Spotlight on Ainsley

Maybe it's because I'm approaching my due date and am feeling overly emotional about everything, but I've been having some Mom guilt that lots of posts have addressing Reiley's new adventures and thoughts. Perhaps Ainsley's been slighted. So I've dedicated this post to showcasing Ainsley.

Her passion in life right now is pretend play, typically focusing around her baby - Baby Jesus. Yes, that's right, the infant Lord lives in our house and is Ainsley's constant companion (except at night-time and nap, he's just too exciting). Meet Baby Jesus in this clip. Where does she say Baby Jesus lives? Galilee. We only figured this out because she would spontaneously exclaim, "Galilee!" One day she followed it up with, "Baby Jesus, lives there." I guess Reiley's current interest in reading multitudes of Bible tales has added to Ainsley's Bible trivia.

Singing is another one of her faves. She makes up songs about things she eats, where she's going , rocks baby Jesus to sleep, and opens the hymn book at mass and invents little diddies. This often happens during times of silence, which gets a few glances. But if she's singing Jesus her own invented song - what am I going to do? I'm sure God doesn't mind. Here she's trying to sing "The Lord Hears the Cry of the Poor" for any of you familiar with it.


She also enjoys narrating and storytelling. When Kevin gets dressed for work in the morning, she coaches him on the next steps. "Put Daddy's white shirt on. Get Daddy's belt on. Socks! Shoes!" On sleep-deprived days, this is very helpful. Here's a clip of her telling you about how the chicken at Prairie Day bit her.

Conception Overanalyzed

A few mornings ago, while I was having prolonged bed-lying time due to Ainsley's new routine of 5 am wake-ups, Reiley hit me with this: "Mom, if you think a lot about having a baby someday, will your body just make a baby inside ofyou, even when you are still a kid?" Stifling laughter, I said, "No, Reiley, you can't make a baby all by yourself." She gave a sigh of relief and said "Good, because I am still a kid, so I don' t have a job yet. I also still live with you guys, I'm not married yet, and I don't know a lot of things to be able to take care of a baby right now." Whew! I don't have to worry about having a pregnant 4-year-old. I hope this same calm, level-headed, critical thinking is still there when she's 17.

Fall Fun

We had some fall fun a few weeks ago with an event each day because of the previous weekend's rain out. I always feel like there are so many fun fall things to do and not enough weekends to do them! On Saturday, we went on our annual apple-picking trip. It is ironic to Kevin and I that we went apple-picking, since we've been cursing the apple trees in our yard for over-producing this year and giving us so much yard work to do! However, our backyard does not have wagon rides, pig races, ice cream store, or a pumpkin-shooting cannon like the Eckert's Family Fun Farm.

Last year, Ainsley was not yet a walker, so she was able this year to pick apples off the tree. However, decaying, bug-infested apples on the ground were also equally enticing choices.

The most exciting part for Ainsley was carrying the bag around. Do not try to touch or help her with the bag. Even if it has gotten so heavy that breakage is imminent.
Reiley has a yearly tradition of sitting in an apple tree. She's very interested in climbing trees (or at least attempting it) right now, so her typical fear of heights was forgotten.
Eating ice cream at the "country store" is always a big hit, typically cited by Reiley as more important that the actual apple-picking. This year's wagon ride and tree-sitting must have very exciting because they were rated as "the favorite thing I did at the apple farm" this year.
On Sunday we made a trip out to the Missouri prairie for "Prairie Day". Reiley was psyched because she loves Little House on the Prairie books, and there were going to have "a REAL covered wagon!!" We had to take the shot that all parents take at the wooden stick-your-face-through-a-hole-and-smile cutouts. Reiley is playing the part of over-worked prairie girl fairly well, and Ainsley as the boy reminded me of all the wooden cut-outs that I made MY little sister look through. "Look, Meg, you can pretend to be the boy!"

