Booler Back to Preschool

Oh hey so Charlotte is back in school now too. After crying for many days in a row when the big kids got on the bus and she had to stay home with boring old loser me (SORRY I AM SUCH TERRIBLE COMPANY FOR ONE ON ONE TIME, CHILD), she finally got to put on the outfit she has been planning for weeks, and stand on the front steps at church, and smile for a picture for her last first day of preschool, and then request her traditional first day chocolate milk from Starbucks.

And yes, I did just say last first day of preschool.

So many lasts and firsts and growing and seriously y'all, every season about bowls me over these days, with the feelings and nostalgia, and I can't keep up anymore. Have I always been this sappy??

(A college professor once told me I was fooooolishly sentimental. He said it just like that too.) (I have decided to embrace it about myself, foolish or no.)

So anyway, what should I do with myself now?*

Happy back to school! Happy quiet house! Happy uninterrupted poops** and showers! My house will be totally clean now!*** And also, in related news: I miss my babies. Am sort of watching the clock. When do they come home? The new rhythm has not set in. I wish it were still summer, there I said it.

* -whispers- I have a little job. More on that later.
** My dad, right now: Erin Lee, you don't have to tell everything.
*** Haha no it won't.

Last Day of Preschool

The girls are all done for the summer! For Anneliese, it's her last day of preschool ever, so of course I felt all the feelings and cried all the tears and we stopped for a traditional Last Day Starbucks before we took a picture on the steps at the church.

Her first day of preschool, and her last. Oh man. Just... what.

And Charlotte too!

Happy summer, sweet girls!

Spring, it Sprang

Where did spring go? It took forever and a day to get here, and now summer is basically upon us. School will be out in a few weeks, and we are in the throes of the end-of-the-year stuff: concerts, recitals, school events, forever and ever amen.

Mark and I went out last weekend to celebrate the 18th (that's ten plus eight, EIGHTEENTH) (!!!!) anniversary of our first date, back when we were sixteen. We were dumb naive teenagers, and we cringe now at thinking we knew what the heck we were getting ourselves into, yet also really really happy that we did. It's so fun to remember the very beginning, and feel happy and grateful about where we are now.

Nathan and Anneliese, waiting for their school rides together. Anneliese is so tall for her age, and Nathan is still so tiny, and I get asked now more than ever if they are twins. Anneliese can't wait til next year when she can finally (finally!) get on the bus with Nathan.

Yes, I know Nathan needs a haircut. No, I do not know why wearing your instrument on your back and your backpack on your front is a Thing, but among the second grade orchestra set, it indeed is.

Anneliese sang in a little concert at preschool, and she was a cow, and she is officially the cutest singing cow that ever sang.

And! The preschool did a big Letterland Day, to have fun with the reading and writing curriculum they use (which is very cool, if you care about linguistics and pedagogy), and each kid got to dress up as a letter character from the Letterland world (haaaaaa I say "got to" like I wasn't cussing up a storm about having to come up with a costume in the last weeks of school... I totally was, make no mistake).

ANYWAY she chose to be Annie Apple, and she was the only one in the whole preschool, and everyone clapped for her. I have no idea if she loved or hated that, but she was hella cute. And this is the part where I pat myself for an illegal download from a google image shirt, reversed onto iron transfer paper and an etsy hat. Costume! May! Super cute! Whatever!

Moving on.

We are also in the throes of All The Baseball.

Okay so baseball is a pain, y'all. It's too many times a week, with lots of rain schedule changes, and not much notice, and it's the busiest time of the year. Whyyyyyyyy. I mean, Nathan likes it and Mark loves it so we go, and we cheer, and I absolutely love to see him having fun. But make no mistake, it's a pain.

Charlotte (who wears this outfit every Tuesday, because I do their laundry on Mondays and she is obsessed with this outfit and mostly only cares that I do her laundry so she can wear it, and does at the soonest moment it is clean every week) has taken to eating toast with me in the mornings.

I used to guard my toast and coffee time as my own alone time, but on days when it's just her at home (well, while Ali is napping), it's sweet to have a snack together. I sort of love it. It has been a good school year of Tuesday and Thursday mornings with her.

So, also. I made a bowl for Charlotte; our church gives us these little stone thumbprint things to mark faith occasions (baptism, Bible reading, confirmation, communion, etc) and there is always this brunch event when the kids are three, where the parents make little bowls for them to collect said "milestones" as the years come. We have one for Anneliese (with a rainbow imprinted in the bottom), and Nathan's is a blue hand-me-down pottery bowl that Another Nathan made at Montreat, since we missed the bowl making when he was three. Anyway! So I made Charlotte's, and then I put it in the oven, per instruction, at like 200 degrees for four hours, except I actually cooked it like twenty hours, and it's totally burned.

