never let it be said that we don't make time for fine dining...

(For the record -I SO did not see this coming! My plans were to ask Ollie a couple of questions for the camera. The boys ate all last summer with hens running around, and the ladies never so much as took a good peek at what was on the table. We like to have the hens out while we're there too to protect the ladies from the hawk that's been hanging out in the alley cottonwood tree. You missed the part where Noah runs up and Coco skids into his milk and dumps it all over his front. No*ah cried from the shock, but Ollie laughed so hard he had trouble catching his breath.)

"soaking dirty"

I have a "new to me" camera, and it has video, so I can post these little clips every now and then. "Soaking dirty" is such an Oliverism.

Happy Easter!

flood

It was a beautiful, if chilly day here today. Jo*el, who knew I needed a bit of a "kid break" today, took the boys out for dinner while I cleaned the chicken coop. That may not sound like a "break", but I actually really enjoy that task--it's easy and satisfying to see the girls in their clean digs, clucking gratefully around my heels, birds chirping and the sun shining. They are a very tame and friendly flock, rushing to me when I go outside, laying 4-6 eggs a day.

Lately there has been a Cooper's hawk hanging out in the giant cottonwood tree behind us, so we've not let the ladies out much, and only with the dog there. Ivy is terrific around the hens--very tame, and an effective lookout for danger. Unfortunately, she also has cancer, and will be having surgery in a couple of weeks. We are hopeful. We couldn't ask for a better family dog, and really hope to have her a few more years.

As I was scanning the sky for the hawk, I remembered yet again that some friends and family not too far from here have their own, far greater lurking danger to contend with. The Red River is flooding a large area in Minnesota and North Dakota, and hundreds of homes are under water or in danger. The area has been declared a disaster area, and the National Guard has been called in to help the hundreds of volunteers. Hundreds of people are now being evacuated. Jo*el has family in the area, and we have friends there too, and we know they're helping sandbag and to feed the volunteers.

It feels odd going about our business here when we know you're dealing with all this craziness just a few hours away. You are in our prayers. I know that people stick together and help each other out in that part of the country, and to whatever extent the worst damage is prevented, that will be why. May the dikes hold over the next few days, and everyone stay safe. And we do have an extra room available should anyone need it.

growing

The boys’ 4th birthday is in less than two weeks. My mom is coming a week from tomorrow. Before then, I hope get the next set of seeds in their pots, finish organizing the new downstairs guest room, have a piano moved in there, and paint much of our downstairs trim. It’s going to be an interesting week. Or, maybe I'll just get lost in one of the giant potholes that seem to want to be our next 10,000 Lakes, and then I'll be off the hook...

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that No*ah and Oli*ver are almost four. How does this happen? They are growing like weeds right now. We're doing an extended family party, and as requested, lots of balloons, one cake and one apple pie, and a potluck meal. J’s brother Mar*k will be in from Boston, and my mom will be with us too. She hasn't missed a birthday yet.

