(Still) Birthday!

Last week was busy with Birthday Part II, III, and IV and that whole holiday thing on Thursday. Thankfully, the weekend was pretty relaxing. Not quite as relaxing as we planned since the refrigerator stopped working on Friday morning. (Thankfully, after a little over three hours of tinkering, we had that bad boy functioning again except for the ice maker which went from hyperactive to comatose. But, hey, ice cube trays bring retro fun into the kitchen!) Also, we Tetris'ed up the house again to get the boys' beds out of the sunroom for the winter. Lots of random stories to share, but for tonight, here are some pics of all the birthday madness.

Birthday Madness Part II involved Leon and Michael's birthday celebration at school. They light a candle to represent the sun, and they hold a globe to represent the earth. Then the "earth" travels around the "sun" once for each year of their life. While they are walking, the teacher reads stories about what happened to them in that year.

They actually had a pretty nifty candle holder. The kids put on four pieces representing the seasons to encircle the candle, and then put on "rays" labeled with the months of the year.

We always take the kids out to eat for their birthdays and, of course, we go to a restaurant of their choice. For birthday celebration number 3 (!), the boys wanted to have dinner at Chuck E. Cheese. We went on Wednesday night, and there were mercifully only three or four other families there.

For anyone who is curious, they haven't updated it much since we were kids. The band is the same and it still plays 80s music. Apparently, those guys are difficult to reprogram! There is a TV next to the stage with a "hipster" guy who talks about 80s music and explains what records are so the kids can get the references of the chef with the bad Italian accent. So wrong.

While we were there, Leon went nuts, running from game to game, spending his tokens as fast as he could.

The girls road on a simulation roller coaster.

The images were actually pretty fun to watch.

Leon and Michael's actual birthday was on Thanksgiving. Although we typically celebrate family birthdays after dinner, the boys were so excited that for birthday celebration four, we let them open presents in the morning before everyone got dressed. It was like a little Christmas morning preview.

The Curse of the Youngest

A friend recently blogged that her husband is stuck with the "curse of marrying the youngest" child in a family - what the youngest wants, the youngest gets. Natalia seems to have caught on to this early.

Recently, we've caught Natalia playing on our new computer while we are busy getting the big kids ready for bed. (The youngest somehow goes to bed last.) We are slow learners, and it took her several days to teach us that we have to actually shut down the computer before bedtime, because she knows how to activate it from sleep mode. We thought the love for the computer desk would end once we cut off her private computer time, but Natalia merely viewed it as an opportunity to explore further. That's when we found her sitting at the computer desk, playing with pens. She wrote all over our check register. She found a sheet of postage stamps, and marked all over it. She was very thorough and made sure not to miss any stamps.

We have also found Natalia in the middle of the kitchen table recently. Not leaning over, but actually on the table, and sometimes standing. Apparently the Thanksgiving decorations in the middle of the table are just to much fun to resist. However, we have to be careful in yelling at her, because when she is up there, she always jumps when we call her name. (We also used to have the same problem with Leon when he was about this age. He would stand on his tiptoes on the arm of the futon in the play room in order to reach the top of the play kitchen. We learned to always let him finish, and THEN yell at him for being dangerous. Funny how that never seemed to prevent him from doing it.)

Recently Natalia also snuck out to a garage, a place she is not currently allowed to visit since it is the storage room of doom. She finally came stumbling back into the house, hugging the kids' little potty. She sat it in middle of kitchen, pointed at it, and said, "Pee!" Despite her choice of locations for the potty, we actually moved it to the bathroom. Since it's been there, she has sat on the potty several times and peed in her diaper. She has also made us late to places on multiple occasions. Each time while I was busy buckling the big kids into the car, she stayed behind in the house. When I come back in the house to get her, I've found her in the bathroom with her shoes off and her pants down while she frantically tugged on her diaper. There was no leaving until she actually tried to go to the bathroom. She did actually go in the potty one time. She was not impressed. But on another day, she came shuffling through the house with Leon and Michael's Angry Birds underwear around her knees. To explain herself, she proudly told me, "Panties!"

Just some random tidbits to share:

It's getting too cold for the boys to sleep in the sunroom. We've been trying to figure out where to put everyone, and we're thinking we may have the boys and Natalia sleep in the same room (her current room, their old room) for the winter. I brought this up with Leon and Michael just to get a sense of how they would feel about it. Even after emphasizing they could keep their toys in the sunroom, and keep a gate on the sunroom to keep Natalia out, Michael was not sold. Leon, however, was a huge fan. He told me, "I could come get you when Nati won't stop freaking out. I could say, 'Mommmmm, Nati needs booba.'"

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The kids watched an episode of Sesame Street about careers. As they were watching it, Natalia grabbed her bag and sippy cup and told everyone goodbye. Jeff explained to the other three that Natalia wanted to go to work like I do, and, of course, they thought it was hilarious. So Jeff asked them what they wanted to be. Ree said she wanted to be a fashion designer. Michael wanted to be a "kid doctor." Leon wanted to a be a pirate.

Given Leon's previous career ambitions of being Mickey Mouse or Stefanie Baker, being a pirate sounded pretty reasonable. That night during baths, I asked him about him.

Me: I hear you watched an episode of Sesame Street about jobs. Dad says you want to be a pirate.
Leon: No, I want to be a builder.
Me: Oh, like Bob the Builder?
Leon: No. (Rolls his eyes.) LEON the builder.

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On Saturday evening during dinner, I happened to look out the window and I noticed the wind had really picked up. After gusting for almost 24 hours, we finally had some definite sustained winds. I made the mistake of mentioning this to my family. Suddenly, all the kids wanted to "feel" the wind.

It turns out, the easiest way to convince kids they don't want to go out and play in a tropical storm is to let them go out and play in a tropical storm. They ended up spending less than 2 minutes in our sheltered backyard before running inside and deciding they were not quite ready to replace Jim Cantore.