Two!

Looks like we have had Gwendolyn for two years now! I have been meaning to post an update on her and haven't gotten around to it, so maybe I will hit a few Gwennie highlights in her two year old post.  

She talks!  Finally (insert small sigh of relief here).  At 17-18 months, my concern about the not talking was minimal, as Stephanie was not very verbal either.  As 20-21 months approached and we barely had a "Mama", my stress levels were starting to rise about it.  After worrying about it to pretty much anyone who would listen and trying to convince Kevin and I that she was otherwise a happy and normal child, she finally started talking!  On top of that, she has some words that are real charmers.  Stephanie called noodles "noonoos", Gwen says, "Doodies" and sometimes chants the word with a little dance of wagging her bum back and forth.  She also can say "water" but when spontaneously referring to water makes a "lalalalala" sound while waggling her tounge.  That one is video clip worthy, and as soon as I can figure out how to easily post that from the iPad, I will.  

She also loves ice.  Way more than I think is normal.  In an effort to get her interested in taking baths again (loves water, but suddenly hates baths), I got Stephanie to put a few ice cubes in the tub to see if we could entice her to play in the tub.  They had a fantastic time traveling back and forth from the kitchen with cups of ice and in 20 minutes my tub looked like I was ready to harvest a few organs, but she was still refusing to get in the tub.  Most recently, she has briefly gotten in and not hated it, so that is a step back in the right direction.  

She never finishes a cup of milk before asking for a refill.  It drives me mad!  Just finish the last inch of milk!  It goes against all of my conservative instincts, but she is so insistent, that I almost always give into the refill.  She is a powerful stubborn little creature!

She will do anything and everything her sister does.  ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING.  It is normally adorable and hysterical.... Normally...

And that brings us to the big birthday.  As mentioned in previous posts, I am just not a big two year old birthday person.  They have no idea that it is a special day and I am personally exhausted from spending my time with a little person that has recently realized they have a personality to assert.  But Stephanie considered it an important day and Alaina drove in for the occassion, so we invited the neighbor girls that we hang out with all the time, their parents and my friend Blake.  The kids played so nicely (for real... Disappeared upstairs for a while and not a single mess to clean up and no one cried or whined to the adults).  Gwen refused to go to sleep at her normal bedtime, but was perfectly pleasant so stayed up with us.  

Blake got her a baby doll stroller (and then she learned a new word , "stroller", and has really enjoyed it), Alaina got her a butterfly house to put in the "habinator habitat" (that would be the pollinator habitat, but Steph keeps calling it a "habinator habitat") that we are turning our yard into, and the neighbors got her some of the coolest animal flash cards I have ever seen, books and sweet little handmade perler animals.  And then, as if this was not enough, we got a package from Mary with magnets, binoculars and reusable animal stickers.  Oh, the stickers.  This kid loves stickers to the point that Stephanie has started stockpiling stickers (secretly, in my purse) she gets from the grocery store to give Gwen when she doesn't get one at a checkout.  If there is a register, Gwen wants a "Ticker".  But not everywhere gives kids stickers.  Not a problem.  Turns out, Stephanie can dig into my bag and pull one out.  I really should tidy my purse more often, and maybe I would have figured this out sooner.  But Stephanie sure enjoyed saving the day.

Earth day girl gets an Earth cake...

So so nice to have Alaina here!

Argh!

Stephanie's T-ball team was officially assigned to be the Pirates last week, and today was the first T-ball game.  The kids are aged 4-6, and the games last 1 hour (which turns out to normally be two innings).  Each child gets a turn to bat, they run one base at a time, and the last child at bat "clears" the bases.  There is no score kept (though I overheard that one little boy confidentially told his dad that he thought the score was 5-4 and that we were winning).  The kids did a respectable job looking like a T-ball team.  Sure, there was the stray child that ran to third instead of first after batting and the kids that seemed to actually throw the bat at the ball so that the bat when in-field nearly as far as the ball, but at least it gave the parents something to laugh about.  Stephanie, for her part, did fine.  She seemed to normally be looking for the batter to hit the ball, but there was sometimes a longer than necessary gap between batters and she would end up talking to her friend on the field.  She was very good about not trying to field a ball that was not in her area, and made no attempts to field the ball when she was a runner (unlike practice, when she somehow got her mitt back on while she was running the bases and proceeded to chase the ball into the outfield when it got past an infielder- I still don't know how she got her mitt after batting and it took some convincing before she believed me about that not being the the runners job!)

