Wednesday, August 18, 2010

It's about all we can stand

Annie started her first day of Montessori school this week (as depicted above). They're having a transitional week where the kids go for a couple of hours to get used to the classroom and next week the "big kids" join them. She's in a class with 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds and so far, so good. She told me how she has been doing "pom-pom work" where she takes tweezers and picks pom-poms up from one bowl and places them in another. Important stuff. We've also had the privilege of having our neighbor's daughter, Emily, who attends the same school, stay with us after school on Monday and today and Friday. She'll be joining Annie in her ballet class this afternoon, which Annie started last week; so the fall is upon us, even though the weather refuses to admit it. It's been close to 90 here every day this week with no sense of that back-to-school chill I remember as a kid.

Oscar is going through not so much a growth spurt as a growth geyser. In the last two weeks, he got two teeth (one top and one bottom) and is working on the other two as we speak. He also has figured out how to get up onto his knees and how to pull up on stationery objects (some more stationery than others, as he's quickly figuring out: play car=bad, sister=good). In fact, just yesterday he started crying while falling asleep for his afternoon nap, something he doesn't really do anymore, so after about 10 minutes I went up to check on him and he was standing, holding on to his crib rails for dear life, screaming, with absolutely no idea as to how to get himself down. I felt so bad for the little guy, but had to laugh a little to myself at his predicament (hey, as a stay-at-home-mom you take whatever humor you can find). He's also chomping on diced soft foods now, very adept at picking things up on his own. I see him watching Annie carefully with every bite at meal times. She knows things.

Well, I need to relish my hour-and-a-half of alone time while Oscar's napping and Annie's at school. So if you'll excuse me, there's a vacuum with my name on it (seriously, I put our name on it when we moved last, which isn't crazy considering how horribly our move to Houston went).