Catch up time

It has been a busy couple of days. Lots of silliness to report. You'll have to excuse my lack of journaling, I seemed to have caught the plague from flying Jetgerm this weekend - today is the first day I feel I am beating whatever it is that I caught.

As I sit here on my sofa gazing out the window I see lots of orange, yellow and red leaves. They are falling fast to the ground and my children are in heaven. Emma loves to sweep them up into piles and Ben loves falling face first into them, then covering himself up with them. This, my friends, is one of the main reasons we pioneered East and landed here in LI. (click on pic to enlarge the cute factor.)

The sun is out today and we enjoyed the morning at Rocketship Park. The usual struggle ensued when I tried to put a winter coat on Emma and she refused, but then I got the bright idea to just let her freeze and when she was ready to put it on she would. Guess what? No stress for Mommy and about 4 minutes into our play she was ready for her coat. Imagine that. As it is a national holiday lots of kids were playing at the park. Emma wanted to use her sand toys so I busted them out fearing a sharing war, but blondie amazed me yet again by inviting children to play with her saying, "Hi, I'm Emma. You want to share my sand toys with me?"

The sun was not out yesterday morning - in fact it was quite cold and cloudy, perfect for a quickie trip to walmart. As we were driving there, Emma said, "Hey Mama, I see a shining thing." "You see what?" "A shining thing! What is it?" I looked in the rearview mirror and found her pointing at the sun behind the clouds. I said, "Em, that's the sun!" to which she replied, "I can't see it good. What's it doing up there?" "It's playing hide and seek with the clouds." - an explanation she found perfectly acceptable now that hide and seek is her favorite game.

While I am away, Daddy gives me the play by play with text messages that make me feel like I am right in the thick of the action. My 3 favorite from this past Monday were: "Ben is DEEEstroying everything right now. Books, Em's drawings, the blankets. He's laughing and RAMPAGING!" and "Ben just picked up the phone from d house, put it right to his ear and said, "aHOOO?" Awesome." As it was pretty cold that day and he couldn't get Emma to go outside and play, he was struggling to come up with ideas to entertain her while Ben napped. I thought this one was the best: "Each time the plane landed she had to add more color to make it FLY HIGHER."(click on the pic to enlarge it and see her mad coloring skills.)

We busted out the holiday DVD pack and watched our first of surely many viewings of Rudolph the Red nose Reindeer. We are hoping to impress upon our young padowan that if she doesn't behave she will get no gifts from Santa Clause. All four of us snuggled in on the sofa and watched it together. I am happy to report that Ben was not petrified of the abominable snow monster like last year, but slightly amused that every time he came on the screen, Emma would hold her hands up over her eyes to block him from the screen and say, "I don't like monsters!" We tried reminding her that Monsters were our friends - ala Monsters, Inc - you know, Sully and MIKE WAZOWSKI!, and she seemed to make that connection and was fine for the rest of the movie. We'll see if that holds over to viewing #2...