Tweet tweet

I have never tweeted before. I do have a twitter account that I created long ago to enter a contest, and somehow I have strangers following me even though I've never used it. I just don't get the concept. And who needs twitter when you have facebook? I mean, on twitter you can only fit in 140 characters, but facebook can fit a lot more. But just for fun, here is what today would have looked like in tweets:

7:05am - Alarm went off just as Ellie woke up. I pretended to be asleep and told her she could play in the playroom, then I snuck onto the computer.

8:45am - It's so hard to tear Claire away from Ellie to take her and Grace to preschool. Ellie always tries to sneak out with us.

9:15am - It is ridiculously cold outside! Too cold to take the kids grocery shopping. We'll have to make do with what's in the cupboard.

9:55am - Time for my very important meeting with the assembly chair (and neighbor) about taxes for the assembly. LOL

11:45am - Ellie is hiding in the closet with her friends, hoping I won't find her to take her home. Will Nina notice if I leave without her?

12:01pm - I get to spend the afternoon with the sweetest and happiest baby I have ever known. And the kids love her too! :)

12:45pm - Time to take my kids to school! I love Tuesdays and Thursdays :)

2:10pm - Washing dishes and watching The Bachelor on the computer. What? I already watched all the episodes of Scrubs and washing dishes is boring

3:15pm - It's a little warmer now (10 degrees), so Coraline and I will walk to pick up Ellie and Rowan from school. Hey, why is that fire truck ...

3:16pm - ... and those 5 police cars sitting in our neighborhood?

3:34pm - Birthday party again? Come on Ellie, can't we play another game today? I am just stuffed from all your imaginary lemonade and butter cake.

5:00pm - Dinosaur Train, I love you! Thank you for entertaining my kids with your funny antics and dinosaur facts.

5:15pm - Researching homeschooling ideas. Love the idea of the "workbox system." http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/

5:45pm - Dinner of pita pizzas and sweet potato fries. This is what you get when you don't go grocery shopping.

6:05pm - Rowan is imitating everything Ellie does, including crossing his arms and pouting. How can he be so cute?!?

7:33pm - Bedtime for the Tatum tots. Free time for the Tatum parents :)

8:15pm - Intrigued by the idea of living in a yurt. Neighbors, would that be a viable idea for living on the goat farm? http://www.yurtinfo.org/

9:00pm - Mash a banana in a bowl, add a spoonful of nutella. Scoop in some strawberry cheesecake ice cream, and you have a perfect bedtime snack :)

9:43pm - Why have I never watched the show Modern Family before? This is hilarious!

10:06pm - Time to update the blog!

How do you deal with this??

On Wednesday I spent 3 hours running errands (translated: shopping) while Jason stayed home with the kids. When I came home, Ellie came running out with a wooden fire truck. That I had stored away in a box (which admittedly is in the living room waiting to go down to storage) for Rowan's NEXT birthday. This is how the conversation went.

Mom: Ellie, how did you get that?

Ellie: From that box

Mom: But how did you get in it?

Ellie: We took off the tape.

Mom: Ellie!

Ellie: Rowan did it too!

Mom: Where was Daddy?

Ellie: Sitting right there on his computer.

Mom: Let me put that back. Ellie!!! (as I see that another toy in the box has been taken out of the plastic shrinkwrap). Did you open this toy?

Ellie: Rowan did too!

Mom: Well these were supposed to be toys for your birthdays, but now you've seen them so I can't give them to you!

Ellie: It's okay, we won't remember them on our birthdays.

Mom: Did you take out all the toys? (there are probably 10 toys/games for birthdays)

Ellie: I don't think we saw all of them.

Mom: Maybe I'll give them to other kids for their birthdays.

Ellie: You can't, we already opened them. You can't give opened toys to other kids.

Mom: Ellie, you can't open boxes that are closed. That means we don't want you in them.

Ellie: Maybe you shouldn't put them where we can see them. Then we won't open them.

