Milestone Minutiae

Emmett and Luke are doing a lot of fighting over who can be on my missing lap. Or they're both up there, and then they start to wrestle. Trouble is, it's uncomfortable if they lean on me, so they have to "perch" and it's work to make sure they don't fall off. On the bright side, there are only a few weeks left! (Ok, it's more like 4, but "few" sounds so much shorter!)

I bought a super-ultra-high-power-blender in the hopes of getting some more fruits and veggies into Luke via smoothies. It's powerful enough that you can put carrots into a fruit smoothie and texturally, they just disappear. Last night I made the first smoothie (red/purple, because Luke absolutely refuses to let smoothies of another color touch his lips). Luke tasted it and declared it "good" but didn't drink much. Emmett loved it and drank it all. I told him there was a carrot in there along with the fruit, and he said, "I don't care what's in it, I just care how it tastes!" I think we may have a long road with Luke, given previous experience with yogurt. For months and months (perhaps even close to a year), he wouldn't eat anything but Vanilla Activa yogurt. But just in the past few weeks, he's branched out - other flavors, other brands (wow! those containers even look different!). So I'm sure I can get him drinking smoothies, i

We've had a couple of days of warming weather, so the boys have been spending lots of time outside. Bubbles and scooters are in heavy use. Emmett came inside today to ask me to turn on the hose so they could play in the water. They're playing outside, it's sunny, of course they want water. But it only got up to 65 degrees today! I decided that I didn't have the energy to change their clothes when they got cold (which would have been immediate!) so they went back to scooting. Playing outside on days too cold for water leads to two dirty boys! They're going to get a lot of extra baths until the weather warms up another ten degrees or so.

Today Emmett was watching an episode of Detonators, a new show on Discovery where they feature high-rise buildings being imploded. He came to tell me that the building they were blowing up this time was built in 1970, then he added, "That's B.C., right?" I told him that anything they were blowing up on that show was certainly built "A.D." but he seemed skeptical. Emmett said, "I'm pretty sure I saw it, and it was B.C." "Are they blowing up a pyramid?" I asked, "because those are the only high-rises they had B.C." At this point he acquiesced. We really need to get a good timeline on the wall somewhere...

A while ago we started giving Emmett an allowance. Today he asked for something, so I told him he could buy it, but it cost about half as much as the money he has for spending right now, so he should be sure he really wanted it. Emmett said, "I don't care what I spend, I care what I get!" I think we must be doing it wrong.

Emmett and Luke both enjoy a few kid-oriented websites on the computer. I found a new one recently, but it's not designed quite as well as the previous favorite - it requires kids to be able to do a real drag-and-drop, holding down the mouse button while they move the mouse. I figured this would be too tough for Luke, so I sent him back to the first website (where they solve the drag-and-drop problem by having the "click" grab the item, and then a second click is required to drop the item). Three days later, I saw Luke using both hands to perform a real drag-and-drop - he holds the button down with one hand, and moves the mouse around with the other hand.