Before they grow up too fast ...

and blogs become a thing of the past, I better post a few updates on how these three children are growing and changing!

Jamison

He's just so dear. He really is. I might even say he is cuter than the girls were at this age, but I guess it's too hard to compare boys and girls, so we'll just call it a draw.

Jamison does his fair share of whining, but when he needs assistance with something, he will just walk up to me and say "Hep me. Hep me." I wish I had had the foresight to teach Emery this when she was one.

Jamison is also obsessed with lawnmowers. He could hear one three states away and be out the front door in a hot second just to get a look. "Wawn-mowie!!" He is equally enthused with the vacuum cleaner which has had a great effect on the cleanliness of my floors.

He adores feeding our fish ("a bish! a bish!), is always eager to throw away trash (and dig through the trash can) and he could not be more attached to his blue rubber boots.

Jamison is still pretty attached to me, too, but if Matt is doing any kind of work outside or in the gym I am long forgotten. His sisters rank pretty high on his list as well, especially first thing in the morning.

Jamison almost always sleeps in his crib, but he will still fall asleep in other people's laps and even sometimes in mine. How much do I love this?! He must know he is always going to be my baby. Whew.

Anna Kimball



Poor Anna Kimball really went through the wringer this month. She spent a full week in gastrointestinal agony before we figured out she had appendicitis. That was fun. I have always believed that kids are resilient but after one too many needles and lost hours of sleep I was beginning to have my doubts about Anna Kimball.

Fortunately she proved me wrong and has bounced back just fine. She's back to being her happy-go-lucky self that constantly wants to know what's next on our agenda and what is on today's menu. Oh, and she is OBSESSED with her upcoming birthday. Naturally.

Anna Kimball has always been a great self-starter and very content with entertaining herself. This seems to be waning a bit and I'm not sure why. I think she might be missing Emery more while she's at school; while Jamison is loads of fun, he's not always the perfect playmate for her.

I'm confident she'll find her groove soon, though. Turning four is bound to have a good effect on her!

Emery



Emery is halfway through kindergarten and I couldn't be happier with how well she is doing. She has her fair share of days when she doesn't want to go to school, but overall she seems to enjoy it, is making friends, loves her teacher, etc. etc. etc. All I could ask for!

When she is not at school, Emery is creating, creating, creating! She's our little artist-engineer and it's so fun to watch her imagination at work. I think we will soon need to buy stock in Scotch tape, scissors and ballpoint pens.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing enough for Emery's spiritual formation. But then the other day, when Anna Kimball was begging for someone to be with her in her room, Emery yelled back, "Anna Kimball! Even though you think you are alone, you are NOT! God and Jesus are with you!!!!"

That made me feel better.

Clean-up problems solved

I take it back. Emery does still say humorous things. The other night she shared with us a ground-breaking solution that will actually make cleaning up fun:

"You know how it's not fun to clean up? Well, here's what you can do - you can just clean up with one hand and play with the other."

If only.

"The white man" and other things that are making us laugh

A few weeks ago, soon after Matt and the girls had been watching quite a bit of the coverage of the Pope's visit to the U.S., Anna Kimball asked, "Mommy, that house that we saw at the running race (a big brick art museum downtown), is that where the white man lives?"

I just love the connections kids make at this age. Like, here's the most important looking man I have ever seen and then there's the biggest house I have ever seen so naturally the two must go together.

Jamison puts on a great show for me and the church nursery workers every week. Whenever I drop  him off, instead of crying, he just freezes with one knee slightly bent and stares at the ground. He won't make eye contact with anyone. Not even me.

Now what could be going through his head? Maybe "if I act like I'm not in this room I won't really have to be here?" Would that we could really know ... In any case, this peaceful opposition to being left in the nursery is always good for a few chuckles.

I'm starting to get concerned that since Emery is 5 1/2 she isn't going to say as many funny things anymore. None really come to mind right now. But, she still scrunches up her nose when she's explaining something important and that's kind of funny. And the relative maturity that comes from 5 1/2 years on this planet is certainly welcome on days dominated by irrational toddler/preschooler behavior.

She hasn't shed a tear

Emery's been in kindergarten almost a month now and I can't say that Anna Kimball has once indicated that she misses her or wishes she were still at home with us during the day. It's not as if Anna Kimball is happy to have her gone, it's just that, well, she's content with our new normal. 

These children, they have a lot they can teach us! I have shed more than enough tears for the both of us and have done more than my fair share of complaining inwardly and outwardly about this transition to having one member of our family in school five days a week. 