We had Ollie in for a speech evaluation yesterday, and will be starting speech therapy at the U of MN soon. They did a test where he described what he saw on a page, over 30 pages or so, and graphed all the speech sounds he made on a kind of chart. I realized as I was sitting there just how often he can’t be understood and how often I probably translate for him. Even his brother does this. He was such a sweetie during the whole thing, animatedly describing the scenes on the pages with some extra adjectives and a little narrative thrown in for good measure. He has real gifts with language, I think, and sometimes I wonder if he’ll have a gift for writing someday. It wouldn’t surprise us at all—his descriptions of things are so interesting and lovely, and he really has a sense for how a story is put together, though you wouldn't necessarily know that if you can't understand him. Indeed, the therapist said, “His expressive and receptive language skills are way, way above average.” She also did a physical exam of his face and the inside of his mouth, feeling the muscles, looking at his tongue and teeth while he said various words, etc. His problem, it turns out, is with low muscle tone in his face. Over time, he’s compensated for that low muscle tone by tensing his facial muscles and moving his tongue too forward in his mouth, which makes certain speech sounds difficult or impossible. She was very optimistic that she could help, because he was so responsive to her, and a lot of sounds are emerging right now. He has a slight occasion stutter that is accompanied by facial tensing and grimacing (and therefore not related to the common 3-year-old stutter that’s more related to needing additional processing time at that age). This is related to the muscle tone issue as well, and could become a real problem without some therapy. So, it will be about a month before his first weekly 1-hour appointment. Meanwhile, he’s supposed to drink with a straw (a hard one, not the silicon sippy cup kind we’d been using) and use his lips and not his teeth to do it, do some speech sound exercises with me focused on the S sound and the SH sound for now, and get plenty of time to finish his sentences. We feel good about things (though I won’t lie –I was still half-hoping they’d laugh us out of there). The therapist is truly wonderful, and that will help a lot. We can't wait for everyone to understand all the great things he has to tell you. If you want to help him out, don't talk too fast so he hears all the speech sounds you're modeling for him, and patiently let him finish his sentences. It's OK, even good, to gently ask him to repeat himself if you can't understand what he said. He’d grow out of his speech issues without therapy, but he’d miss a lot meanwhile, and that’s the real issue. He’ll miss being taken seriously by peers and adults alike, being able to ask a follow-up question with confidence, having any confidence in maintaining social interactions, and so on. A little of that is happening now. His therapist said that at age four and later, being poorly understood can become a real confidence/self-esteem issue. But he'll be fine - he's a quirky kid, but lovable and bright and one of the two lights of our lives. If you talked to him today, he'd tell you that pink is still his favorite color, and his favorite book is still "The Reader's Digest Guide To Home Improvement".

Ollie was a bit miffed at finding this “dead fishie” on the counter, but he loved the smoked-whitefish salad it made, the little hypocrite.




One of our calmer arsenic hour moments:


I’ve been making our own yogurt from milk this winter t save a little money. We can easily spend $9 or so a week on yogurt otherwise, and it's a lot less to make our own. I'll share the info here in case it interest anyone. We have a warmer, and it makes great yogurt overnight. Oli*ver in particular clearly prefers it over storebought, and tells me I make the "best yogurt in the world". It doesn’t take much time, though there are a million conflicting recipes, and you have to find what works for you. We use starter (but might switch to using yogurt soon), and I add a little gelatin powder because I like it a little thicker than I can otherwise get it. You can also use nonfat dry milk powder as a thickener. I heat the milk to between 109 and 112 degrees, then add the starter and gelatin. Some people boil the milk, but most seem to agree that pre-pasturized milk is already sterile enough. (Waiting around for the milk to cool back down to exactly 112 is a pain, too.) Then it goes, uncapped, into the warmer over night, and into the fridge the next morning for a few hours to set. It takes me less than 15 minutes or so to make a couple of quarts, and I just clean up the kitchen while the milk warms, so it's really less. Winter feels like a great time to learn a new indoor skill like that.

But winter will end someday, as fantastical as that starts to feel every Minnesota March (it was -3 degrees when I walked the three blocks from my car to work today!), so I've got some of our seeds going for the vegetable garden.

That below is my seed box. I think if our house caught on fire, I'd wake Jo*el, grab the boys, then the animals, then my seed box. In that order, of course. It's always so amazing to look over those seeds and think of all the life that will come from them to sustain us over the summer and beyond.

it runs in the family

The boys have had a couple of baby dolls since they were about 18 months old, and played with them on and off, but mostly they've used their stuffed animals, called "stuffies" at our house, for domestic-related role play. Dinosaurs having meals, an owl and a teddie bear coming over for lunch, that sort of thing. They adore their stuffed animals, and treat them with tender care. Lately, though, they've been talking more about babies, and how they're going to become daddies when they grow up, and they've been paying a bit more attention to their 2 dolls. Ol*iver in particular, says these two are his twins, named "Pinky" and "Stinky". I find it interesting that he named his twins after two of his very favorite things: the color pink, and all things potty-talk related...


No*ah, for his part, took Stinky's dress off and put it on one of his bunny stuffed animals (not one of the 2 favorites, but another one he quite likes). He added a jingle bell collar, and was quite proud of the ensemble. He's back to devotedly carrying his 2 favorite bunnies around, but he also now has "Pretty Lady Bunny", and tells me she's "lovely".

When the kids aren't around, we may or may not have been known to refer to the pretty lady by the less genteel term "Bondage Bunny". Below is the pretty lady in her natural state. Now, some of you already know this, but my mother-in-law K*athy killed a bunny a few years ago by throwing a hose attachment at it to shoo it out of her garden. She hit it right between the eyes, and it fell over dead. She did essentially the same thing to a squirrel years before that. She was probably the one that got picked first for the church softball games, don't you think?

