An Update

I took these back in the beginning of March, but am just now getting around to processing and posting them.

Gracie lost her two front teeth earlier this month.  She was excited about it.  She consented to a few pictures.  I have been practicing braiding her hair, now that it is getting longer.  I am still learning.  I thought it would be a good model for her, showing her that it gets better and better the more I practice.  You don't get it perfect the first time (something that she finds endlessly frustrating in her own life).

 This is her model face.

The is her giggle.

My girl.

A view of the braids.  It has been a full year (I think) since her last hair cut.  Grace has the slowest growing hair ever, it seems.  She likes it long.

Eli likes to build a "house" on the couch.  He instructs you how to build it, telling you where to put the walls and the roof and the door.  He was sitting in there one day and I lifted up the roof to peek in.  I still have the mental image of the little boy sitting cross-legged in that tiny space, looking straight up out of the opening in the pillows, beaming from ear to ear.  He thinks it is very funny.

This is Charlotte working at her desk on evening.  She loves to make cards and signs and write stories.  She is better at starting projects than at finishing them, but she really is very creative with what she comes up with.  

Finally, here is a video of Eli playing with the word magnets on the girls' white board.  It is a full 10 minutes long, which I realize may be overboard for a kid video.  It seems like the standard attention span for watching videos of other people's kids probably maxes out around 1:30.  But I couldn't figure out how to trim it.  I could watch him all day.  He starts to get frustrated with me around 7:30 and I even find that endearing.  I am just crazy about this kid.

Home Improvement

Over Christmas break, the girls and I spent a good deal of time going through toys and stuff in their room and getting rid of/donating quite a bit of it.  I loved it.  They weren't thrilled at the beginning, but I think I brought Charlotte around to embracing the catharsis by the end of the project.  We had a vision of a long, two-person desk for the one wall and Derek made it happen.  I am usually terrible at taking snapshots, but I made an effort to document the process.

Here is everybody helping paint the desk.  Yes, we paint in the family room.  Doesn't everyone?

Here are a few before shots.  They had a sort of pale lavender color and pinkish, flowery wallpaper.  The previous owners of our house loved their wallpaper borders, that's for sure.

Our paint color choice was a long process and the color palette changed a couple of times.  Then, we narrowed it down to four colors - a deep purple, a bright blue/turquoise, lime green and hot pink.  Then I looked around and realized these four colors are everywhere.  I always think it is funny how your taste is informed by trends without you even realizing it.  Heidi also painted Kat's room these four colors a few months ago, so the cousins coordinate with each other. :)

This girls got tents for their beds out of the deal, too. The carpet is the big thing that still needs to be replaced. Someday we'll get the whole upstairs done.  For now, every time someone spills juice or ketchup or something, I take some quiet solace in the fact that nothing could really make me hate the carpet any more than I already do.

The desks Derek built.

I found this image on iStockphoto and fell in love with it.  I bought it and manipulated it in Photoshop to make a mural for the girls wall.  Debbie Pisacreta helped me over Christmas put the colors into it.  It all sort of came together.  Grace took one look at the mock up and burst into tears.  Apparently, she didn't share my vision.  It took a while, but it grew on her.  She helped me paint some of the parts and she did the birds with stencils.

This was the original image for the mural




This is my PS mock-up (i did my own tree)




Here is the finished product.

From the other end of the room (excuse the bad flash photography)

I enjoyed the painting project.  As full as my days are the past few months, I looked forward to working on it.  I painted, like, 15 leaves a day for the most of the month of January.  It reminded me of painting the mural on Charlotte's wall before she was born.  All those evenings after work, listening to music and painting while I waited for February 1 to finally come around so we could meet her, our first baby.  

When we put up the tents for the girls, we had to move Grace's bed frame so that her mattress would still fit under the top bunk.  So, we finally got around to taking down Eli's crib and he inherited Grace's bed frame, with a new mattress and a set of Thomas sheets.  He was totally cool about it.  He didn't even glance at his crib, where he had slept every night for 3.5 years, sitting in the corner.  He just walked in and climbed up on the bed and beamed, "Eli's bed!"  

Here's the before of his room (which I hope to be next to redo).

Eli has the worst wallpaper of all.  He also has pink carpeting and a little half-bath inside his room that has a pink sink and a pink toilet.  Nice!  He also has my grandfather's pinball machine in his room.  Pretty cool.