*sigh*

* in defense of Jason, the kids have often gotten into mischief while I'm on the computer too :)

Winter fun

See this little guy? We befriended him for a while by leaving nuts just outside our balcony door. The kids love watching him eat with his little paws. He was even starting to get semi-comfortable with us. That all ended one day when as he was heading for the nuts, Rowan smashed a monster truck into the balcony door right in front of the squirrel. Bye bye little squirrel, it was fun while it lasted.

This morning we woke up to this odd sight.

We have never seen ice spikes on the trees before!

Like the view of our front yard? Some of our neighbors built this happy snow family :)

Ellie really loves playing outside in the snow. Finally! But Rowan is still young enough that it is not fun trudging through snow up to his knees. So, we play outside a little bit, but most of our fun is inside :) The kids received this earth-friendly dishes set made of recycled milk jugs for Christmas, along with some wooden food. They love playing picnic and restaurant, so today Ellie and I made this menu for her restaurant by cutting out pictures of food, gluing them on paper, and labeling them. I love Ellie's creative spelling, like "mufin," "ches," and "petzza."

Hmm, looks like I need to take some pictures of the kids actually playing these games :)

Back in the swing of things

Now that we are back in town, and have a working car, I have started to bargain shop again. There is a lot of clearance going on right now, with stores getting rid of excess stuff after Christmas. I did miss out on a bunch of it, but there are still deals to be had. Today I went to the bank (to deposit months of checks, oops!), Kohl's, Einstein Bagels, Michael's, and Target. I bought: a 4 pair set of thick socks for Rowan, a fabric play food set, a pair of snowboots for Rowan, a pair of snowboots for Ellie, 3 other pairs of shoes for Ellie, a play wooden rolling pin, two wooden castle 3-D puzzles, a pack of 3 wooden pegs, and a bagel with cream cheese. For all of that I spent less than $20. Woohoo for coupons and clearance!!



Here are the wooden puzzles and pegs. Rowan and Ellie each painted a puzzle, I painted the pegs, and then Jason and I raced to see who could put together the puzzle first. They were hard to figure out! You had to punch out each piece, but carefully because the only instructions were to match up #1 with #1, #2 with #2, etc. Then there were diagrams of all the pieces and each slot had a corresponding number. By the middle of the puzzle, it was so dang confusing that you just figured out which piece went where without the stinkin' diagram (please pardon my language). Well, Jason barely won the race :)

To show you the size of these peg dolls, here they are next to a AA battery.

It was a fun afternoon craft. I doubt the wooden castles will hold up for long, but I will be buying more wooden pegs to make more dolls, since the kids fell in love with them!

Tatum tots

My friend Keeley coined this phrase for our kids, and I love it! For those of you who haven't heard, we are adding another Tatum tot to our family sometime around August 1st, 2010. Which means I am about 10 weeks pregnant now, with 30 weeks to go. And boy has it been rough so far! It seems that with each successive child, my "morning sickness" gets worse. This time around I have already had to have i.v. fluids and now have a prescription medicine to help with the nausea/vomiting. Taking the medicine was a hard decision for me, because even when I am not assisting in a human being's growth, I am pretty anti-medicine. It takes a major headache lasting for hours for me to take an ibuprofin. But once the nurse convinced me that being dehydrated and not retaining any calories was worse for my baby than any potential slight risks from medicine, not to mention the fact that I wanted to hide the pregnancy until after my sister's wedding (and I didn't want to vomit all over her beautiful dress), I decided to take the medicine. I am taking the generic version of zofran, and it is not a miracle drug, but it does seem to take the edge off the nausea. So, I still feel sick all day, but the vomiting has definitely decreased. I'm just hoping that this pregnancy will be like my others, and that the sickness will leave around week 14 :)

We were naively, ambitiously hoping to not reveal the news to our kids until we knew if it was a boy or a girl, so there would be no room for, "But I want a sister!!" Because as I predicted, Ellie is already clamoring for a sister. But the kids know and are extremely excited for a new baby. Rowan thinks the baby is residing in my belly button for now, but Ellie has everything figured out already. "Mommy, when will the baby in your uterus come out your vagina?"