Easter Basket Joy!

I've been meaning to post this for weeks...

A few days after Easter, I was putting Molly to bed for a nap, and noticed that Ben was being wonderfully quite while I was with her in the other room. I was so proud of him, thinking to myself, "What a respectful little guy he is becoming...knowing to stay quite when I need him to!"

After she was out, I walked out to look for him and to thank him for his excellent behavior.

This is what I found!!





He had meticulously unwrapped every remaining piece of candy/chocolate from his Easter basket, and was slowly eating them...piece by piece.

After my initial shock and amusement, I just let him eat what he wanted and then tossed the rest...I figured he deserved it after all that work. Plus, the candy was gone, and it was great to be done with it:)

Pics

Just a quick post to say:
1. Sorry I haven't updated more frequently this month, and
2. Yes, the kids are still cute, adorable, wonderful, fun, growing like weeds, and Trouble-with-a-capital-T.

Randon Gender Thoughts...

So I don't forget:

A friend recently asked me about how Ben and Molly seemed different from each other, and specifically, did I think that there were differences in a little boy vs. a little girl.

In general, some things are quite the same, and there are a lot of differences that I'm not sure have anything to do with male/female, rather than just their different personalities.

But I had a couple thoughts that do seem more gender related.

1. With both kids, between 6 mos and 18 mos, we have spent a lot of time sitting on the back of the couch, looking out of the front window to watch the world go by.
When we did this with Ben, he was only ever interested in one thing...automobiles of any kind . Cars...trucks...fire trucks...motorcycles...you name it. If it was on wheels, he was fascinated. If several minutes would go by with nothing driving by, he would loose interest, even if there were 1,000 other things to look at.
But with Molly, now that she is getting more window time as she gets older, I have noticed that she couldn't care less about the cars and trucks. She is fascinated by any people who walk by, and really even more so, any animals that go by. She almost jumps out of her skin with excitement when she sees a dog or bird out the window. And if a fleet of fascinating vehicles went by, she would barely notice:).

2. Dolls/babies. Ben never showed the slightest interest in dolls or stuffed animals of any kind in the first 3 years of his life. He is a little more interested these days, but the dolls and animals are more like playmates that he can pretend with, so it really seems more like an age-related development, rather than a true affinity for dolls or babies.
But Molly, if she sees a baby doll anywhere, she JUMPS at the chance to hold it and carry it around. If there are 20 stuffed animals and one baby doll, she will find the baby in an instant and hold on to it tightly! And if someone else has a baby, she will go for it with gusto! She doesn't do a lot of "mothering" the babies yet, but she definitely seems strongly drawn to them in a way that Ben didn't.

Sorry I've been gone!!

Things have been busy in the evenings lately, and now that Ben doesn't nap, blogging the daytime is almost impossible:(

Quick notes: the kids are both doing really well these days.

Molly is getting cuter and sweeter every day. She is giving us lots of "kissies" and "huggies" every day, and is learning more words and signs all the time! New words include: bath, down, that, eat, Bzzzzzz (for bee) just to name a few! One cute, little development: she is still seriously in love with me, so Aaron has to work sometimes to get snuggles from her if I am around. So lately, when she reaches for me, Aaron has taken to asking for a "kissie" from her first, before handing her off. Well we realized recently that she now thinks she HAS to kiss Daddy before she can get down anytime. So anytime he is holding her and she wants to get down, she will say "dow" and then lean in for a kiss:) Daddy happily obliges!

She "graduated" to a "big girl" car seat today. We have still had her in the pumpkin seat this whole time because she was never at the 22-pound weight limit. Now that she's 14-mos-old, I'm still not sure if she is a full 22, (she's somewhere close to that, I'm sure), but her feet were touching the back of the car by quite a bit and she has been having to cross her legs lately to have enough room, so we decided to turn her around and put her in the forward-facing car seat. Boy, did she look SO tiny in that thing tonight! She seemed to really enjoy it, though. She and I rode in the car tonight together as we went to choir, so she hasn't gotten to ride in it with Ben yet. I think she will be excited tomorrow to sit by him, facing the same way as big brother.

Ben is getting more creative and adorable every day, too! His imagination has really been growing lately.

He has been really interested in a couple of things lately:
1. Spiderman. He doesn't really know who Spiderman is or anything about him, but he has seen action figures from time to time, so that has sparked his interest. He is really preoccupied with wondering if Spiderman is a "good guy" or a "bad guy". I keep trying to explain that Spiderman is a pretend good guy, but Ben isn't sure he should buy the story yet:)
2. He has continued to develop his imagination, especially in regards to trains and rockets. He found one of Aaron's golf tees today, and turned it upside-down and pretended that it was a rocket blasting off into the sky all evening. And he really thought it through well...he explained several times in detail how far the rocket could reach based on how much fuel it had on board:) And tonight, he spent the evening playing with our neighbor Jenny who babysits him while we go to choir practice, and when I got back this evening, the 2 of them were in the Thomas the Train tent, both wearing engineer hats, and Ben was spinning some elaborate tale about where the train was heading and what each of their specific jobs were involving the workings of the train.
3. He has decided, for sure, that he wants to drive and work on trains when he grows up. Today, however, we had the car washed, and on the way home (after a VERY exciting/terrifying time watching the whole thing from the big windows in the car wash place) he thought that maybe he would like to be a car washer some day, and run the vacuum and be the one who turned the big spinning cloths/sponges. But after he thought about it for a while, he decided that he would return to his original plan of becoming a train engineer. I suggested that maybe he could get a part-time job in high school at the car wash, and then when he graduated college, he could then devote his full time to driving trains:)