, mommies and daddies only talk. Only babies and people cry.

Huh?

Logan in the backseat of the car en route to the mall yesterday:

"Mommy, sometimes when I was an animal I ate a lot sometimes."

Logan's Take

Logan on the way home from preschool this afternoon:

"Mommy, sometimes I like blueberries. Sometimes I like blueberries on cottage cheese cuzzin I ate it. I ate it and then someone gave me a haircut. It got all over my hair. Silly Logan!"

Quiet

This is one of my favorite times of the day – post-lunch with a cup of hot tea in front of me, Shay asleep and Logan playing and reading quietly in the other room. Not that I don't count time spent with my awake-and-lively children as "favorite times," but frankly when you've spent 5+ hours herding around a 3-year old and a 6-month old, an hour after lunch spent in the company of a cup of tea is a welcome respite indeed.

In a switcheroo here at the RL Castle, Logan is now sleeping through the night (I whisper in case the Sleep Gods hear and yank away this blessed turn of events while cackling with evil glee), and Shay is – well, not sleeping through much of anything at all. But she's doing much better sleep-wise than Logan did at her age. Yesterday I actually put her down in her Pack n'Play wide awake (her, not me), and she fell asleep on her own. First. Time. Ever. Of course, we tried it again last night and today and she refused a repeat performance, but it was heartening nonetheless.

Meanwhile she sleeps for about ½ an hour in the morning around nine, then again around 12:30 or so, but I try to get her back to sleep in the afternoon so we can keep her up until 7. Then both she and Logan go to sleep between 7-7:30, and after the flurry of activity that consitutes our evenings (bath, cooking and eating dinner, dishes, milk, diapers, PJs, teeth-brushing, stories, these projection-lullaby things that Logan is now fixated on, several rounds of songs) once they're both sleeping, Will and I sit on the sofa looking shell-shocked and thinking, "Wow, is this what quiet sounds like?"

Logan is on spring break from preschool this week, so we've actually been venturing out after the snowiest Madison winter on record, and we even made it out to the park yesterday. But now it's snowing again (8-10 inches expected), so we joined our new friends Kim and her daughters Lily and Iris in the apartment community room for a playgroup they host. Only one other mom and her son showed up, but it was nice to have company nonetheless. Tomorrow we have a birthday party for one of Logan's preschool classmates, so hopefully the roads will be plowed. Come on, Spring!

Viewing of the Lambs

This morning Will had to go in to work, so March being lambing season and all (you'd think I was raised on a farm, wouldn't you?), I took Logan and Shay to A-Z Farm to see lots of lambs and pregnant sheep. They were all in a large pen in a barn along with a few baby goats, pigs, rabbits and chicks, and there were several farmhands holding the baby animals so the kids could pet them.

It was crowded. REALLY crowded. But because this is Wisconsin, people were all very polite about being shuffled and jostled about ("Oh, excuse me." "No, that's all right." "No, excuse me."). Logan was quite taken with the sheep, although he startled with the sheep baa-ed right in his face, and then he had his picture professionally taken holding a baby lamb—while wearing his boots and overalls, no less. SO cute. I will post it as soon as it's mailed to us.

We petted baby lambs, chicks, goats and a full-size rabbit, then went into another area of the barn where people were demonstrating how to spin wool on various looms. Logan had a heart painted on his face at the face-painting station, and then was entranced by the man using a spinning wheel—I herded him out of the room about three times, and each time he said, "I want to go back in." Since I am nothing if not accommodating, we maneuvered our way back in—did I mention three times?—and he stood there just staring at the spinning wheel. After finally announcing, "I'm done with this," we went back to look at the lambs again and he proceeded to pitch handfuls of hay from the floor into the lamb pen "because I wanna give them something to eat."

Just as we were leaving, a big "ahh" rose from the crowd, and we hurried back to try and see a lamb actually being born, but the big event was taking place too far away from where we were standing. So we didn't get to see that, but we had a very nice morning nonetheless. Oh, and Shay just hung out quietly in the sling and was the recipient of several exclamations of, "Oh, look at her! Look at those blue eyes!" Meanwhile I stood there all bursting with pride.

Man, do I love my children.

Shay