Milestone Minutiae

Henry is 4 1/2 now, and has been asking to sit in a booster seat instead of his regular car seat.  Yesterday David vacuumed out the van so it was a good time to switch the seats (the crud under a car seat must be seen to be believed!  Actually, it's best not to look...).  When I told Henry that his dad was cleaning the car so we could switch him to a "one-clip"  (his name for a booster), Henry immediately started dancing around, hopping on one foot, playing air-guitar, and singing, "I'm getting a one-clip!" All day long he'd come up to me and say, "I'm just so excited!" with a voice that was in fact, really excited.  We're getting ready to go run some errands now, and he's really excited to ride in his big-kid seat.

Luke's left upper incisor was only about half way into his mouth, but was overlapping behind the lower tooth.  A quick trip to the orthodontist and he has a new retainer pushing that tooth forward.  After just a few days it's overlapping correctly, and he'll wear the retainer for a couple months so things can stabilize.  He'll need more work later, but at least this acute problem will be corrected.  The upper tooth can push the lower tooth right out of it's socket if you don't correct this overlap issue! There were a few surprising things about getting the retainer for Luke, who is not quite 7 yet.  Luke was looking forward to getting the retainer even though we were upfront about the fact that his mouth would be sore for a few days.  I was also surprised to realize that his friends are jealous of his retainer!  We also had Emmett looked at by the orthodontist, and his teeth are "mature" for his age (read: ready for braces even though he's only 1

Sick of being hounded by the kids about having dessert, sometimes even before dinner was over, I decided to schedule it.  Now we have dessert on Sundays and Wednesdays.  Today was the first day of scheduled dessert and there were several choices - David got donuts this morning and there were still some left (yes, they had dessert for breakfast on our first day of scheduled dessert...), we have some yogurt popsicles, and since Emmett begs for them constantly, I finally bought cream puffs from Costco.  To my surprise, Emmett picked a donut.  Luke picked the cream puffs (he got a few), and Henry had a popsicle.  The cream puffs needed to thaw, so Luke was eating his dessert after Emmett and Henry were already finished.  Emmett was lamenting his inability to resist the donut when Luke offered his last cream puff to his brothers.  I cut it in half and they each got to try a bite.  He didn't ask for it, but I got Luke a replacement from the freezer.  In general the boys share well and