Last summer, I stopped by with the boys to water Kathy's garden or something, and as we were leaving, I notice this bunny still lying on her front walk. I almost picked it up to take it back home, but instead, I wrote "the bunny killer strikes again", and left the note and the bunny on the sidewalk. She was, thankfully, appreciative of my twisted sense of humor.

Slightly inappropriate fun with dolls and stuffed animals: that's our family. I admit we are easily amused.

changes

I realize that this possibly sounds both trite and redundant, but I simply cannot believe how very fast my boys are changing. Lately, it’s their love of music that has been especially evident. Both boys love to sing, but O*liver has also been very interested in the harmonica and piano lately. If he can get No*ah to leave him be for a few minutes, he carefully plays notes on the piano, going up and down the keys, seeing what happens when he holds 2 keys down or plays with more than one finger. We kind of have an idea that we’ll have Ollie take piano lessons and Noah on the violin, so maybe that’s an encouraging sign. He also plays the harmonica rather nicely, making very deliberate little tunes and trying to play the same pattern of notes over and over. It’s a lot of fun to watch him experiment, but a bit frustrating to see how often he gets interrupted by No*ah in the middle of his playing. I’ve been explaining a bit about the piano here and there to both boys—what an octave is, playing scales and so on. At this level, we’re not yet at the point where J’s expertise is that much more relevant than mine. We were talking about “middle C” the other day, and N*oah asked why “C” is in the middle, and not “A”, like in the alphabet? I didn’t really have a good answer for him, so he said, “I just think the notes people should talk to the alphabet people”.

Noa*h is all about singing, rhyming, and making up lyrics right now. He’s really quite good at it, making up simple songs, or creating entirely new lyrics for tunes he knows, in key. He’s imitating Joel and I, who do that all the time, and have since they were born, singing to ask them to come set the table, take a bath, and so on. It is so much fun to watch him do the same thing. Ollie is in the middle of a major creative streak as well, especially with storytelling. I can’t wait until he can write, because he has a fabulous imagination. He’s suddenly singing more or less in key too. And everything that I’m describing here has happened within the last couple of months!

Something both wonderful and also a little concerning is their connection as sibling twins. They are so into each other right now, and often quite loving.

They show concern for the other’s wellbeing, and if they hurt one another in some way, they’re often quite remorseful. The problem is, they don’t ever really want to be apart. As in, at all. I’m a little worried that this is going to be more of an issue, as even now, the little time they have apart is punctuated by regular request to be reunited with the missing twin. Their preschool doesn’t have the option for them to be apart, so that isn’t a place they can practice separating. We will likely separate them for kindergarten, but if they end up going to all-day kindergarten, that will be such a massive all-at-once change. Oy. The school district is changing all it’s school choice options and possibly re-zoning all the neighborhoods for the fall the boys start school (fall of 2010), and all the possibilities are making my head spin. We’ve also applied at a private Montessori that would have separate class options but still allow some interaction between them (and they’d go there starting in the fall), but getting them in there is a real long shot. We’ll know a lot more in April, and looking at all the options over the next year will likely be a consuming task.

Yesterday, N*oah irritated Ollie somehow, and Ollie said, ‘you don’t know everything, N*oah!”. He was facing away from Noa*h, and Ivy (our dog) ran past No*ah and stepped on his bare leg. N*oah started to cry, because it hurt, but Ollie misunderstood and thought he’d caused Noa*h’s reaction. He ran to Noah, threw his arms around him, and said, “No*ah! No*ah! You know many of the things to know!”

They don’t fight so terribly much at all, but they did receive a single balloon from someone else's party a while back that caused some bickering and possessiveness. Their big request for their actual birthday is “Many, many silver balloons with helium!” Here, it was Ollie’s turn, and he held onto his balloon even while he napped. (A nap is a rare event around here unless someone is sick, but he was.)

And did you know that blue and yellow make green and that red and yellow make orange? The boys have been telling everyone they meet about this new information.

still laughing

That was one saucy squirrel--it had been teasing Orbit for a good half hour before he made his move. I just missed the shot of the squirrel slamming into the window and Orbit hissing and howling and slamming back from the inside.

