Buttons and Dots

Bubba likes to turn off the car and then push the button to close the garage whenever we get home. We don't have a garage door opener in the car; we use the programmable buttons above the dashboard. And so it was yesterday, we returned home from Joy School and Bubba asked to turn off the car and close the garage. He pushed the button and said, "I push the one-dot button. The two-dot button is for the green house." (By "green house" he means our old house.) I asked him what the three-dot button was for and he stops and thinks for a few seconds, then says, "I will tell you what the three-dot button is for when we move to another house." Ha! Ain't gonna happen, little dude.

Then, last night, I'm driving Cakes to swim team practice and I tell her that little story. The conversation:
C - What voice did he use when he said that?
Me - Just his regular Bubba voice, not his whiny voice, silly voice or mumble voice.
C - I'm trying to imagine the way he said it.
M - It's my fault Bubba mumbles, and it's Papop's fault that I mumble. He used to say to me sometimes, "Shauna, you're mumbling" and I would say, "Yeah, where do you think I got it from, Dad?" or "Whose fault is that?" But there are worse things to inherit from your parents.
C - Like what?
M - Well, I could have had ugly parents, and inherited that!
C - Oh yeah, that definitely happened to somebody on my bus.
She goes on the describe a rather odd looking woman, but somewhere in the midst of that description she throws in, "Mamie is definitely prettier than that lady" (I guess confirming that I did not inherit any ugliness from my mom?) and later, after she talked about the woman's clothes, "Oh, and even better, Mamie wears clothes that are appropriate for her age."

I'm retelling all of this to Scott as we're getting into bed for the night. He stopped me when I got to the part about mumbling and said, "Wait - you're admitting that you mumble? But you get mad at me every time I say I can't understand you." I ignored that comment. But he thought what Bubba and Cakes said was hilarious, and he asked me what I'm doing to our kids to make them come up with such things...

Post Valentine's Day Post

I decided after Christmas that as far as decorations, Christmas is completely out of control and all of the other holidays are sadly lacking, so I actually did some things I found on Pinterest to add to the three Valentine decorations we had. Imagine that!

I made a yarn wreath for the front door. I thought the hard part would be cutting the felt hearts, but that was pretty fast and easy; the time consuming part was wrapping the yarn around and around and around and around and around to cover the whole wreath form. And then, cute as it is, it does not fit into the wreath hook, so I had to tie some ribbon around it. The kids were getting on me because according to them, all things Valentine need some red, so I used red ribbon to appease them.

Bubba and I made some paper heart chains. He was my official assistant with the paper cutter and the stapler, and he approved my color combinations. We discovered (through some trial and error) that they do much better lying on something (table, mantle) rather than trying to hang them up, because then the chain gets stretched out and they don't look much like hearts anymore.

 

The kids and I made Valentines for all of their friends/classmates using some ideas from Family Fun. They had quite a bit of fun using gel pens to make the outer space Valentines. Their pictures got more and more elaborate, going from lots of stars with a planet here and there to adding aliens, space craft, meteors, and constellations. I did not get a whole lot of help with the fans though. Cakes did a little bit of folding and gluing, and this time Bubba was my glue and rubber band assistant.






Silly's art work



Cakes's artwork; she said all of the bouncy balls fell out by the time she went to hand them out, but it turned out to be a good thing because then her friends just told her what color they wanted.



And we did go shoe shopping, although I didn't find anything for myself.  The boys all got new sneakers. Cakes has more shoes than the rest of us put together, so no shoes for her, but I did let her pick out some fun socks. Bubba's feet are huge! Scott pulled out some 12.5 sneakers, and I told him to put them back, there was no way they would fit my little Bubba - uh, wrong. He'll be 4 in two weeks. I keep warning him that after he turns 4 I won't carry him anymore, but I think he and I both know that is a lie.