It's supposed to be... white.

I really wanted to toss it and start over, but she saw it, and she thinks it's SUPPOSED to be this color, and, well, now what do I do? So we are keeping it. And at every faith milestone we will remember the story of the time I miraculously didn't burn the house down. *sigh*

In other less serious milestones, there is a new Princess Charlotte! And when I told Charlotte there was a new princess Charlotte, a real one, she insisted that she was the real one, and promptly made herself a dot-art crown from her dot-art book, and wore it grocery shopping. Soooo... she sure told me?

And on that note, this is where I make a bloggity plea that anyone who wants to send any Princess Charlotte kitsch my way, I totally definitely want it.

To Feel Like a Real Mom

It's funny how pushing out a baby, and handling three children all day every day, and knowing in the ins and outs of car seats and diapers and the odd truth of how your kid throwing up or pooping on you somehow isn't as gross as anyone else's vom or poop -- none of those make me feel quite as much like a Real Mom as homemade jewelry that looks super homemade yet I actually don't mind wearing in public.

Or being subjected to the public reading of a survey of your kid's impressions of you.

Or a coffee date with a sweet boy who produces a card with a poem inside, and it's actually the best poem ever written, which is just a pure objective fact.

Or a fancy* mother's day tea party brunch while sitting in a chair approximately an eighth the size of mah ass.

*very loose definition

I roll my eyes at it all, but somehow it does make me feel like a Real Mom.

Also here is a picture with Charlotte because my lands, I'm not That Mom who would leave one kid out. Simmer down with the pearl clutching.

Happy Mother's Day!

Stuttering, and a Poop Joke

So, this is a thing I haven't said much about on the internet, but Charlotte is having a rough time talking this fall. She went from being a perfectly appropriately-fluent three-year-old this August, to... barely being able to get a thought out in September. Over just a matter of weeks, truly.

Like, complete breakdown in communication. I know this sounds weird, with her being right here - but I missed her. I didn't know what she was thinking, and she was so easily frustrated that she basically broke down into tears any time she needed to communicate a thought beyond a few words.

It sucked, y'all.

And it only took a tiny bit of googling (and a few gently concerned questions from her teachers at school) to realize her stuttering falls into the "severe" category, which sounds, well... severe.

Anyway, we took her for a speech assessment through the early intervention people (well, not them, exactly, but the county people who do that for preschool-aged kids) and it turns out yep! she stutters! badly! and she qualifies for full speech therapy through the county! So, bad and good.

They sent me away with a stack of books and DVDs about stuttering and speech disorders and how to be a parent advocate, and paperwork to start up her IEP with the school system, and suddenly WHOA this is a whole new world for us.

Okay so here's the deal. She will be fine. Speech therapy is very effective for stuttering, and Charlotte is pretty textbook in how she struggles. There are 44 phonemes in the English language, and she gets stuck on about 20 of them (yikes). She does most of the classic severe-stutterer things, like: repeating sounds at the beginnings of words and syllables (not the words themselves, which is stammering, which is something different - a more normal disfluency that isn't actually a speech problem), explosions of sound at a high volume to force some of her sounds out, and dragging out some sounds (like mmmmmmommy).

Anyway, it's a really Known Thing, this problem and its treatment. Almost all stutterers can be therapied out of it, and we should have no worries about long-term fluency. So that's not the main concern, surprisingly enough.

The main concern, apparently, is the psychological stuff that comes with difficulty in communicating. This is especially true for young kids. Learning that it takes too much effort to talk, or you will be interrupted or your words inserted for you, or that people don't have the time to hear you, or might tease you, etc etc etc - that'll eff a kid right up, and can have effects into adulthood. (Not that surprising, right?)

So while the professional therapists will do the work with her of making sounds and teaching tricks and workarounds, our job is to make sure she is heard. Like, endless patience in letting her get her words out. No interrupting her, ever. No supplying words for her. In general, convincing her that whatever she has to say is something we want to listen to, and that it's always worth the effort for her to tell us what she's thinking. We have to be very aware of our body language and facial expressions and we all (even Nathan and Anneliese) do lots of turning and facing her and kneeling down to be close when she wants to tell us something.

And y'all. It has been sort of... well, humongously relationship-changing, this pattern of really intentional listening. I know, that shouldn't be shocking. But it makes such a difference.