Poor Orbit. He's sulking now. I think the experience rather diminished what was left of his manhood...

a long rambling update

Oh, am I ever behind on photos and updates! I have shots of Me*agan and P.hil’s wedding from September I haven’t even posted, so maybe I’ll begin there.


It was such a beautiful day and wedding, and oh, the food. They have a lot of friends that are into good, local food and cooking, and it was quite the feast. No catered event I’ve been to has ever compared. The boys had a blast dancing to the Irish music, and my mom was there as well.


A few months later, we went to my parents’ home, AKA “the Barn”, for Christmas. To everyone’s delight, my grandmother (Oma) came too, from Holland. We had a really nice visit together, four generations under one roof.



I confess that the kids were inside with Omie when Jo*el and i made this snowman. We had fun doing it!




That's my old sled No*ah is riding on.





Last summer, when we stayed in Holland, Oma gave us a few of her chickens’ eggs to have for breakfast, as you can see in this picture.



At Christmas, we gave everyone framed photos of the boys, and the boys brought her some of our eggs from Minneapolis.

(We brought them in a break-proof egg container designed for camping, in case you’re wondering how we pulled that off!) The boys still talk about Oma all the time, and are fascinated by the fact that she is sleeping while they are still awake.






Traveling with 3 year olds was SO much easier than any age before it. Jo*el and I read entire chapters out of our own books on the flight, the boys slept pretty well, and were generally just happy, adaptable little guys.

Some of you may not be aware that Meagan’s dad passed away a few weeks ago, as did Joel’s Aunt Karen, who lived in Hawaii. It’s been a sad winter in a lot of ways, with lots of loss and bad news. We hold everyone who loved Karen or Me*agan’s dad in our prayers as you go through the slow and often messy process of grief.

Those boys of ours are growing like weeds, both physically and otherwise. The last few months have been a bit trying, with a lot of drama and insecurity, mostly saved for mom and dad, one of those lovely “stages of disequilibrium” that our Early Childhood teachers have told us about. They’ve been a lot clingier, clumsier, and more easily frustrated than they were over the summer, holding it all together very well at school or church or wherever, and then falling apart with the safety of home and parents. The cold winter we’ve had hasn’t helped, and it can be difficult to give them enough opportunity to burn off energy. We see signs of hitting a smoother patch, though, and we love watching our almost-four boys learn and grow. They are very interested in maps and the earth right now, especially that if you kept going in one direction, you'd eventually get back around to where you started. They spend time talking about the boat/car combination they need to build to pull that off. Maybe I need to get them a decent globe..

They adore school, and are starting to really make friends—though they don’t seem to have quite the same need for it as non-twins do. They seem so darn smart lately, so full of intense and sophisticated questions. I can’t always answer them anymore.



The boys study one artist a month at preschool, learning about his/her life and art. The big painting by Ollie in this photo was from when they were studying Piet Mondrian. The boys told their teacher that they and their mama are Dutch too, and that they've even been to Holland.

Both boys have had the same singular obsession for months now: the color pink. I don’t know if it’s the fact that we have little of it around or what, but they’ve been asking for pink anything and everything since summer. They have a single pink boa, a pink turtleneck, and a pink tye-dye t-shirt, and these are about the only things they consistently fight over. Fine by me, but older kids tend to have a thing or two to say about that. Oli*ver tells them, “some people don’t know that boys can have pink, but I do!”

While we were in New York for Christmas, Joel’s parents gave the boys a very generous gift: they painted the whole upstairs! Pink. Well, kind of a lavender-pink. It looks light and cheerful, and the whole space is so easy to organize and manage. The boys sleep upstairs together, and that's going really well.










Ollie's is above and No*ah's below. There is a door between them, but it's basically one big attic space.


They both have new down comforters from IKEA too, and they match the quilts that the Sundseth women made for them perfectly. I used their toddler bed comforter covers to make curtains, and we were all set. The boys adore their new "pink room", and will gladly show you around if you come by.


The boys rarely nap anymore, but occasionally, "quiet time" turns into slumber. Unfortunately, that usually means bedtime is full of shenanigans. Still, is there anything more beautiful than a sleeping child?

All the best to you and yours!