Anna Kimball is also pretty proud to now be in preschool. She does the one-morning-a-week co-op preschool that Emery did and according to her teacher, acts like she's been in school all her life. 

She's also doing a fantastic job of playing with Jamison and taking on the role of calling the shots now that big sister is out of the picture much of the time.

Having Emery in kindergarten is a startling wake-up call to just how quickly the "littlest years" fly by. I'm so happy I get to be with Anna Kimball and Jamison during the day and really just want to follow Anna Kimball's lead in embracing and accepting the season that we are now in.

Here's our brave and happy kindergartener, who has also shed her fair share of tears ... but now bounds down the steps each afternoon happy to declare she had a "no tears" day. Gotta love her!

"You don't have to tell me because I already know."

Currently, this is one of Emery's most-used responses to any information being relayed to her. I think it usually tends to be in response to good news from someone smaller than she, as in Anna Kimball is exclaiming there will be ice cream for dessert or that we are going to the pool.

So maybe our little know-it-all really is ready to start kindergarten next week.

Emery certainly is into seeming more grown-up than she actually is. I sometimes catch her talking to herself in bed, making up words to sound smarter. You know, just adding "tion" to the end of any word and using her very best professional, motherly voice.

Yet, the lack of inhibition or self-awareness is still there and for this I am so very grateful. This means she will still blurt out to the elderly man up the street getting his mail, "I know how to swim but not all the way!" No introductions, no formalities. Just getting to the point. It's great.

In the past few weeks sometimes Emery has been so dear and such a delight to be around that my heart just cannot bear the thought of sending her to school for 35 hours a week so someone else can watch her be who she is. And then a friend reminded me, "The world needs her little light. Send her out!"

True. And I did need to be told that, even though I already knew. 

July is for Jamison

Attempting to summarize summer so far actually overwhelms me to the point of wanting to shut down this blog all together. I think the only way out of this blogging hiatus is to catch up with several short posts instead of getting bogged down by a diary of all that we've been up to for the last eight weeks.

So today I will give a little summary on Jamison and call that success for July.

He is at the most adorable and vexing stage right now. He still looks enough like a baby that I just want to devour his thighs and snuggle him so ... but he's also old enough to wriggle out of your arms and get into big trouble with electronic devices, toilet paper rolls, spice grinders, you name it. His favorite words are "Da!" "Dog!" and "Go!" Though I'm still his parent of choice, the instant Matt revs up the lawnmower Jamison does a Jekyll and Hyde on me and will. not. be. moved from his observation deck.

It's pretty wonderful.

Jamison enjoys his sisters but is quickly learning to hold his own with them. Just today when one of them was trying to grab something he was playing with, he bellowed the deepest, manliest "NOOO" I've heard him utter so far.

Jamison has been walking since he was 14 months old, which is a new experience for us, given that the girls didn't get going on their two legs until 21 months or so. When Emery would carefully go through a basket of board books, page by page, at his age, I thought this was normal toddler behavior. When Anna Kimball would quietly inspect a bag of small trinkets and toys, I thought this was normal toddler behavior. And I think I was right ... it's just that now I'm learning there are many different kinds of "normal."

The only book Jamison has ever gazed at for more than a moment has pictures of dogs. I might as well toss all my buckets of little toys for him to fiddle with because he is over it. All this boy wants to do is climb the furniture, mow the lawn, run away from me at the pool, turn his sister's CD player into something that doesn't play music anymore and then melt my heart all over again with his grin.

What progress looks like

I believe last spring I blogged about Emery's preschool performance, during which she just stared at the audience and never opened her mouth except to shout out, "Anna Kimball!!" in between songs. 

This year she actually did sing along and even cracked a smile or two ... but kept her arms folded the whole time. Too cool for preschool?

Who knows? It's all behind us now ... nothing but a few months of fun in the sun stands between us and kindergarten. Eek. 

Emery is also as cautious as they come. As in it is pretty difficult to get her to even go down a playground slide unless it's a three-foot baby one. Well, she's doing swim lessons right now and at the end of class the kids "get" to go down this slide if they want to. 

Double eek. Emery has actually been going down with an instructor but we told her that if she went down by herself she'd get a milkshake. I had no idea that would do the trick. I didn't even see her come down, I was that sure she was going to ride with the instructor. 

But she did! At this rate she'll be marching off the diving board come Memorial Day to snag that ice cream prize Matt has promised her for such a feat.