We started out the new year with another Patrick tooth extraction! It's a little tricky to come up with a new way to do it each time but we had a nice option this time, we tied the string to Patrick's tooth and then to Juliet and instructed her to run away when we said go. She was so thrilled to be involved and did a great job!
It was our easiest experience yet pulling one of Patrick's teeth! Worked on the first try!
Patrick with a slightly bloody tissue and the dollar he earns whenever he lets me yank a tooth in a creative manner. Between my payments and the tooth fairy he earned $7 for his first three teeth he lost!
Speaking of which, Patrick was snuggled up by me the other afternoon and started asking questions about how on earth Santa was able to make the Dav Pilkey book he got in his stocking for Christmas. We had a VERY IMPORTANT TALK because of this and Patrick is beyond delighted to be in on a secret although he was a little sad about flying reindeer and elves. No sorrow because of Santa, Santa was always pretty lame, especially this year when he just brought three very small gifts. A week or so later Juliet was cuddled up by me and Patrick in bed one morning and started singing Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Patrick leaned over to her and said, "Santa Claus is TOTally real, right, Juliet?" and started winking at me. A side benefit about knowing about secrets is getting to assist with Santa duties and Patrick has also informed me that he's keeping his teeth he loses from now on and is starting a collection. Not creepy at all ...
Cute Juliet likes tracing outlines of people's hands now. It's a lot of fun when she does it, she's very enthusiastic.
And FYI, Juliet is able to manipulate people at will and will cry on command. I wouldn't give her candy the other day and she started crying but could still talk and asked for Eleanor because she knows who will give her candy if I say no. Her powers are both impressive and terrifying.
On new years day we had a very small amount of snow but it was the first amount of snow that was at least worth playing in that we've had this season, so the kids and Nathan bundled up and went outside to enjoy it.
Nathan, AKA "the cool parent" even had a snowball fight with the kiddos.
Juliet was an eager participant.
We have a lot of fun with our neighbors, the Kriegers, whenever it snows.
Snow angel!
Snow angel.
I am in charge of cocoa and warming kids up when they come inside.
Eleanor is in charge of laundry and cuddling any kitties on top of the laundry. We keep switching around the chores the kids do. It's interesting what the valued jobs are vs the hated ones. No one seems to mind dishes but everyone hates vacuuming. To be fair, the floors have to be cleaned in order to be vacuumed and that is the worst part of the whole thing.
Juliet begged and begged for a sleepover with Patrick and Eleanor so we caved and gave it a try.
It did not go well, despite Juliet having skipped her nap that day. We finally had to send her back to her room when Nathan walked in and Patrick and Eleanor were both asleep and Juliet was wide awake and sideways on her sleeping bag, shoving Eleanor with her feet on repeat. We have not agreed to a sleepover since.
We played so many new games after Christmas. A surprise hit was Mastermind Kids - even Eleanor likes it! She and the boys were playing it together on repeat.
I wanted to film board game videos during winter break and Nathan and the kids wanted to play video games and so a small tv was moved to our room while I filmed in the basement. It's warm and cozy in our room and the small tv has remained there ever since. Eleanor loves her new Kirby video game and is so proud to have a video game that she likes.
Juliet got a replacement present from her Uncle Thomas after the first microscope he got her showed up broken. New one is well-loved!
Joy over testing it out, especially when it became apparent that siblings were desperate to try it as well.
Thank you, Uncle Thomas!
That night Eleanor and I wanted to take advantage of the new tv in the cozy room and sit on the bed and cuddle kitties and eat popcorn and watch a show but Nathan said no because he thought popcorn in the bed was a terrible idea. These were our angry faces - Eleanor's needs work.
Eleanor is actually doing a bit more work selling Girl Scout cookies this year. She made a sales video that turned out to be highly effective. Cute kitties help sell cookies!
Juliet at gymnastics! Please note the braids and pigtails. I've really been enjoying doing her hair lately.
She has a gymnastics birthday party coming up and everyone knows about it because she tells them almost every time she's at gymnastics for a class.
Nathan still works from home here and there. This is an accurate photo of how efficient he's able to be while doing so.
So - here is a video of me singing the "Meow Meow Song" which Juliet demands from me most nights. It's to the tune of Brahm's Lullaby so you know it's classy. I came up with it when she asked for a kitty song one night and apparently I did too good of a job.
Juliet likes to sing the Meow Meow song to her pretend babies.