Inauguration

(I wrote the following for the boys' memory boxes, as I sometimes do when something momentous happens. I will share it here as well, because today was an important day that needs to be acknowledged here if this is to be anything other than a scrapbook with pretty pictures and stories. That has it's place, I know, but I don't really have it in me all of the time, so forgive me --today you'll have to accept a little politics along with the quotes and milestones. I am hopelessly behind on editing pictures, but I'll catch up from early December as soon as I can.)


Dear Noah and Oliver,

Today, Barack Obama was sworn into office as this country’s 44th president. I was at work at the hospital during the inauguration. It’s not always easy to be there lately. It is my job to help people who need a little extra help, and we have fewer resources to do that with than ever before. Sometimes, we stitch people back up or bring them back to health only to send them homeless into the cold. Sometimes we do not even have a coat in the clothes closet to hand out, or a pair of gloves to cover the frostbite that brought them to us. Sometimes it feels like the little we have to offer is so very far short of what is really needed, and my heart aches to know it. We are experiencing cuts, and more people may soon lose their jobs. The mood has been gloomy, at the hospital and everywhere else. These are difficult, often terrible times, and there are few places where that is more obvious than in an urban safety net hospital where the holes in the net are growing ever bigger.

I wasn’t really happy to be there today, but I didn’t take the day off as planned because I was off for a funeral last week, and needed to catch up on work. As it turned out, I was just where I needed to be. I snuck across the hall at 11:30 and took my break in the radiology waiting room. More and more people came, all crowded into the little space. Behind me stood a group of janitors, all Hmong women, hearing the speech with the help of an interpreter. Their were doctors, mostly African-American people visiting the clinic with babies on their hips, Somali women in hijabs, and rad techs in scrubs holding their clipboards. By the end, we were almost all crying, all just looking at each other and the screen, listening to that beautiful speech. All of us knew that Obama’s speech, given by the first president to ever break through the color barrier in this country, was for all of us, and it was all that mattered. I doubt I will ever forget those 15 minutes.

One of the sad symptoms of how low public discourse has sunk is that patriotism has become equated with refusing to question our government’s agenda, so let me be very clear: Your father and I care very deeply about the people that make up the United Stated of America, but over the last eight years, America has become known largely for excess and might-makes-right, arrogance and myopia. We believe that history will see the Bush administration as a shameful era in our history, but we also have hope that this very day will be seen as a turning point beyond the reach of that era. Your father and I hope that America will again become engaged with the rest of our world, based, as Obama said, on mutual respect. It is our hope that we will indeed dust ourselves off and make the changes necessary to allow for a healthier, more sustainable economy and planet. It is our hope that we will again prosper as a nation, but that prosperity will be defined first and foremost as a basic level of security for all Americans willing to work hard, and that we may never again fall victim to the extreme unregulated excess that defined the Bush administration and took us all down with it. It is our hope that the Americans that crowded into that waiting room today and indeed in living rooms and coffee shops and theaters and numbering many times the population of our city at our nation’s capitol will still feel included in that new vision months and years from today.

When I got home at lunchtime today, your daddy and I talked about that speech while you boys ate your sandwiches in our sunny kitchen. We both cried a little, again, and then we explained that sometimes, grownups cry when they are relieved, or happy. At your early childhood class, you made Obama necklaces and counted to 44 with your teacher.



As dinner was cooking, we watched the speech streaming on the computer, each of you on one knee. I wonder if I will always remember the feel of you in my arms as we watched, as I answered your urgent and insistent questions with my arms straining to hold you in my lap. You are so big now. Your limbs no longer feel as fragile as bird bones, and I can no longer contain you entirely within my arms. You are so sturdy and strong, so full of hope and life. For once, today, I didn’t feel like the reality of the world was a terrible secret we’d someday have to break to you, even as we also share the source of our truest hope through our faith in God. For once, I could say, look, there, at that handsome brown-skinned man pointing his long finger with smart, fair words. Listen.

Love,

your mother

Christmas Program

Happy New Year! May you remain healthy, and happy (and solvent and employed, should that be what you desire). We had a very nice trip east to see my parents, brother and grandmother, especially since the rest of the flying population seemed to get stuck at the airport this year and we had not so much as a delay. I will catch up on pictures soon, but if you wish to see the boys and their buddies in the church Christmas program, you can go here.