Das Jahr begann für uns mit Rekordschneefall von einem Meter, der drei Tage schulfrei bescherte und das Bauen von ganzen unterirdischen Tunnelstädten ermöglichte – ein großer Spaß für die Kinder, aber lästiges Übel für all diejenigen, die trotzdem irgendwie zur Arbeit kommen mussten.

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Milo is doing his homework as sloppily as possible and drawing outside of the lines.

Nic: “Come on, Milo you can do better than that. You draw like a 3 year old kid.”

Milo: “That’s just my style.”

Felix as we are driving on the highway: “The other cars are going slower than us because they don’t know where their hyper speed button is, right mom?”

Milo: “At school Emma is always following me because she is in love with me.”

Nic: “Aww that’s sweet.”

Milo: “No, its not! She loves me.”

Nic: “Yes, what’s wrong with that?”

Milo: “But she is way too young to get married!”

Nic after carrying Felix’s motorcycle toy for a few minutes: “Felix, can you please hold your own toy.”

Felix: “But I look awesome without holding anything though.”

Milo’s reading is getting better by the day, but sometimes it is still hard for him to grasp the meaning of what he reads while he is focusing so hard on pronouncing letters. Even after he has “read” a sentence, he sometimes asks for me to read it again so that he can understand the thing as a whole. Well, the other day he definitely got the meaning of what he read when this happened:

Milo reads about sharks. The book says: “About ten people get killed by sharks every year. But every year people kill thousands of sharks.” Milo immediately breaks down sobbing all over the book and crying hysterically about the poor sharks.

After kids going “mom”, “mom”, “mom” every two minutes for hours on end, I ask  of them: “Guys, can you just for 5 minutes find something to do by yourself and don’t constantly say mommy mommy mommy.

Milo: “Okay, Nicola.”

Milo and me having a discussion about a dinosaur movie:

Milo: “Mom, there are no real dinosaurs, right?”

Nic: “There used to be real dinosaurs, but not anymore.”

Milo: “But the dinosaurs in the movie are not real dinosaurs, right?”

Nic: “There were real dinosaurs a long time ago, but the ones in the movie are not really real.”

Milo: “I know that, the real ones are just featured in the movie. Wait, how do I know what featured means?”

Felix hears the echo of his yelling: “Did you hear that guys? My mouth is somewhere else.”

Hi guys, what’s up. Anybody still here? I know it’s been awfully quiet on this blog lately and that’s mainly because you know why. Time. Who has time anymore for this stuff? Actually, it’s mostly because I have successfully met my goal last year to relax more and do less. Instead of doing home projects, I’ve drastically upped my TV watching and book reading and going out going. That was a nice change, but this year I’m ready to turn the creative juices back on and hopefully get a good mix of everything going. For a start, here are some of the conversations you’ve missed:

The other day I discovered my first white hair and showed it to Milo. His first immediate reaction: “I’ll be really sad when you die.” Later on: “Can I see your old hair again?”

One night I was trying to motivate the kids to put their PJs on as fast as possible so that we would have more time to read. Usually that works by making it a race. So I started putting my PJs on and said to Milo: “Come on, Milo, faster or I’m gonna win.”

Milo: “It’s not a race mom.”

Me: “Really? But what if it is a race and I’m winning?”

Milo: “But it’s not a race.”

Me: “How do you know it’s not a race?” (Fully expecting to win this argument)

Milo: “Well, because you didn’t say ready-set-go and started without me.” (Can’t argue with that)

One night while doing homework, Milo decided that he could connect all the individual letters in a word to each other, so he was practically spontaneously writing in cursive. Lincoln said:” Wow, Milo, how did you learn that? You are writing in cursive, that’s a dying form of writing.”

Later on Felix asked Milo what he was writing and Milo replied: “This is how the old people write before they are almost dead.”

Even later Milo asked me: “Mommy, can you show me how to write a dead b again.”

It’s been over 3 years that we lived in our beloved home. Much has changed, much will still change, and we are happy to be in this cozy place that has become truly ours. It is still constantly transforming and adapting to our ever changing needs. At this point we are planning to stay in this house roughly until Milo is done with elementary school, so another 5-6 years. The neighborhood and the community is just too great to leave and the elementary school is right across the street. Eventually however, we would like to move into a single family house with a garage and our own yard. With that in mind we are trying to make mostly cosmetic changes that take the house from old country to fresh contemporary on a low budget, so that it will sell easily and hopefully for a profit.

Some of the updates we are making throughout the house are:

• Paint all trim bright white instead of cream color
• Change all brass light fixtures to white, black, or silver
• Swap out all brassy wobbly door hardware to brushed nickel
• Remove nasty old carpet from main level and basement and replace with wood floors and new darker carpet
• Repaint rooms to a more gray based coordinated palette instead of tan and red.

Other than that it’s really just some major decorating. Look at this evolution of a home.

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Holy crap, it’s been a while since anyone’s been seen on this lonely old blog. Aside from busy life, I have been trying to be more lazy on my evenings and have taken on reading books again and going to bed early. Not such a bad thing I have to say. But every now and then I should still try to throw in a few of these shorties. Here is an example of Milo’s logic.

“Mommy, Felix wants to take my money, but I don’t want him to have it because he will put it in his mouth and die. And that would be sad, then we wouldn’t have any baby anymore. Like my friend, he doesn’t have any baby brothers. Maybe they all died.”

After I explained to him that sometimes people stop making babies and babies all grow up to be big kids he suggested: “So maybe when Felix is 10 you can put him back in your belly and have a big baby.”

Hello again. As Milo is approaching the big 4, his language skills and reasoning improves drastically, so these gems are getting rarer and are replaced with amazingly logical and knowledgeable statements. We’ll get to those too. In the mean time, here are some of the recent out takes:

Imagine this with Milo singing in the bath tub: “I don’t have a car wash. But I will. Have one. I will have a car wash. Yahoo.”

Nic: “Milo, don’t pull that shower hose out of the wall.”

Milo: “But please can I do it? I will say sorry.”

Milo: “This is my pillow store.”

Linc” “How much does this pillow cost?”

Milo: “5 million Dollars.”

Linc: “I don’t have that much money. How much is the other one?”

Milo: “This one costs 1 inches.”