eternally chaotic

We had a great time this past weekend spending some time cooling off at the Duluth Town Center Fountain.  The Sun was blisteringly hot and the air might as well have been dripping water, but the water coming from the fountain was refreshing and cool.  We grabbed some Chick-Fil-A along the way, ate on the curb, and headed in.  Once they all got used to the water they had a great time.  Isaac didn’t need any warming up and was racing in circles as fast as he could swallow his chicken and fries.  Piper was on his tail but needed her hand held for the first few minutes – that was until she got wet and started play.  Violet needed a bit more prodding and she wasn’t having anything to do with me taking her through.  Carol grabbed them all took them on a few laps to get them all good and soaked – that’s all it took to get Violet all revved up as well.

Jacob received a remote controlled car for Christmas this past year.  One that can drive over nearly anything, spin in circles, do wheelies, and glow in the dark.  Piper loves this car.  She has only just started learning how to drive it with any control, but half the fun is figuring that part out.  Her and Violet both took the car for a turn around the house.  I followed them around with the camera while they had a blast.  One turn for Piper and one for Violet.  About a week after this we saw the same car on Woot and decided to get one for Piper as an extra gift for her upcoming birthday.

Two Jamaican Brides and One Curly Headed Princess — 45 Min of tortured fingers
Three Times My Little Pony — Russian roulette with a fairy wand
Hungry Hungry Hippo Marathon — One Mommy with a Migraine
Barbie Bath Tub Party — Barbie needs a maid
Pedicures All Around — Toenails on ground
Snacks at 10:30pm — Energy before bed
Tucked into Bed — Tiredness still forthcoming
Hugs all around — and around and around and around…..

(more…)

This week marks the start of pre-k for Piper, about a month behind schedule.  She is still at the Legacy but in a pre-k program that is ran by the state.  Up until recently we weren’t sure she was going to be able to attend pre-k, well at least not the state sponsored version.  Legacy was passed over for the first round of Bright From the Start funding and weren’t certain about their prospects with the second round.  We looked around the area for other places to go but the pickings were slim at best with waiting list after waiting list.  In the end patience persevered, well that and not really having any other options.

We were able to meet her teachers this week at a short meeting where they told us about the program details.  They both, Mrs. Gail and Ms Mayonn, seem to have their ducks in a nice neat row.  Having taught at elementary school and daycare in the past they are both excited to being doing pre-k.  As with every government run program, the state has strictly structured exactly what the teachers can and cannot do with the kids.  There are deviations of course but only off the record.  I think Piper is going to do well and I hope she won’t be on a learning plateau until kindergarten.  If anything she will sharpen what she already knows, add bits more, and be ready to run once she gets to elementary school.

It has been raining for the past week in Atlanta.  Literally.  Mainly just on and off sprinkling followed by a short downpour followed by mugginess, wash, rinse, repeat.  Over the weekend however heavy rain came down continuously causing flooding in most of the area.  We woke up this morning to hear about school and road closures around the whole Atlanta area.  Gwinnett County schools of course were only on delay which later changed to a closure as well.  The flooding has been pretty severe closing surface streets and interstate junctions like “Spaghetti Junction” causing significant traffic problems all around town.  The news said a few schools were flooded as well but we didn’t hear about any in our area that were affected other than just being shutdown – likely due to transportation issues more so than flooding.

Looks like the kids will get to stay home and play for another day.  Isaac was concerned though that school was “closed forever”…oddly that upset him (maybe we should check his temperature).  I don’t think we will hear the same complaint from Jacob he has been at home sick for the past few days missing much of school last week and was non to excited to go back today.  Piper still gets to go to pre-school which stays open regardless and Violet is already at school when she wakes up.

I am not squeamish or faint or weak-kneed at the site of blood.  In nearly all cases where I have encountered it in the past, regardless of the details, it has never bothered me.  This is certainly not the case when it comes to the girls and bloody noses.  If it were anything else, skinned knees, cuts and scraps, whatever, I would just bandage them up, kiss the pain away and send them packing.  There is something about bloody noses though that scares me.  The location nor the seriousness of what is causing the bleeding is rarely evident.

Tonight I heard Piper crying on the monitor, this being somewhat typical shortly after bedtime, usually resulting in the need for a drink, often goes ignored for ten to fifteen minutes.  There was something though about her crying that caught my attention, everyone that has kids knows what I am talking about, a slight change in pitch or less whining or a layer of panic, etc…as a parent you know and it is hard to explain.  So I dashed up the stairs, hit the light and quickly took in the situation: Piper on her knees in her bed with her hands covered in blood.  It was smeared all over her face and had dripped and been rubbed over her clothing and bedding.

I was able to get her calmed down pretty quickly and once she saw it was only blood and not something else, weirdly she calmed down – I had expected the opposite.  I cleaned her up, changed clothing and bedding and had her lay back while we waited for the bleeding to stop together.  Interestingly she wasn’t crying because her nose was bleeding but because “something” was coming out of it and in the dark of the nightlight she didn’t know what it was and that scared her.  I find it a little ironic though that the princess of the pair didn’t mind the gushing blood but the inability to identify it properly – perhaps there is hope yet…

Since I have some unfounded fear of the nosebleed I decided to take a look online and see what I could find.  What causes them?  Are they serious in kids?  Is it normal?  At what point is it serious enough to head in for an emergency?  Time to squish the fear with knowledge.  So here is what I learned.