And to Eleanor when Juliet is getting to help me with big kid bedtime. Because she's the only one who still takes naps she falls at sleep at the same time as Bradley and Eleanor and sometimes she's up even a little bit later. She reeeeally enjoys getting to tell them to go to sleep.
The inspiration for all kitty songs. This is Meg's preferred spot to sleep during the winter.
She also helps me read to children at bedtime. We are in love.
Patrick's basketball season is going as expected. He has so much fun playing and he never stops moving.
He scored six baskets in his first game. We're trying to get him to pass the ball more. He beats me when we play one on one in the driveway after school and while I'm fairly rusty, I'm not too shabby. The poor 1st graders don't stand a chance.
With the movement of most screen time, especially video game time, to our bedroom, Juliet has a new favorite spot to watch shows on a tablet. It's hilarious to have her run over and hop into the laundry basket whenever it's an evening where the kids get screen time.
Bradley doing some bedtime reading for an impish sister. On MLK day the kids didn't have school and I was trying to prep for filming board game videos so Bradley took Juliet upstairs, read to her, then mostly closed her door and sat outside and sang "All the Pretty Little Horses" to her. He's a champ.
Bradley and Juliet like to play Baby Menace together based on the cute nickname I used to call Juliet when she was a naughty baby getting into everything. She's really embraced the name - yet another example of her being cute and terrifying.
Juliet and her buddy Caroline have been getting in a good number of winter play dates.
This is at Kidscape, at the Johnson County Museum. Juliet was insistent that she needed to be the doctor and Caroline could be the patient and Caroline is correct to look a bit concerned about the situation.
Juliet spotted in her closet the princess dress my mom made for Eleanor when she was around Juliet's age and insisted that I get it down for her so she could be fancy.
The standard Scott child napping position. Asleep with a book on their chest!
Bradley had some awesome hair after wearing a hat one day. Nathan can still pick him up and carry him to bed!
We renewed our membership to The Museum of Prairiefire. Juliet is such a good little scientist.
She's also good at playing with an adorable train track I made for her and then destroying it all fifteen minutes later.
Nathan and I finally made it to a board game night with a Facebook group we're part of. It was very fun, but we had to sacrifice one of our Friday dinners and game night with my folks in order to go so I'm not sure if we'll make it again anytime soon. Also we played our most impressive game with the people there (Unmatched) and I don't know if they would be okay with our standard light fair.
That night it dumped a fair amount of snow and the kids finally got to have a good romp in the snow complete with sledding.
My dad is the mysterious dark figure in the background. His primary job was to pull Juliet back up the hill after she slid down, because she made it known in no uncertain terms that she was not interested in walking.
Bradley complained about how cold he was at one point. Perhaps eating the snow could be to blame ...
Bradley and Eleanor, literally face down eating snow. These crazy kids.
This is about the point we decided Juliet might be due for a hot cocoa break.
She rallied a bit when playing with Eleanor.
Me and my dad and Juliet right before I hauled the tired toddler back home.
The older two joined our friends the Krenns for an afternoon of sledding at a legit hill near their house.
Patrick and Juliet wisely elected to stay home with me and rest up and stay warm. People are serious about their sledding in Kansas - driving to the prime sledding spots is such a foreign concept to me but people do it all the time here. Definitely seems worth it for hills like this!
This is what my afternoon looked like. Plus Patrick snuggled up to my left while we read books by each other. Rough stuff.
Trying out a new board game that evening.
Cozy reading time with Grandma!
Eleanor was delighted to get to go to her friend Cate's birthday party at a climbing gym.
She spent four or five hours climbing, I can't believe she wasn't an exhausted wreck when she got home.
It looked so neat though, Eleanor had a blast!
Meanwhile, the other three played in old snow. It's actually my favorite way for kids to play in snow - it was 40 degrees out so it felt pretty balmy.
I was still cold though and put on my kitty scarf when I went inside and even my 2 year old daughter judged me for this.
We're in the process of getting certified for foster care - we're planning on just doing respite care which is helping out with someone else's foster child for a weekend or two each month. Part of this process involved taking the kitties in for shots for the first time since they were kittens. They were all very nervous but did very well and we got a clean bill of health for all three of them!
An interesting piece of information to come out of the vet visit was that we were told all three of our kitties are torties! We knew Sookie was, but I assumed Meg was a gray tabby and Layla was a calico. Nope, apparently Meg is a diluted tortie and Layla is a tortie with white. Layla was the most controversial to label, apparently some people say that torties can't have any white but calicos don't have Layla's kind of coloring - so she remains a unique and beautiful kitty and Nathan says it's not surprising that his kitty is the most special and unique one (eyeroll).
