This morning as we were barreling down the freeway my children began to sing the Twelve Days of Christmas because really, Christmas is a mere four months away!! This delightfully repetitive and obnoxious song that is pretty much the holiday equivalent of 99 bottles of beer on the wall began to evolve after about the third time around, and all of the gifts changed from leaping lords and dancing milkmaids or whatever they are to the following:

12 giant flytraps
11 hobo spiders
10 boxes of lice
9 pterodactyls
8 rising mummies
7 T Rexes
6 hungry zombies
5-headed dragons
4 spraying skunks
3 thorny devils
2 stinging scorpions
1 velociraptor

So that’s festive, right? I particularly like the use of appropriate adjectives like “rising” mummies (for when the regular mummies just won’t do). Now, I realize this looks suspiciously like something that Georgie would come up with alone, but I’m fairly sure that the girls were back there envisioning this monstrosity right along with him. I mean really. Is this what you want for Christmas??

Venus Fly Trap, although I think they may have been envisioning something more like Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.

Hobo Spider, which is our very large, local, nasty, poisonous one.

Lice, which I’m sure we all know enough about to detest.

Pterodactyl, which I always thought of as rather charming dinosaurs until I saw Jurassic Park III.

Rising Mummy = never good. This is me (or my body double) being threatened by a rising mummy:

Happily, this guy should be coming along any moment to rescue me.

I wonder how good Brendan Fraser does against these:

Zombies ~ ugly yes, but they move soooo slow. Oh no, what could be fast enough to escape them?? Stilts? Pogo sticks? Tricycles??

Five-headed dragon, which will be represented today by a drawing of a Hydra. Georgie will like that.

Skunk buns. Just what I always wanted for Christmas!

Thorny Devil. Call me crazy, but I think these guys are kind of cute. They certainly beat out skunk butt and zombie woman.

Stinging scorpions. Nope, not cute!

Velociraptor: cute until they slice you open with their giant middle claw and eat your guts while you’re still alive. And thank you, Steven Spielberg, for delivering that very important information to little rabid dinosaur-loving boys everywhere.

I better not get any of these things for Christmas. Of course, when I was a teenager my brother gave me a piece of moldy bread he had been growing in a jar in his closet for three months specifically for the occasion (he partitioned the box and put the actual gift in the other side). I don’t know that spraying skunk could smell much worse than that.

Rachel

WooHoo! Looks like we may finally be making potty training progress with Miss Faithyroo. She’s pretty close to Georgie territory on how long she’s been taking to train. Georgie was four months but Trinity was only a week, Anika one month, and Kyra two weeks start to finish. Faith here is somewhere around three months, I think. Actually looking up when we started would be way too depressing.

Anyway, she’s far enough along now that she’ll go one and two pretty consistently… as long as we ask her if she has to go every hour or fairly consistently. If we are doing something like say, feeding the baby or making dinner or doing something other than spending every moment watching her, then she goes merrily along her way and doesn’t bother telling us she has to go. This is not good for the furniture or her mother’s psychie.

So last Friday after she didn’t tell me and I found a surprise at naptime, I got pretty fried. One of Henry’s diapers was on the floor there, so I stuck it on her (he’s in 4’s) and deposited her in Henry’s crib with the admonishon that only babies go potty in their underwear and babies have to wear diapers and sleep in baby cribs. Wowee, should did not like that!!

She pretty much freaked out. Noooo, it’s Henry’s bed. I want my bed. This is Henry’s!!! I picked her up and plopped her flat on the matress because she wouldn’t lie down, and then attempted blankets. Well, that was met the same was as the crib itself, so I just left.

When I came to get her after nap, she was standing in the crib and had dumped everything else that was in there on the floor (of course). I’m pretty sure she didn’t sleep at all.

The next day, she was remarkably good and ooooh, came and told us when she had to go potty. That night she got a pullup and a big lecture about how good she’d been doing and was going to sleep in her own bed because big girls go potty in the potty. Twenty minutes later after I was done monkeying with the other kids, I picked her up and met ye olde stinkeroo. Argh!

So, I changed her and told her that she was going to have to sleep in Henry’s bed because that’s where babies who go potty in their undies or pullups have to sleep. She looked right at me and said, “I’m not a baby.” What did you just say? She repeated this to me three more times by the time I had her in bed. Ha! There’s the key. Finally, after three months, I think we may have found the key. Chocolate? Take it or leave it. Pretty big girls panties with butterflies and horses? Not terribly interesting. Wandering around in wet stinkiness? That’s okay. But the shame of having to sleep in your brother’s crib? Intolerable!

Since then she’s been pretty close to perfect. She had an oops at Babunya’s house Monday, but that’s pretty common when kids are learning. I’m not going to give her a bunch of grief about that until she’s really consistent at home. She’s starting to look like she’s making an effort at bed and naptime as well, so I’m expecting that to shape up here pretty soon as well. Yay!! This has been long and trying, and I’m glad that it seems to be nearly finished. Only one more child to go. At least that won’t be for awhile. Maybe he’ll be easy. One can dream, right?

Rachel

Wildlife Safari last week was great! We drove through the park twice, picnicked on their grounds, took a little train ride, ate snow cones, the kids rode camels, and nobody had a meltdown from spending six hours in the car. Here are a few pictures:

Trinity on the Train

Kyra the Zebra Girl

Hungry Hippo

Kyra with Her New Post-Haircut ‘Do

Non-Plastic Pink Flamingos

Georgie & Faith with Mr. Camel

Everyone had fun!

Henry’s Hungry

Have a great week!

Rachel