Anything she wants to tell me these days, no matter how silly or inane, I care about it in a way I didn't used to. She will sometimes take a full ninety seconds to tell me something like how she put Sheepie under her blanket (still bank-o-link) because it's naptime, or how someday she would like to wear a hat (?) - but if those are the things she wants to tell me, then make no mistake: I WANT TO HEAR IT. It's no small thing, the effort and energy it takes her to talk! And she is using it on me! It's an honor to listen to it. It really is. And that's never how I've thought about preschool chattiness before. Um, to say the least. Ha.

Okay anyway that's not what I meant for this post to be about.

So, she's actually doing way better now. Ranking every day on a scale of 1 to 5 helps overall progress, and overall progress is good. And that's just with what we are doing at home which has seemed to improve her confidence, which  often means she talks more - which all counts as practice. When we get into the meat of the speech therapy over the next couple of months, I imagine it will get even better than the improvement she's already made.

There are some days that are still turrible, but there are some that are good -- so good that she talks like most any three-year-old would, like what we remember from this summer, and we get a little giddy at her sweet voice and happy easy chattiness.

All that to say, she was doing some great talking one night, and these days that means we bust out the phone to get it on video... and then she told a poop joke. Sigh.


(If you can't see the embedded video, click here to watch it on YouTube.)

(Still worth it for her tiny voice, telling me something! Anything! Worth it.)

(And, secretly bursting with pride anyway. Such! Good! Talking!)

Hippie Bullsh!t Coffee and Other Quick Takes

1.) I bought some hippie bullsh!t coffee at Fresh Market a few weeks ago. I got sucked in because I had a taste for cold caramel coffee in a bottle, and the packaging is so pretty! Good font choice! Matte labels! And on the side there is a funny blurb written by someone admitting to be a blurber! It was all very enchanting, except it said things about how it doesn't have any of those "nasty chemicals" in it like other coffee (YES IT ACTUALLY SAID THAT), and I could not have rolled my eyes harder. Y'all! Once again, brief lesson: everything has chemicals. Everything is made of chemicals. Nothing but chemicals actually. Yes. EVERYTHING. Full stop.

But despite my eye rolling, and knowing it would not actually make me "focus" in any "natural" way, I bought it and drank it and it was delicious. Excellent use of one dollar next time you're at Fresh Market. Hippie bullsh!t coffee: RECOMMEND.

(Children who photobomb coffee pics for blog post: not included.)

2.) Mark took Charlotte to a park a few weeks ago, and in case you were wondering if she only likes to take selfies with me? Nope. Girl loves a good pic with Daddy too. I mean, who wouldn't? He's a pretty awesome human.

3.) We started a thing last month with a friend and preschool classmate of Anneliese's, whose big sister gets dropped off at school before his mom takes him to church on a route that goes right past our bus stop, at the exact time we are outside waiting on the bus. Which means Nathan and I did a lot of waving at them as they drove by, until we realized hey! Anneliese could just... get in their car, and save me a trip of loading up the babies and taking her to school.

So that's the story of why there are now two kids at the bus stop with me on Tuesdays and Thursdays (those are the days only Anneliese goes). They both love it. It's fun.

4.) When I was in Minnesota I got the worst chapped lips of my life, I think. I was using lip balm, just not enough I guess, or not often enough. One night when I was home I needed some and didn't have any in bed, so I asked Mark for his out of his night stand, and the next morning, I kid you not -- MY LIPS WERE HEALED. Like, almost completely better. Overnight. A second night and they were as good as new.

I can't believe the small fortune I have spent in the last decade on fancy lip balms, when REGULAR OLD CHAP STICK is basically a miracle balm. Y'all! Buy this! I am now officially a chap stick evangelist. Recommend.

5.) My new identity as a Kindle user is coming along. I like it. It is handy. It was especially handy for traveling. And for reading in the evenings in bed when my doctor-designed Sleep Plan (capital S, capital P, it is a PLAN) dictates that I should not have lights on. And e-ink is safe reading in the evening hours of dimness. Anyway! Guess who else likes the Kindle?

Our library website has a great page where you can sort the children's e-reader books they have, by topic and grade level. So that means Nathan can see a berjillion book choices, and two clicks sends them to our house in minutes. For free! LIVING IN THE FUTURE IS SO GREAT Y'ALL. In related news, I think someone might be getting his own (very basic) Kindle for Christmas, since someone's mommy is tired of sharing.

6.) Speaking of Nathan and reading, he picked out this book from the dollar spot at Target a few weeks ago:

Yep, that's Moby Dick. Most boring book in the history of books and English. (I love Melville, but I freaking hate that book.) Anyway all he saw was chapter book! one dollar! sperm whale on the cover! and he had to have it. It's a thing I would never say no to, of course, so he bought it and read it and then sent Another Nathan this adorable email about it and oh my lands.