Eli's bathroom is that door on the left. I figure for a boy with 2 older sisters, having your own bathroom may be a really good thing.

Charlotte made Eli this picture and hung it up for him.

If you have made it all the way to the bottom of this very long post, I have a question.  We have been playing around with ideas for Eli's room.  He has a cool roof line in his room, so I think we are going to do white walls and a colorful ceiling.  He likes animals alot.  I came up with this design, with animals going all around the room and I bought some sets of silhouettes online..  Derek and the girls all contributed ideas.  We are down to three color palettes.  What do you all think?  The background color is for the ceiling (and the grays are the doors and windows).  I like the quilt for #2 best and I think I lean towards that one, but I think the overall favorite in the house is #3.  You can click on the image to see it bigger if you feel like it.

Kind of a boring post.  Thanks for reading!

Year of the Dragon

I missed it by a week now, but I wanted to post on the Chinese New Year.  This is the Year of the Dragon.  This is my favorite because Derek and I were both born in the Year of the Dragon (different dragon, Derek likes to joke) and we met in the Year of the Dragon.   It's been a wonderful 12 years.  I look forward to seeing what the next 12 bring, and the next 12 after that.

It's a little before Derek's birthday, but I thought I would also use this post to add to my running list of reasons why I married the man of the century.

#48.  You think big.  I never know exactly what new plan for world domination you are going to start hatching next, but I always sincerely look forward to finding out.  Whether it's big in the figurative sense of ambitious, far flung, ballsy or high concept (or perhaps all of the above) or big in the literal sense of the 2200 square foot addition you are designing for our (already 3700 square foot) house, it's go big or go home.  I'm with you, babe.

We took these last night and I was really looking forward to editing them.

The loves of my life

This one is actually my favorite.  So typical.  Something didn't go Grace's way.  No idea what.

Tomorrow my oldest baby turns 8 years old.  Holy cow.

 I remember so clearly taking this picture from across the room in the hospital bed.  It seems more recently than 8 years ago.

 I also found this one while poking around.  There's a little more gray in the beard now.
Derek has no real wistfulness for the tiny baby years.  But he was really, really good at them.

 A portrait of two middle children.  I think Derek and Grace share the bond of being the middle child in their family, and the contrarian streak that seems to go with it.

 This one looks to me like an actor's head shot or something, with a 6 year old photo-bombing it.

Another Daddy and Grace shot that I love.

I didn't shoot just Derek and Eli last night.  But I still wanted to post this old one of them together.

Two Mohr men regard each other.

What more can I say.  My favorite part of every day is you, Derek.

Gracie

I looked out the window the other day and the snow was coming down in big fluffy chunks the size of a fist.  It was really pretty.  I quickly lobbied Grace to come outside for a picture.  She is wearing a sleeveless dress under the coat and has bare legs.  By the time we got out there, the snow was back to the normal, fluffy stuff. We still shot a few frames.  She wouldn't put her tongue back in for me.





Grace still gets so frustrated when something doesn't live up to her expectations.  Sometimes it is something like her facepainting at the winter festival wasn't what she expected, so she cries and I get mad because it is rude to the nice teenage girl who painted it.  I don't want to invalidate disappointment.  It's an authentic emotion.  But how to teach her how to also be polite and grateful?  Sometimes she is edgy and her expectations are so completely unreasonable that nothing will make her happy.  Again, I feel for her and her levels of anxiety and frustration.  But the net effect on her behavior is not at all acceptable.

It is becoming a problem for her at school.  She hates to get answers wrong.  She had a timed math test where she was supposed to do 30 simple addition problems in 2 minutes.  She can do the addition problems.  Everyone she did at home was right - no errors.  When I set the timer so she could practice the timed test, she had an honest to goodness panic attack right in front of me.  Picture my little 6 year old still scratching away with her pencil at this page full of addition problems with big, fat tears streaming down her face and her chest heaving faster and faster until she sort of started hyperventilating.  This is not good.  Then, she gets mad and turns the bad feelings outward, and comes at me for distracting her or yells that the chair is too low at the table or the pencil is not sharp enough.  It's not pretty.  In fact, it's downright ugly sometimes and I lose patience more than I'd like to.  The heart of it, though, is a very small girl who is having some very big feelings. I remind myself of this when she's screaming at me.  Not screaming, exactly, to be fair.  More like loud, vehement but also sort of pathetic whining.

