Backyard wrestling

The other day Noah's friend Rostam came over to play, and as an added bonus brought his 12 yo brother for some serious wolf-pack tumbling...

 

Oh, boys

 

Then we had some watermellon so the younger four had a mellon/motorcycle powow.

 

 

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Two and a half, ctd.

Oh, and the other day I went in to wake Eva from her nap and found her like this:

 

Some features: underpants pulled over shorts, barbie car in bed, no blankets. Oh, and also a dinosaur mask.

 

Never a dull moment, I tell you.

 

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Two-and-a-half

Oh, Eva. My cuddly warrior princess.

 

Eva finally turned two and a half last week. This is a little surprising because I've been thinking of her as a three-year-old for months now. Possibly because she is so fiercely in charge of herself. She must decide what she will wear and when her shoes will go on. She wants to play this game, NO THAT GAME oh and how about she'll be the doctor and you are sick and here are some strawberries for you to eat and meow, she's a kitty!

 

She plays superheros and knights and witches and dragons with Noah, tearing around the house and screeching, and then collapses into tears and cuddles because it is too scary, and then jumps out for more tearing around and hysterical giggling. To put it mildly, she gives Noah some mixed messages about how rough play is too rough. Half of the time when she trips and falls she jumps right back up like a tough little cookie. Half of the time she totally falls apart.

 

She has the vocabulary of a four year old, she can count to 15 or so, she recognizes absolutely no letters other than E ("E for Eva!!"). She runs and jumps and gallops and is getting pretty good on the small balance bike. She "swims" with a noodle or swimming barbel under her arms, and if you try to help her she will give mommy a small heart attack by taking one of those arms off of the floatation device to push you away. She also laughs hysterically while doing this, and has a hard time remembering to close her mouth when her chin goes underwater (oops). Her favorite color is red and her favorite food is, well, really anything that is mostly sugar will do. She demands braids in her hair, preferably two, sometimes she requires one little and one big braid. The pictures here are from the day she requested a million braids. I gave her 6.

 

 

She remains dedicated to her stuffed animal Tigger, and recently has declared Tigger is her baby and goes through lots and lots of play centered around caring for baby Tigger. All toys (or random inanimate objects around the house) have their own personalities and relationships. She runs a constant monologue narrating the stories her toys are acting out, complete with different voices for different characters and often with song.

 

She is demanding when she wants to be, collapsing into full hysterics when she just wants cheese puffs for dinner and her cruel parents are denying them to her. When she wakes at night she wakes up screaming. The other night when putting her to bed I made the stupid mistake of telling her we would read another book on the couch in the morning. At 3am I stumbled upstairs to find her standing at the door of her room, book in hand, crying that she wanted to read it on the couch. This morning she was in our room at 5am screaming about something I didn't understand, and after a few minutes of back-and-forth she was sitting in our closet crying "I don't WANT you to say that" to whatever I mumbled from bed. Eventually she was so disgusted with my sleepy incompetence she went gave up and went back to bed on her own. Which left us pretty confused, but hey, at least this time we didn't have to get out of bed.

 

 

She is hilarious, clever, tough, sweet, independent and cuddly. It is never a dull moment with Eva around.

 

Two and a half. Wow.

 

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Summer

Brought to you by the world's slowest and messiest ice cream eater and really couldn't that "kiddie" sized cone be any smaller and really can't we just pull your hair back to get it out of the stickiness and seriously oh oh oh you're dripping oh boy... 

Eh, screw it.  Life is short and summer is shorter.

Spiders

Eva: I'm a spider with a million legs!!

Noah: I'm a spider with five eyes and guns on my butt!!

Mommy: I'm calling an exterminator.

Have no fear

Wolfman is here!!

He can fight bad guys and break them into a million pieces!

And also he made this neat picture

The universe is safe again!

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Vacation story part 6: Coda

By Friday afternoon we were all starting to get a little overheated, we'd had about enough of the sun, and there was only one more thing mommy REALLY wanted to do:

The Flying Trapeze.

Seriously! They had a trapeze setup and were offering short lessons that anyone could take. So I took one.

Turns out the trapeze is really high in the air.