She ended up with the "1" jersey. 

Field Trip to Raleigh

With the taxes still in progress, an unexpected week of car shopping, and daylight for gardening in the evening, we have had too many late evenings and limited spare time for things like blogging.  I have one other field trip that I want to put on here, but I had to do the most recent first while it was still fresh, even if it is a bit short on details.    

We spent today in Raleigh for a few different activities.  First, a park there had a nature sensory play area set up this morning and then NC State was hosting "Farm Days".  The kids played for a half hour in the sensory play area, but a required bathroom break had us walk across the park where they discovered a playground and a lake, so that was it for the sensory play for the day, but still lots of fun- and, frankly, less wet. 

A fairy house designed by Stephanie and the neighbors

And I managed to get a series of "Gwen climbing on things" shots...

We had some lunch and headed to the Farm Days event.  They had lots of farm animals, and very importantly, free ice cream! 

On a personal note, if you are wondering what is going on with my hair, welcome to the club!  I keep thinking that I need to get it cut into a great style I love, then I think about taking the kids to a hair place- which would be fine once, but if you want a style you have to do that often- and then I give up and go with long enough to pull back. 

Speaking of haircuts- this little lady just dropped several inches a couple of weeks ago!  It is actually hard to tell because she has had bangs that length around her face for a while now, but we cut off quite a bit.  She was tired of the nightly brushing battle, as was I, and asked for a cut.

We had to wait in a really long line to hold the chicks, but it ended up being Stephanie's favorite part, so totally worth it. 

Kevin's new car got a chance to do some off-road parking.  More on the need for a new car later.

And Stephanie found time to do a little gardening with Dad when we got home.

SciWorks

Let's revisit spring break!  It is hard to claim a spring break, with my kids not in school, but I do get my night of teaching off and the neighbors are out of school, so we kind of have a spring break.  And we decided to make the trek to Winston Salem to the SciWorks museum.  It is a good haul, about 90 miles, so it has been on of the trips that was designated as eventual but required energy and planning. Spring break, it turns out, gave us that opportunity.  The nice part was that it was not crazy despite kids being out of school.  The same could not be said, apparently, of the zoo and our favorite Durham museum, as rumor has it that they were mad houses.  

The final analysis was that it was worth the trip, maybe we would go back before the end of summer but it did not land in the absolutely must do again soon category. 

The museum wasn't huge, so we saw all of it that day.  There were a few highlights, the crazy air lift chair being the coolest.  There was definitely one lowlight... Getting the three year old neighbor (L) and Stephanie locked in the planetarium during the show without an adult when I left to quiet Gwen and then my friend brought our 5 year old neighbor (E) out to go to the bathroom.  Seriously, the doors to the theater lock when you leave.  So Blake, E, Gwen and I were out while Stephanie and L were inside.    I wasn't worried, but Blake said that she was really worried about L panicking when she didn't come back.  I assured her that Stephanie would take car of L, but now is am also really worried... L is only 3! Meanwhile, the front desk people would not let us back in, and it turns out, I had it totally backwards.  Stephanie didn't realize that I had left with Gwen and panicked when I wasn't there.  Meanwhile L was fine and trying to help Stephanie by offering to go in search of Blake.  Ironically, I feel like Stephanie made the best choice by convincing L to stay where they were and not letting her leave, but if she had let her go, we would have been able to get back in. Anyway, they were alone for about ten minutes and we talked about what happened and why she made a good choice and what other options she had so it was probably a good learning experience, but it took a fair bit of calming down before more museum fun could happen.  Oh, and it was the worst planetarium show...It was just terrible!  Had it been a decent show, maybe she wouldn't have even realized she was alone.

I can't lie... The locking into the theater was a bit of a damper and may have effected my overall opinion of the place.  If we are going to pull my standard of comparison, the Museum of Life and Science, this place was a 7 at best, and that was before they secured the theater as if it were Fort Knox.  But still, there is a highlight reel...

I declared getting this picture to be "like Christmas" because they were both looking and smiling.  And then I realized it was the complete opposite of Christmas, during which 200+ photos did not result in the same, and ultimately had Stephanie declaring Gwen to be "an angry little elf"

They had an indoor fishing river.  Everyone had their own technique...

Little race cars, super popular!