the sleppys

The reason I have been away for many weeks (away from blogging, that is) is that the computer screen makes me nauseous. I can’t stand looking at it for more than a few minutes. I haven’t read my email since before Christmas. So I’ve been a little behind on everything.

And the reason I get nauseous from looking at a monitor is that I’m going through a mild case of… *dramatic music*… pregnancy. Every sound and smell makes me want to hurl, and I blame it all on a tiny innocent being. He (or she) is supposed to be born in July, so that puts us just over the first trimester right now.

Onto family updates and old news…

Christmas morning was a real treat for the children, the boys especially. Dad woke up early and waited in the living room. I was awake, but I didn’t want the children to run into a living room full of toys and see their parents sitting there, “obviously” being the ones who made it happen. So I stayed in bed, hoping that I’d hear their joyful noises when they came out of their rooms.

And I heard Ty’s whisper, “Wow!” The first thing he saw was the castle, dragons, and knights set, but as he walked further down the hall and into the living room, he saw the huge set of wooden train tracks with two elevated routes and a roundhouse. He also saw a “Build Your Own City” for toy cars, which has connectable roads, police station, parking garage, et cetera.

The rest of the morning was spent in an overwhelming mixture of happiness and frustration. Ty and Kyle fought over which toys were their own. Taylor got a sweet, soft tree trunk that houses five forest friends, but she wanted to play with the trains.
The children’s paternal grandmother came by and delivered gifts. She stayed for Gordon Ramsay’s shepherd’s pie (Made with real shepherds! Just kidding). Then the children’s maternal grandparents came over and delivered gifts. They stayed for coffee and panettone. My brother and his wife were with them, and we talked for a few hours, being that they live two counties away.

New Year’s was exceptionally quiet. The children have no idea what all that is about, so they went to bed at their usual time. But Dad and I tried (yes, tried) staying up for the countdown, and the party a few houses down was sure to have kept us up. But we were in bed by 11:30pm, and the fireworks didn’t wake us.

The following weeks are a blur as I’ve been trying my best to keep food in my stomach, which takes a lot of energy.

As for home schooling, Ty has finished (after whizzing by) his first phonics workbook. Book Two introduces the long vowel sounds combined with the silent e, exempli gratia, rake, bike, cone. He was having a slow start to the whole concept, so I made some flash cards for him that contained those words. We haven’t worked on writing the words since the New Year.

Kyle is more interested in sucking his thumb and daydreaming (big surprise). But there is an intelligence in that boy that is scary. He plays with his small animals and people for hours. Every once in a while, I’ll hear him using different voices for each of the characters. He plays out the action scenes from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and the Blue Car. Especially the scenes that have that flying blue ’66 Ford Anglia in them.

Taylor turned two on January 7th. We had a little get-together for her the Sunday prior. All three of her grandparents came over and watched her be cute. We had sandwiches, salsa and corn chips, and cake. She went to work with Dad on her actual birthday. For the rest of the week after that, she thought that she was going, too, if either Dad or I were leaving for work. Her little mouth would pout when I’d kiss her good-bye.

She watches way too much “Sesame Street.” While she and Dad were out, they stopped by the grocery store. Dad said that she counted the bananas. She can count well past ten… around 14 or 15, she gets a little lost and repeats, “po-teen,” until she starts to laugh. She recognizes most capital letters. She gets “Y” and “V” confused, but that’s normal. She calls every color “blue,” but I think she’s inquiring and not declaring. She repeats me when I correct her, “Yellow, pink, green.” Sometimes, I throw her a curve ball and say, “Magenta.” I did that with the boys, too, and they have no idea what magenta is. *shrug*

I’ll get back to regular blogging as I start feeling better, less prone to tossing my cookies all over the keyboard.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Everyday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.