(I'm the one in the blue shirt climbing up the ladder)

(my fan club enjoying their last sugary snacks before we left)

Here we go...

weeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

(I totally thought I was going to pass out after doing that. But I didn't. It was awesome)

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Vacation story part 5: Noah the swimmer

Noah and Eva have been taking swimming lessons at the JCC for several months now. Noah is particularly nervous in general, he will make a bit of progress and then decide he is scared and spend the entire lesson negotiating with the teacher and refusing to do anything. We recently switched him to a new teacher who seems to be much better with him, but apparently what we really should have done was just take him on vacation.

There was a zero entry pool (a "ramp pool" as Noah called it) that Noah and Eva loved. I think it was really fun for them to be able to walk out into the "deep" water and be able to just walk back up the ramp when they felt a little scared. Of course, they could always do this when we take them to a lake, but maybe the clear water made them feel more confident. At any rate, after about a day in the pool Noah was doing this:

(his record was a full 10 seconds under water)

Over the week, he gained more and more confidence until the last day we were there, when he started doing this:

Amazing!! I am hoping some of this will transfer to the pools we go to here (not zero entry, unfortunately). Or maybe we should just start digging one in the back yard...

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Vacation story part 4: 4th of July!

We had a fun (but HOT) 4th of July this year. Both kids got to march in a little parade

(Eva with the Petit Club)

(Noah with the mini club)

Also in the parade were a bunch of fancy cars and trucks and motorcycles. I think the staff went around asking the guests who drive these things to be in the parade - one elderly couple who drives a blue corvette has apparently been participating in this parade for the past 10 years. Also, they got a local fire truck. (!!!!!)

Afterward, the fire truck stuck around for the kids to check it out.

This is where Eva informed us that the firefighters have to look out for bad guys and then they can fight them. Hmm..

(Eva is the firefighter, Daddy is the bad guy)

Then Noah got to watch something incredibly exciting (for him), one of the motorcycles needed to be fixed!

(at one point there were 5 biker guys and Noah standing around watching this guy fiddle with his bike... I didn't want to photograph all of them but it was a pretty funny scene).

Later there was a party with cotton candy, popcorn and bounce houses.

Happy 4th of July!!!

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Vacation story part 3: Boating

Or at least as close to boating as we got...

The resort offered sailing and paddleboarding, and since the wind was a bit too intense for sailing with little kids we opted for the paddle board. We put on our life jackets and we were off!

Say "hi" everybody!!

Next is a picture of mommy getting yelled at by the lifeguard because apparently 2 years old is too little to be on a paddleboard.

Ok, everybody back in...

So ends our illegal paddleboard trip

Fun while it lasted, though!

(apparently you have to be 6 to be allowed to ride on the boats. So maybe we'll try again in 4 years)

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Vacation story part 2: show time!!

Noah and Eva both participated in the kids club, which was full of neat things for them to do. On Tuesday, it was show night. The "petit club" kids (Eva's class) performed in early afternoon, leading with Eva's first ballet experience:

It is actually quite impressive considering what I believe is the rehearsal schedule:
2:00pm - wake kids up from nap
2:30pm - convince classroom full of 2 and 3 year olds to put on costumes
3:00pm - show time
Anyway after her ballet debut there were a few other acts and then a percussion number where Eva played a maraca (she's in the back left)

And a final bow.

Yay Eva!!!
(We celebrated with a mango smoothie while Noah rehearsed for his show)

Noah was part of a bigger production that included all of the "mini club" kids (ages 4+) and the teenagers. He was very anxious about being in the show until dinner time, at which point he seemed like he resigned himself to doing it and got really excited.
I was super proud of him for doing something he was scared to do. And afterward, he was pretty proud of himself too. :)
At any rate, here's the performance:

(My favorite part is his expression of "how can you possibly expect me to follow this!?!?" )

And then other numbers with all of the other age groups and a big final bow

(Noah is in the first row of standing kids about halfway down the left side)

And then they had a big party for all the kids with popcorn and candy. What a treat!

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Vacation story part 1

So we went on vacation and it was awesome. Our little travelers are getting pretty good at navigating the airport.

The kids watched the Wizard of Oz both on the way there and the way back.

We arrived to the hot weather and geckos (pictured to the left of Chad).

And high time for relaxation

Yay vacation!!!

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