We watched a friend's child while she went to an OB appointment. She openly discussed with me in front of Juliet about the ordeal of her little boy eating a quarter a week before and waiting for him to poop it out. Juliet had her work cut out for her the rest of the time he was at our house and kept telling him to not eat anything he happened to be holding in his hand because you never know what's going to happen with a quarter eater. And, he did happen to have a good poop while he was at our house, and I had to search through it for the quarter. I used a pair of disposable chopsticks. It was very gross. Juliet and I are united in our hope that no one in our house ever eats a quarter.
More poop! Juliet found coprolite at the dinosaur museum.
I get compliments on her outfits whenever we go places. Rightfully so. Do you see this? I even did French braids.
We had our friends the Smiths over for a board game afternoon last Saturday. One of the best things about getting together with them is their sweet children. Their youngest son Archer is just about six months older than Juliet and they are beyond adorable together.
The friends stayed late and Juliet seemed a little tired the next morning and I didn't think anything of it until we realized she was running a low fever on Sunday night. I still took her out to the park the next day because it was gorgeous out and she mostly sat in the wagon and ate snacks besides a little swing action at the playground. But her fever lasted three days and we were very freaked out about germs because we have so much fun stuff coming up, this is not the time to get sick!
Fun thing #1 - a skating party through the school on Monday night! Fortunately, we were happy to have Juliet skip this. It was very cold and she wouldn't have been able to skate anyway.
The big kids all loved it though.
Especially Eleanor. This was the first time skating for all three of them and they did so well!
The crew skating - boys are in the middle and Eleanor is holding onto a wall in the back at this point.
It was so adorable when Eleanor decided to skate with Patrick although I was shocked that she agreed to do it because he fell down constantly when he was skating on his own.
Sure enough, it didn't last long until he knocked them both over.
We decided to get a Covid test for Juliet because of her fever, although she didn't have any other symptoms. Trying to do the saliva test was a huge fail and I felt very embarrassed to have to go back and ask for a different test but I felt better when one worker told the person who gave me the saliva test originally that he never gives those to kids under the age of seven. They wanted a lot of drool and it wasn't going to happen. Test came back negative, which was a relief! And the fever disappeared the next day.
However, she still had a fever of 100 degrees at bedtime when she ran around wildly and insisted on doing this to Eleanor.
Crashing hard for much needed rest.
I left her with my dad the next morning while I hosted a MOPS play date at the Cardboard Corner. We had coffee and chatted and even got a game in!
Juliet was twenty-four hours fever free on Thursday so she was able to go to her first Little Explorers class at the museum. It's supposed to be for ages three and up but I checked and it was okay for her to start attending a week early. She absolutely loved it. Her first class was a dinosaur themed class.
Her teacher may have melted a bit at the end of the class when Juliet started enthusiastically telling her about her two teachers and she looked at me for clarification and I let her know that she was now on equal footing with Juliet's gymnastics teacher who she bragged about constantly.
The art project from the class. Feathers for the dinosaur!
And then building a structure and seeing what happened when a earthquake simulator was used on it.
Cute boys playing a game together. There are few competitive games that do not end in tears around here but Patrick has been way into Rock Paper Scissors lately and apparently Rock Paper Scissors War is an excellent sibling game.
The other big event this month has been working on pinewood derby cars for cub scouts!
Nathan even helped Eleanor make a car for fun because he's awesome like that.
So three cars in total. It was a ton of work. Kudos to Nathan for setting up a little shop space in a storage room in our basement.
Finished result! Kitty car.
Bradley named his "Sword that Seals the Darkness" after the master sword in Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
And Patrick made Blue Lightning. They race them on Saturday!
We're prepping for a big February. We have a trip to Great Wolf Lodge planned for this weekend. I was shopping for a new swimsuit for Eleanor online and we were looking at all her options and she was seriously interested in some leopard print swimsuits so I told her the basic leopard print looked like something a 35 year old woman would wear and she should go for one of the cute colored prints. She agreed with me and then told me maybe I should get a new leopard print swimsuit so I could look younger. Because I'm 37. Thanks Eleanor ...
Really, I need to watch what I say in general. But the kids are so fun and it's hilarious to teach them new tricks! Lately we've been working on transitioning back and forth between cute and scary faces. They're all really good at it.
