The Destructor & The Nemesis

Well, the new year has brought us new talents from the kids, Sammy mostly. For example he has mastered the skill of climbing. Climbing on to the couch, onto Andi's bed, onto the chairs in the kitchen, right up onto your head if you are sitting on the floor. We are still waiting for him to learn how to get back down without hurting himself, and crossing our fingers he doesn't break any bones in the meantime.

Here he is climbing the computer chair in the kitchen.

And feeling very proud of his accomplishment

And his attempt to get back down off Andi's bed.

He has also learned to love electronics. Remotes, buttons on the TV, I often find him wandering around the house "talking" on my phone. The weird part is that when he is babbling into it, he puts it right up on his forehead. I'm pretty sure I always put it up to my ear, so I'm not sure where he got the forehead thing.

He has learned to run very quickly, pull hair, throw a ball, and toilet papers the inside of my house on a daily basis. He loves to brush his teeth and every chance he gets sneaks into the bathroom to eat toothpaste, which wouldn't be so odd except that both kids use adult toothpaste. They were not interested in the sugary bubble gum stuff in the kids section. They like minty freshness. I do try very hard to keep the bathroom doors closed at all times to avoid the toothpaste eating and toilet papering, but that is where my nemesis Andi come into play. Always undoing what Mommy does, and waiting till my back is turned to take something from Sammy or play a little too roughly with him and run away. Sammy is learning to fight back though, with the aforementioned hair pulling. Andi has also decided that she is pretty tired of always having to wait for mommy to help her with things and has started doing things on her own If I tell her to hold on a second. Like this:The kids were outside playing when Sammy started trying to eat mud. So I took him inside to clean him up, and Andi thought that was a great moment to ask me to help her up into Sammy's swing. I told her she needed to wait till I had Sammy cleaned up. A few minutes later I hear her yelling for me outside, and I go out to find that she drug a chair off the patio and got herself buckled into Sammy's swing only to realize that she did still need me to push her. So I'm not totally useless yet.
She is learning to tie her shoes, and get's better at writing her numbers and letters everyday. She is very into words and asks me all day long "what letter makes this sound", "what does this word start with" and"do this and this rhyme". Dance started again yesterday and she was so excited to get back to class, although a few weeks off and she was "out of shape", for lack of a better phrase. She came home, ate dinner, took a bath, and asked to go to bed at 6:30. And she slept all night.
Destructor moment of the week: We had just returned from our Costco run and all the groceries were on the table. Andi asked for a drink and while I went to the fridge to get her some juice, Sammy walked over the the twin pack apple juice bottles and pulled them both off the table. One cracked wide open and about half the gallon shot all over the floor before I could get it picked up and tossed in the sink. The he splashed in it for the few seconds it took me to get rags. ugh. The good news is that my new H2O steam mop ultra proved itself. Normally apple juice takes like 3 moppings to really get all the sticky off, but this only took one. I love my new mop.