The girls played in a house made of sod. I love Ainsley's look of wonderment in this picture. "Could I really live here??? A house made entirely of mud?!" She ran around the house, hitting the walls, saying "Walls - mud on them!"
The girls (Ainsley especially) had a lot of fun petting the sheep. Though Ainsley extrapolated "OK to touch sheep" to also mean "OK to stick fingers in chicken cage", and received a quick snip. She was more shocked than hurt, but Ainsley has been telling us the story since the incident, "The red chicken...bit me...NO chicken!" Prairie Day was much more walking than I had anticipated, and the weather was fairly humid, so we were getting hot, tired, and sticky near the end. This felt AWESOME as a hugely pregnant lady lugging around too-tired toddler. When the girls and I were walking toward the shuttle while Kevin took a bathroom break, I heard a grandma-aged woman say, "Look at that poor pregnant lady, carrying around that baby." Two minutes later, a woman passes me as I'm carrying Ainsley and holding Reiley's hand, and said "Oh my gosh, you seriously have your hands full - do you need help?" Perhaps I'll have to post a separate blog entry about how people feel they have liberty to say anything to a pregnant woman. I was just trying to walk to the freakin' bus, people! Give a tired, sweaty pregnant lady a break!

We took a moment to take a picture near the end because the wildflowers were so pretty - and I don't think I look nearly as pathetic and distraught as the Prairie Day folks believed me to be.
Happy fall to all!

Bend It Like Heffern

Soccer season has begun! Reiley is playing soccer for the first time on our parish's co-ed 4-year-old soccer team, and Kevin is one of the coaches. I'm liking it because all of the coaches are focused on the kids learning through small-group, fun exercises, with a few team scrimmages at the end of the season.

The temperature was in the 80s during the first practice, and we wondered how typically heat-resistant Reiley was going to feel about the sweating, and the heavy soccer shinguards and socks.

Reiley was also the second-youngest kid on the team, so you never know what the experience will be like with the "bigger" kids. The team sat in a line on their balls, and counted off into four groups. Reiley was in a group with three boys and one other girl (who turned out to be the one kid younger than Reiley). Reiley had a great time - split between playing with the boys and trying to console the other girl who was clearly not comfortable with the whole team sports thing (as evidenced by a nearly continuous stream of tears). At one point, Kevin was trying to encourage the other girl to join in the "Simon Says" game, and Reiley said, "Dad, it's ok if she doesn't want to do it right now. She'll start when she's ready."

By the end of practice, Reiley was ecstatic.

Reiley: "Dad, I had fun with you and Coach Tim and Coach Mike and Coach Eric, too, but I need a shower when we get home because I'm very sweaty."
Kevin: "You're right, soccer makes you sweaty. Some of the other kids told me they were getting sweaty and thirsty, too."
Reiley: "Yeah, but even though I was thirsty, I didn't say that. I just KEPT PLAYING until the coaches said it was time for a break."

Reiley also said her favorite friend from practice was a girl named Lindsey. Kevin didn't remember a Lindsey playing so he asked Reiley which girl she was. "Dad, do you remember that girl with a blue and yellow flowery dress and flowery sandals? That was Lindsey."

Yep, her best friend was the six-year-old big sister who was watching practice from next to the water bottle bench.

Another Brick in the Wall

Since we bought our house four and a half years ago, we've had a running list of home improvement projects. The list keeps getting longer and we haven't quite been able to strike as many items from the list as we would have hoped. We cite having three kids in a little over four years to be our primary reason for this slow home improvement!

Despite our turtle's pace, we've really attacked some big projects this year. It's always been our hope to finish the basement, but we had structural cracks to repair and water issues to address. We had the structural cracks/foundation issues repaired this summer, and were convinced that this was the solution to our basement water woes. Not the case - water still floods into our window well in the basement (thanks to our awesome home location at the bottom of a sloping hill, where our yard becomes home to all our higher-lying neighbors' water). We have big plans to regrade the backyard in the spring.

