2 round-trip train tickets to Seattle: $159
Hotel stay: $130 per night
Leaving kids behind for a few days: 1 grandmother’s sanity (and grandpa helped)
Monorail to the Seattle Center: $2 per person
Adult admission to the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum: $15 per person
Spilling the beans that there are 3 Matthews in this picture: Priceless
I know this is nothing new when it comes to children’s antics, but I just think it’s the most adorable thing in the world when my girls are changing clothes and decide to run around with their shirts on their heads chanting, “Silly hat! Silly hat!” I rarely get the chance to snap a picture. I just happened to have the camera nearby when Phaedra donned her silly hat tonight, so I couldn’t resist.
Eleanor didn’t have a silly hat tonight. She was pretending Mary Poppins was here. She told me she snapped her fingers and her clothes came off. Then she snapped her fingers again, and her jammies went on all by themselves. And she snapped her fingers again, and her clothes went into the laundry.
I hope Mary Poppins comes around more often.
This morning, I was reading my book while Eleanor was trying desperately to “play school” with Phaedra. The only trouble with that was Phaedra’s inability to take orders and play along. She wants to do things her way, and Eleanor just wants her to follow. But they managed, with the occasional argument and squawking. Eleanor loved putting things in her ladybug backpack, and Phaedra had a little pink backpack she kept asking me to help her put on after every time she took it off.
A little while later, when they had moved on to playing with other toys (I think they were setting up beds in the family room by then), I went into my bedroom to find this on my dresser:
Apparently, their school needs a coat rack.
I have been sick, with hardly any voice, and trying to take care of the kids and house while Grant has had his long evenings at grad school. So yesterday morning, when Grant’s work had a 2 hour delay due to snowy roads, it was Heaven sent. I let Grant deal with the kids while I tried to get a little extra rest.
Eleanor has been fantasizing about making snow angels, but we haven’t had any snow for her to do it. I knew that it would feel like a chore to bundle them up, send them out in the snow, and possibly have to go out in the cold myself as soon as any drama should arise. But I didn’t want to spend the whole day feeling guilty for not letting my girls play in the snow because I’m sick. So I told Grant the one thing he could do for me before going to work was to let the kids play in the snow—and take pictures for me. And being the wonderful, caring, supportive husband and daddy that he is, he did.
The following are a bunch of pictures of their fun in the snow. Since I wasn’t there, I can’t really explain accurately what was going on, but Eleanor and Phaedra narrated the pictures a bit as I scanned through them on the computer. I’ll let you read about what happened in their own words.
Explanation from Grant (later): Phaedra wanted to make a snow angel, but then she just laid there in the snow without moving for the longest time. She didn’t really cry, she just peeked out at us from behind her hands. I finally figured out that she wasn’t getting up because she couldn’t get up. She couldn’t bend enough at the waist to get up by herself.
We had snow off and on, and off and on yesterday. During Phaedra’s nap, Eleanor really wanted to try to catch a snowflake on her tongue. I can’t say no when it comes to snow because it’s not like she’ll get another chance very soon. So I let her step out on the back porch and see what she could catch. She was so happy that she caught some, and she thought it was so funny that she got snow in her hair.