Anterior nosebleeds are the most common in kids.  Caused by capillaries that break and burst for no real reasons but possibly from allergies, a recent cold, sinus infection, dry nasal cavity, small fingers digging, etc… are mostly harmless and the amounts of blood are inverse to the severity of the problem in most cases.  If they happen more than once a week or continuously for several weeks the recommendation is to see a doctor just to make sure something more sinister isn’t going on.

Another thing I learned is that you should not tilt the head backward to help ease a nosebleed.  Supposedly it does not make it stop any faster than just applying tissue to catch the drips and it adds the risk that the blood will escape out of the back of the nasal cavity and into the throat.  If that happens and in rare cases it could cause you to vomit – I guess you stomach is squeamish about blood even if your eyes are not.

I have been teaching Piper how to do mazes lately.  An instead of just purchasing books of mazes for her to color in, I have found many many sites online that offer them from very simple to quite complex, all available for download and printing, thus reusable.  One site stood out, and while not so kid friendly in locating the appropriate maze for a four year old, it did offer literally one billion mazes.  On the sheet that it provides you print out both a blank and the solution.

• One Billion Mazes

There were however plenty of sites where I found mazes appropriate for young kids to solve.  There are certainly tons of places out there to download mazes, but many I found were wrapped with pop up windows and other annoying site elements that make finding the actual downloads quite difficult. These were the few that were clean and easy.

• Krazydad
• All Kids Network
• Mazoons

While looking around I found lots of different types of mazes.  There was one site that offered types that I had never even heard of – grids, patterns, hex-grids, spaghetti, freehand, tiles, brains, designs, jumping, and 3-D.  All for the pleasure of getting a line from point A to point B in the most imaginative ways possible – now if I could just relate this to getting the girls to take their fork (point A) and put it in their mouths (point B) come dinner time.

• Mega Mazes

So far Piper loves to do these and is getting better at them the more she tries.  She still doesn’t quite understand the point or the rules, in particular that you cannot cross over the lines to go down a different tunnel, but with each new maze or the repeat of one she has done in the past she is learning.

The girls are just at that age range, and Violet is still pretty young, that they are still a bit like oil and water.  It is becoming more frequent but still somewhat rare that they will play or relax together.  After we came in from the snow on Sunday the girls both grabbed books and jumped into the recliner.  After a few minutes of watching them battle for position they settled into reading their books.  Violet would watch Piper like a hawk trying to figure out not only what she was doing but being sure to mimic each and everything.  I was able to get a few pictures before they noticed me and started being hams.

What started out, or so I assumed, as a just another cold Sunday changed with some excitement from Piper, yelling about the sky falling from the playroom.  “Daddy, It’s snowing!!! It’s snow daddy!!!  Come hear, come hear”.  I don’t know what I thought she might be seeing but snow certainly was not on the list.  It has been cold and rainy, and later I heard that snow was forecast, but it so rarely snows here that it never crossed my mind that it actually was – silly three-year-old – what does she know.

Turns out she knows precisely what snow looks like falling from the sky.  This wasn’t just small flakes dusting the ground either.  It was the huge puffy wet snow falling everywhere.  At the point Piper noticed it had likely been snowing for a while as the ground, bushes and vehicles were covered with an inch or so.

Quickly we got dressed to suffer the cold and wet to come and rushed out to play.  Violet had been in snow before but not at an age she would remember.  She certainly had fun just running around and looking at the snow fall from the sky.  Piper enjoyed it as well but was quite obviously cold.  We played for a good while before I was able to get some pictures and we headed back inside for hot cocoa and chocolate milk.

A friend of mine asked me recently if I regretted having two girls or secretly wished that we had both girls and boys.  I have certainly been asked this before, in particular around the time before we knew, or announced, that our second baby was going to be a girl as well.  I don’t really know how to answer the question though.  If I look at the girls and try to think of what would be different were there a boy in the mix, I struggle to find an answer.

Piper and Violet are certainly girls, well Piper is for certain and Violet is just rough and tough and mean – perhaps she is a boy in disguise.  I rarely think of them as such though.  Doing so would only place false limits on what they should or should not do because of their gender.  We play rough, inside and outside, we climb everything, crawl in the grass, get muddy, work in the garage, they get tickled and tackled, they wrestle with me and lately each other, they assault the dog until he takes interest at which point they turn tail lest they be licked.  Now granted that many of these things they might do in the likeness of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White or Belle, they do them nonetheless being girls.

Perhaps the differences at this age are too insignificant and as they get a bit older and are around more girls and boys and start seeing classic roles played out, even in grade school, their attitude and mine might change – I certainly hope that isn’t the case.  I look back and think of the things my dad and I used to do when I was a kid such as work on the car, take care of the yard and house, play football, go fishing, etc…and I can only be excited for the time when I can do the same with the girls.  If I try to think about those experiences to come and how they might be different were one of them a boy I draw a blank, would I bond differently with a him, would I have different expectations, would I push him harder for success, in all case I think not.

Another topic to this conversation typically revolves around carrying on the family name.  I think that such is important but don’t believe that only the men can carry on the name or the traits that make up a family.  In particular as times change and the line between men and women in society blurs I foresee plenty of opportunity for the girls to strengthen their family name as well as make names for themselves.  Their are plenty of examples where men take the woman’s name, a hyphenation occurs, or each party in the relationship keeps their own name.