Family Files!

Watched a 1967 episode of Spiderman with Charley this morning. I said it was the Spiderman I used to watch when I was little. Charley asked if he was a Spiderboy back then :)

The other day Charley saw me getting dressed in my room from his room. He shouts out across the hall to me, “Hey, what’s that boobs thing?”

In the midst of our third visit to H&R Block, Flora asks, “How do you spell boring?”

This morning I overheard Flora playing: “Hi, Ariel? Um, hi. I’m on Facebook. So I’ll see you soon. We’ll do a play date together. OK, bye.” We went to an Ariel-themed birthday party (Raessler’s Fourth) this weekend and Flora hasn’t stopped talking about — and, apparently to — Ariel ever since. The Disney Princess floodgates are slowly being pried open from my clinched fists! Sigh. Well, a little princess goes a long way. Hopefully a little.

Last night I stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things on the way to daycare, and apparently I entered an incorrect PIN number for my bank card and the transaction was denied. So I called our bank to get it straightened out, and the customer service rep was asking all kinds of specific questions abut deposits, withdrawals, etc. — none of which I knew the answers to since I don’t do our banking. He wouldn’t unblock the card, and I had to abandon the shopping cart there. I was furious. So in the car, Flora asked me if I was tired, and I told her that I was angry about the guy on the phone. She asked me to demonstrate his voice, which I did, and she said, “Oh, I know what you mean. Blah Blah Blah. Sometimes when you yell at me you go Blah Blah Blah.”

Yesterday the kids and I were sitting on the couch. I heard a shriek coming from Charley, and looked over in their direction. Flora said, “What?” I said, “Nothing. What’s Up?” And she said, “Nothing. Why? Did you see me poke him?”

Last night I was reading Charley a bedtime story while Flora played in her room. She came running over to his door, “I’m not putting lip gloss on or anything in my room.” “Hmmm,” I said. “Then what’s all that purple stuff all over your chin?”

This morning, when Charley heard the garbage truck coming down the street, he got all excited and said, “guck, guck!” He also says “uh-o” for uh-oh and “eh-mo” for “elmo.” And he’s been making awfully silly faces and doing silly things (like putting pasta on his thumb) to get a laugh! He made up his own word for eat &mdash: a clicking of his tongue (to imitate the smacking of lips we do when we ask for a bite). It’s also the sound he makes when he sees the cat (to imitate the teh-teh-teh sound we make to call the cat). And all food is “na-na-na-na,” which we think came from banana.

In Flora’s world, everything and everyone has to have a name — people, stuffed animals, characters in a book, pieces of candy … and if they don’t already have a name, she’ll assign one. She coined her own turn of phrase for this: “name ‘em up.” I love this expression, because it reminds me of how her great grandparents from Missouri talked.

Charley has morphed waving Hi to his own sign for “I want that.” When he sees something he wants — toys on a shelf, balloons on the ceiling, light fixtures … he points to it with his chubby little arm and “waves Hi” at it. And he can answer the questions, “Where’s the balloon?” and “Where’s the light?” by “pointing” with his arm in the proper direction. His little hands and arms are rarely not moving. Even when he nurses, he reaches up to feel around my face like Helen Keller or plays with his own hair, and when you hold him facing you, he loves to play with your hair or ears.