This is not a post about Christmas

Although ours was magical and merry and pleasantly white, and maybe I'll blog about it someday. 


But today...

I was vacuuming a few hours ago (trying to ease back into real life responsibilities before Andy goes back to work tomorrow) when Livia decided to explore our outlets by trying to unplug the vacuum cord. After being told no, she thought for a minute, then figured she'd probably be better off using her tongue to experience the physical attributes of the plug anyway. 

She started to lick it. 

And just so we're clear, by "it" I mean the exposed metal prong part of the plug that she had just a minute ago loosened from the outlet and which was still actively conducting electricity to my running vacuum. Awesome. 

The outlet of discussion is behind her

Landon was in the background singing and "jumping" to Roger Whittaker's Twelve Days of Christmas, which was playing on repeat. Not that this is relevant. Just thought it might add another dimension to your visualization. I think I'm going to have to come up with some way to make that song go away until next December. Maybe I'll blame its sudden disappearance from our iTunes library on The Elf. 

I think my kid is maybe a little weird

It's been apparent to Andy and me for a while now that Landon is smarter than either of us, but lately I'm beginnig to feel like he totally out-classes us all together. He's never shown a huge interest in music; he hates it when we sing along to songs on the radio and usually asks us to "make it quieter" when we play music at home. Turns out, maybe we just haven't been tuning in to his style of music...

A few days ago we were playing on sesamestreet.org and we found a C is for Cookie video segment that he recognized from his Sesame Street DVD. He was really excited and wanted to play it repeatedly so he could "jump" to it (his idea of dancing), and I was really excited because it entertained both of them while I finished making dinner. After a while he started messing around on the page and discovered there are several versions of C is for Cookie. He soon realized that his favorite version is the one by (apparently) famous opera singer, Marilyn Horne. He is obsessed. He'll come up to me throughout the day and tell me he needs to jump to C is for Cookie. "The one she sings, Mommy." 

I thought this was a little quirky, but it makes him happy, so whatever. 

Well, today we were listening to Christmas music on Pandora while eating lunch and a very operatic version of Twelve Days of Christmas came on. He declared a few times that "this is my favorite Christmas song!" which was news to me because for the last week he's been all about Jingle Bells. Then, suddenly, he insisted he was finished with his lunch. Now it's very uncharacteristic of him to say he's finished with lunch while there is still food on his plate, but I thought maybe he just wasn't into his food today. Unfortunately, I didn't get to him before the song ended. As soon as it stopped playing He Melted Down. It was crazy. He started sobbing and telling me, in the most heart-broken voice imaginable, "Mommy, I need to jump to that song!" 

I found a punk version in our itunes, but he just looked at me disgustedly and repeated, "No! I need to jump to that song."

So apparently...

Our little opera fanatic

Halloween

Landon wanted to be Oscar the Grouch

So Livia got to be Abby Cadabby
(We learned that none of the retirees in our neighborhood have the slightest clue who Abby is but all thought she was such a cute butterfly/fairy/ballerina...)

Our themed pumpkins that took entirely too long to carve

It took bribery to get Landon to stand this close to her. He started out on the wall across the room.

A girl on a mission

Trying to break into some candy at the trick-or-treat trail at our zoo

Bubble fun at the zoo

Squadron Halloween party... the bigger kids were a bit perturbed by Livia's dedication to climbing the corn hole game they were trying to play

With her pumpkin

Checking out his fellow grouch

I think this is Livia's answer to the removal of the rocking chair from her zone of play following the "rocking chair on the kitchen table" incident...

Andy and I aren't so great at coming up with names for our babies before we meet them. This is why both of our children spent at least the first night in the hospital without a first name. Landon doesn't suffer from this indecision. He already has names picked out for this baby. 

Oscar the Grouch for a boy 

and London for a girl

London is the name of a girl in his preschool class. He's a fascinated by the fact that their names differ by only 1 letter. London is his favorite word right now. He'll randomly sit at the computer, open Word, type "London", and then go back to whatever he was doing.  

Perhaps the Dorkiest Thing I'll Ever Post...

But I'm just so darn excited about it I wanted to share. 

For those of you who share my attachment to CamelBak's Better Bottle, and I know several of you do, I have great news. 

I have 8 bottles (2 per family member- my mom is a little obsessive about providing us with choices) and of those, 6 had broken lids that I had to toss. Not happy. 

I emailed the warranty department a 2 sentence email asking if the lids were covered. They replied asking for my address. Yesterday, the mailman delivered 6 new lids, with attached bite valves, free of charge- no hassle, no questions. It's pathetic how excited this made me. 

So just in case a new lid to complete a currently useless bottle in your cabinet would make your day too, here's their address:

 warranty@camelbak.com 

Little Liv

Here is a little snapshot of Livia's personality. She is a complete daredevil. She can be quite cuddly at times but all loving happens on her terms and is initiated by her. She often gives us a piece of her mind via babble rant complete with wagging finger; I'm not ever sure if she's telling me off or telling me "right on!", but she's very emphatic either way. She is the first to concede a toy in a dispute with Landon by graciously saying "thank-you" as she hands it off and moves on to the next big thing. She has a really great sense of humor- she'd have to to crack-up like she does at some of Landon's more ridiculous antics. She is, by far, the most outgoing of our bunch and gains the affection of everyone she meets with her friendly "hi" and easy smile.

But this post is mostly about her daring. She is undaunted by physical feats, and is definitely a leap-first-look-later kind of gal. I tried to start chronicling all of the precarious situations this attitude of hers gets her into. I never do end up getting pictures of her trickiest predicaments because I'm not too sure walking away to get the camera is the best idea. She doesn't seem to find her adventures nearly as alarming as I do. Here are some that I was able to capture.

She still had time to offer up her best Cheese Face for the camera

Don't remember what she was after but after hanging for a good 15 seconds, she figured out that pushing a kitchen chair over to stand on was much more effective and a lot less bruising to the face

She's gotten taller now, but she used to climb to the top of the chair and straddle it to reach these blinds

This picture doesn't quite capture what was going on, but it's the best I got before rescuing her. She is about the step onto the top of the chair back at which point the whole tower toppled. (Melissa- she's not wearing a shirt because we just had spaghetti and I didn't want it to get ruined, and that black spot on her back is a spider sticker Landon put there - because I know these are things you'd notice and wonder about)

She was headed for the stove where pots were simmering. After I got her off the counter and moved the chair, she resorted instead to climbing the oven. 

The other day I was sitting on the couch when a moment of panic struck me. What if this baby is another boy but he's one of those "wild" boys I hear so much about? Landon is an intellectual type. Sure, he can get rowdy with the right crowd, but mostly he's happier creating multiplication problems out of the number of windows pictured in the city buildings of his Harold and the Purple Crayon book than he is scaling the walls in my house or securing the cat to the kitchen chair with duct tape or whatever it is those banshee boys I keep hearing about do all day. How will I handle it if I get one of those hellions? I'm not cut out for that!!! 

Then I looked over at my one year old daughter as she very determinedly wrested her brother's rocking chair to the top of our kitchen table and prepared to climb on for the ride, and I realized...

Nah, I totally got this.