We are very confident that Grace has dyslexia.  Her reading tutor (who is wonderful) totally agrees.  The word dyslexia seems to be not always in vogue, but it's clear to me from reading up about it that it fits Grace to a tee.  So this compounds the frustration for her, I think.  She has to work extra hard to do things that are obviously coming naturally to so many of the other kids.  She really tries so hard (even though she sometimes masks it with outbursts).  It's tough to watch.

This is her spelling test.  She got two wrong.  Not because she spelled the word wrong, but because she had two letter reversals.  She told Derek that she can't remember which way the s goes.  But notice she had it right other places on the test.  She says she always feels the d looks wrong to her (when it is written correctly).  She was so upset this morning that she got two wrong. I didn't know why at the time, but I came into the room when she was vigorously and violently brushing her own hair while sobbing about how, "it doesn't feel straight!!!  It doesn't feel STRAIGHT!!! Why doesn't it FEEL STRAIGHT?!?"  Grace's hair is poker straight, i have always marvelled at it's ability to fall back into it's flat shape no matter what.   Derek just looked at me over her head and said, "she's upset about the spelling test."  Enough said.

What I notice about the test is this - see on the word 'dish'.  She first wrote a q and erased it, then she wrote a b and erased it, then she got it correct by writing 'dish'.  Same on 'pen'.  You can see where she erased both a q and a b before she put the p down.  She fixed 'best' once, from initially writing 'pest'.  In my head I can see her sitting there agonizing over not wanting to get it wrong and writing letters and erasing them and still not being sure that they "look right".  She knows it's supposed to be a 'd'.  She doesn't think the word is spelled pish, with a 'p' sound at the front.  She just gets it backwards when she tries to write it.  There are a total of 13 p's, d's, and b's on that test.  Imagine having to work so hard one each one of them.

Gracie will learn just like we all do how to deal with the challenges in her path.  I'm sure this won't be the biggest one she finds in her life.  She's got so much going for her.  She'll do great.  It is much more heartbreaking to watch them struggle then I ever would have guessed it would be, though.

Happy 2012

This is Eli outside with one of his favorite possessions, our Kindle Fire.  He watches Thomas movies on it and plays games and sometimes pages through books.  Our guilty confession:  we sometimes let him take it to bed with him and watch in his crib before he falls asleep.  When I go in to cover him up he is sleeping with the Kindle still in his hands, cuddling it.



If you happen to be using it when he comes in the room, he usually tries to acquire it immediately.  He sometimes says, "Eli's turn!" when he wants something.  It's more of a statement than a request.  He also will sometimes take something (usually the Kindle or my phone) right out of my hands.  When he does this he always says without fail (and it's the only time I have ever heard him say this), "thanks for helping!"  He says it pitch-perfect, with that lilting, fake-bright tone that teachers sometimes use.  I wonder who in his life takes things from him while using this ironic phrase.  It is a funny example to me of kids giving back what they get.  I do not find Eli taking things from me by force funny, however.  We're working on it.

This is Eli after I told him that we couldn't take the Kindle to the playground with us.  When he throws a fit (which happens unfortunately more frequently lately), he makes this really sad face, more than a mad face.  He puts and frowns and protests.

It's really quite pathetic.

He also sometimes hurts himself, or pretends to hurt himself.  He used to bang his head on the floor when he was mad, which makes everybody uncomfortable and is hard to watch.  Not repeatedly over and over (thank goodness).  Usually he would pout, walk purposefully to a spot, kneel down and bump his head on the floor.  Sometimes harder than others, but there was obviously some control to how hard he let his noggin contact the floor.  Now, he sometimes will just touch his head and tell you it hurts when he is mad.  Or, he'll purposefully bump his knee on the wall, and then present it to you with a frown.  Most common recently, he wipes his finger along his pants or the wall or something and then holds it up to you, as if he just got a splinter.  I don't quite understand the point of this.  It goes something like...Me:  No, Eli.  Don't touch that!.  Eli:  Bumps finger and then holds it out frowning.  "Ow!  Hurt!  Hand hurt!"  Is he trying to deflect the situation from my hollering at him to his "injury"?  Is he trying to communicate his pain and upset over being yelled at and over not being able to do what he wants?  Maybe a way to ask for comforting?  It eludes me.

Here is Eli on a happier occasion.  Kid loves his junk food.  He takes it really seriously, too.