A smaller DIY project that we knew we could do was build a retaining wall to keep water out of our carport that inevitably seeps into the basement in small, yet annoying quantities. We finished the project in 4 days/evenings and had some very helpful pint-sized laborers! The project was every small child's dream: a huge pile of dirt delivered by a dump truck, a rainstorm that turned some of that pile of dirt into a mud pit, and much shoveling, dumping, and splashing. The girls braved the heat and humidity to build our wall that we all feel pretty proud of as our family creation. Here are some photo highlights!

Ainsley checking the soil saturation levels. (A very technical project than resulted in her little body caked with mud)

Reiley clearing out the mud from the puddle in order to "rebuild the river."

The mini manual laborers enjoying a well-deserved snack.

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The finished product!

The Most Important Job

The Mary Poppins soundtrack is getting constant play in our minivan's CD player. Reiley's seen the movie once, but with her unrivaled steel trap memory, she recalls little subtleties about the movie that I didn't realize she had picked up on. This has led to some in-depth discussions about the inner turmoil of various characters. We've talked at length about why the Daddy (Mr. Banks) is simultaneously distraught and happy about losing his job (for those of you who don't talk about this daily - his realization that work does not completely erase the need to spend time with his family).

She's seemed to have come to terms with Mr. Banks' character development throughout the movie, and now she's turned her interest to Mrs. Banks. Prompted by questions about why the kids have a nanny, I tried to give an age-appropriate summary of the Women's Suffrage Movement, and Mrs. Banks ("The Mommy's") excitement about getting women the vote. Being pro-woman and pro-political involvement myself, I was stressing the importance of the Mommy's involvement by saying, "That's an important job, too". Reiley replied, "But that is not the MOST important job, Mom. I think the most important job is being a mommy, because kids' jobs are are to play and learn. And they need a grown-up, like their Mom or Dad, to help them do that."

Whoa - four-year-olds don't worry about the political or social ramifications of their opinions. While various women could jump all over this statement and land on one ideological side or the other, I silenced that part of my brain and heard what my daughter was implicitly saying:

Thanks for being there for me, Mom. I think you are important.

In that moment, it became very clear to me what I have been grappling with these several years that I started working very part-time from home to stay home with my kids. My kids don't look at me as woman with advanced degree and student loans she's still paying off stalling her career by working part-time and unsure of when she'll ever re-enter the full-time work force. Who do I think the people that have this opinion are? Does it matter what society's expectations for "women like me" are? Over the years, I've turned my back on those messages to find out what I really want for my family and my children, and things have become more and more clear. As many of you know, the world of motherhood isn't always valued by society, and doesn't come with a lot of tangible pay-offs and promotions like the business world. Little fleeting moments like these are illuminating and validating.

Thanks, Reiley, for putting things in perspective so simply. I stay at home with my children for my children. Not to make a political or feminist statement or stand in judgement of others. I'm here to just be there for them, and it was incredible to feel truly appreciated.

Sprinkler Picnic

On Sunday, we decided to bypass the late-afternoon hump with a picnic at the park. How did we enjoy a picnic in 95 degree weather, you may ask? With huge, delicious burritos for pregnant Mommy (my all-time favorite pregnancy craving three pregnancies running), Budweiser for Daddy, and sprinklers for the kids.
What is it about upwardly moving water that is so exciting for kids?? I am amazed at how my girls can be so grumpy and antagonistic in the air-conditioned house, and once you take them outside into the scorching heat and turn on the sprinkler, the rage melts away. Seriously, the look of careless abandon on Reiley's face cracks me up - it's just fast-moving water! Though the fact that she loves it so much is exciting to me, because she refused to touch any water spraying from a sprinkler until last summer.

Ainsley also got mentally lost inside some type of waterworld wonderland while we were there. I imagine her mind playing a trippy Beatles-esque song (Sprinkler Park Forever to the tune of Strawberry Fields Forever) as she pads along the sprinkler park.
I felt happily full of burrito in the summer scorcher, Daddy felt slightly drunk (only kidding :-)), and the kids were enthralled with the water. I think we have a new plan for every Sunday afternoon in August.