This is why we let kids read adaptations of boring books we hate: because it's surprising that a whale would eat someone's leg, and he's guessing the whale must have been a girl. WELL.

7.) Still speaking of reading, I read this last week and found it just delightful. A lady who loved the Little House books visits all the sites in real life, and finds some disillusioning and some lovely.

This isn't the best LHOTP travel guide you can find, nor the best biographical info, but it doesn't intend to be either of those things - just a funny thoughtful lady traveling to Little House sites and writing about it, from her perspective. Really fun book.

8.) One last book thing! Another Nathan and I, unbeknownst to one other, both checked this book out of our respective libraries last week. A book about friends and influence and I mean... haaaaa okay universe. Good one.

9.) We let the kids try for a three-way sleepover last week. Usually this is just a Nathan/Anneliese thing, every Friday night, but Charlotte always wants to join, and so we let her try. We had done it once before and it was fine, but this one was doomed.

This photo was taken pre-doom. It was super cute until it wasn't.

10.) It got very cold this week, and the girls look very cute in their cold weather clothes. That is all.

Three Somethings Cheerful (And A Bonus 1990s Mark/Erin Story)

Look, I can be cheerful. Three times, even! Ready?

1.) Anneliese sang in chapel choir again last week. She was as adorable and delighted as the first time.

And what's sweeter than a choir full of four-year-olds anyway?

Anneliese is tall* so in the back row, to the right.

*Side story: one of Mark's first memories of interacting with me was when we were taking some group picture for school (band! fine! it was for band! we were at BAND CAMP okay?) and they told us to stand by height and I hopped up into the back row, because apparently part of my self-image is that I am tall? And apparently I am actually... not that tall? (I feeeeeeel like I am tall.) 

So anyway Mark watched as they moved me down a row and then down another and then apparently it happened again (!) later in the school year and he kept wanting to yell at me (in his best Seinfeld-to-George "you're bald" voice): YOU ARE AVERAGE! But he didn't, because he is Mark, and that is just not a very Mark thing to do. But! He does like to bring up this story every time I mention that I am tall, which is apparently still fairly often. Because I am! I mean, not a giant! But fairly tall! Really! 

2.) Charlotte has a new purple peacoat. In my opinion (as the shopper), it is perfection.

3.) Nathan was telling me some story the other night about something that happened at a Boeing parts factory (I don't even know) and he thought it was the best most hilarious mishap ever, and even though the story was actually suuuuper boring, his perfect smile and giggling about it enchanted me anyway.

lampshade on head?

I'm glad I got a picture though so I never have to get him to tell me that story again though. Yawn.

(Y'all hush, I am a good mom, take a seat and stop clutching your pearls.)

Some Other September Things

Here are some other things we did in September (alternate title: let's take a journey through my phone's camera roll) --

One Friday night when Marky was working, the kids and I made popcorn and turned the lights off and snuggled on the couch and watched a movie together. We had never seen Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. It was delightful.

I snuggled with Ali a lot. Because she is also delightful. She's turned into a super happy baby recently. I'll take it.

We took a lot of pictures at the bus stop. Some days, even in non-yellow shorts.

(Anneliese now has a carpool ride two days a week --
they pick her up from N's bus stop!)

Anneliese learned to brush her own hair and suddenly she's a teenager.

Charlotte did her first round of swim lessons. She can't swim on her own yet but she also didn't poop in her swimsuit at all, so that's a hearty win.

Nathan got a bad case of swimmer's ear (seven years! three kids! our first ear infection!) and we barely slept for several nights and he was generally miserable and in pain but it's over now.

I did some more preschool homework FTLOG.

Another Nathan came for a weekend to visit, he and Mark shucked some corn fresh from Minnesota and grilled dinner and we played with the kids and ran errands and it was all right and normal and good, and then we waved bye til next time.

Anneliese and I painted our toes yellow.

We set up Mark's old phone with Nathan's email so he has a way to text/call us (through google hangouts) and we can leave him home alone for an hour or so when we need to. One night he was home doing his homework and practicing, while I hopped over to church for a few minutes for preschool orientation, and Mark had the girls at dance. This is what texting with a seven-year-old looks like:

Anneliese's cutie friend Beatrice has been with us for a few afternoons, and as always, we love having her around. (Especially when she can pull some cheerfulness out of Anneliese these days.) We decided these two are competing for the best-dressed award at the weekday school.

Charlotte got in the habit of wearing a cape to go poop. Like you do.

Nathan graduated out of his first cello (from this eighth-size to a quarter-size, coming soon). He's very excited but I am mostly sad. His first cello! Aw. I will miss this tiny sweet thing.