Ellie: Daddy! Did you know? We went with Mommy to the doctor and the doctor saw a pe.nis in Mommy’s belly!
Jason: Did he? Oh my! (Jason already did know.)
That’s right! Baby #3 is a BOY!!!
I wonder
what it sounds like
when a 17 month old boy
falls head first into a washing machine?
I know, I know. Our poor tree has been poorly neglected. No home-preschooling gold stars for me, huh? We’ve had the bats hanging around for…yeah, a long time now.
Maybe because we all love them so much? No kidding. They’re cute. Even Abram will point up to the door and declare, “Moon!” or “Bat!”
Ellie was the one who reminded me that we needed to give the bats something to eat. Thankfully, the bat in our book (Bat Loves the Night) ate moths, so that’s what she settled on. (Remember? Her other choice was blood.)
Nice, huh? Again I found an old water color “painting” Ellie had done awhile back. I drew the shapes and cut out the bodies. She cut out the wings and we did some “teamwork” to glue on the wings. (The best-ever unimagined upshot from the Nest Gluing Debacle was that Ellie learned and internalized the word “teamwork”. She loves it when we do teamwork. This has been something of a sanity saver. Really. We use it when we are trying to impose our help when she wants to do it all herself or convince her to help with something she doesn’t want to do. Like clean up toys.)
I did let her do most of the glue work, but I didn’t give her free reign with the glue bottle. I squeezed some out for her and she dipped the wings in and then I helped her hold the paper so she could stick them on the moth bodies. I told her she could choose to put the wings on the same side of different sides. She did some of both.
I let her choose where to put all the little buggies. I especially love the way she made sure all the bats were catching a moth and will have something to eat. She put some of the moths on leaves because those moths are eating the leaves. As I write this I realize I missed the chance to talk about food chains. Dang. Maybe next time.
And then, the pinnacle of our bat month was we got to see real bats while we are in Taichung. We were leaving the Tunghai University campus just at dusk. The sky was full of bats chasing moths, mosquitoes and other flying critters. It was great! One even buzzed me close enough that I could see it’s face!
Next up…owls and possums. Still not sure which one will be first. As much as I like bats, and flat out LOVE owls, I think possums are gross.
Sometimes, when Ellie asks just a few too many “Why?” questions I will respond with, “You tell me.” Particularly when things have devolved to the point of, “Why is that a car?”
And that’s what I’m going to do here.
This is my current favorite picture of my two littles. What’s the story behind it?
You tell me.
Maybe this isn’t really a conversation. I didn’t say very much, unless you count the fact that Ellie is reflecting back to me exact words I often say to her.
Ellie likes to play that she is the mommy and I am her child. When she does this she either calls me Darlin’ or Child.
Here we are playing in the grass at Tunghai University. We were pretending to be at Ellie’s “home” and she wanted to show me some of the amenities of her home.
“Darlin’, so you want to come and see my pile of grass? It’s right over here. It’s not too far for you to walk Darlin’.”
I know you can walk that far Darlin’. You have strong, healthy legs. I know you can walk that far.”
“So come on. Let’s go, Darlin’. You can walk that far. I know you can Darlin’.”
(It was a spot the mowers had missed. About five feet away.)
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