Saturday, June 28, 2008

My Girl Likes to Potty All the Time...

Miss Molly loves the potty. She talks about it all the time. She points it out whenever possible. She pats our cat Abe and says "Potty. Potty." (Truth be known, I wish Abe would pay a bit more attention...).

So not to brag, but today Molly was in the bathroom and started getting really excited about seeing the potty. So I figured, why not try it? After all, Matt, Em, and Sam were at the movies, and we had nothing else to do. So I sat her down (we don't even have a toddler potty seat yet) and... she peed! In the potty! She's not quite 19 months old and it's not like we're expecting anything for like a year. I know it was serendipitous. But still! She peed! In the potty!

Now whenever she goes in the bathroom, she tries to pull down her little pants cuz she wants to sit on it again.

I'm so proud. At this point, she'll train way earlier than either her brother or her sister.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Miss Communication

First of all, I need to send mucho amor and shout-outs to my beautiful and fabulous friend, Deirdre, whose gorgeous baby girl was born yesterday. Congratulations and love to you guys!

So lately I've been thinking that it's gotta really suck for Molly. She talks a blue streak and she knows exactly what she's saying. But we don't. All we can pick out are words. She's got more words every day; her new favorite is "cookie." Wonder why. But she'll be talking away and she'll say something like "Gack a bleep?" And we'll look at her and go, "What, honey?" And she'll repeat it, slowly and carefully because, well, she knows her parents aren't too swift: "Gack a bleep?" And we'll go, "uh-huh." At which point you can see her just get fed up and disgusted, and start with "mama. dada. Emma. Molly." Like, "ok, I can see that my higher conversation skills are lost with you people. I landed among a bunch of losers, and I'll have to come down to your level of discourse. You want me to point out my nose again? Sure. Whatever floats your boat."

Another oddity in Molly world: She's fantastic at learning new words and great with names. She quickly mastered mommy, dada, Emma, nana, Molly, her teachers' names, her friends at school (with complicated vowels and consonant combos), "Diss" (Dennis), etc. But her brother? He's called "Chhhhmmmmm." That's the Hebrew CHHH, like "CHHanukah" or "CHHHallah bread." No clue why she finds it so challenging to say "Sam," but there you go. A Molly roll call around our dinner table sounds like this: "Mama! Dada! Emma! Molly! Chhhhmmmm!"

The weather here has been beyond perfect and Molly, Chhhmmmm, and I made it to the park this week. Here are a few pictures of our adventures there.



Here's my beautiful baby girl. Note the ponytail spout. This was especially exciting because normally Molly protests when we put her hair up and her hair's starting to look like Einstein on a bad day.



Molly and Chhhmmm doing a little playground construction work.

Molly's a great Mommy to her Teletubby Po. Here's a meeting of the minds.


Molly singing Po to sleep.


Changing Po's diaper.



Molly favors all-natural diaper care products, like grass.



My other beautiful girl.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Why Johnny can spell.

Three days into summer vaca and it's wonderful, even tho I've spent 2 of them at school so far. (Cleaning up my room and working on curriculum.) Planning to spend the next 2 at school, too. But whatev. It's summer. But before I leave the school year behind forever, I want to share one more story:

Kindergarteners are many things. But one thing that makes them kinda awesome is that they really truly love to learn. They haven't gotten tired of it yet. Most of them are totally into the idea of reading and spelling and all that stuff. It makes my job a leeetle bit easier.

So a couple of weeks ago, I'm walking my kids in from the playground first thing in the morning and one of my kids, J., looks at me and says "Ms. Cibula, 'F-R-E-E' does that spell 'free'?"

Now, it's 7:45 in the morning, which is, I'll point out, quite early, and I'm not at my mentally sharpest. But I look at her and I say, "You've been watching a lot of TV, haven't you?"

When your kids are learning spelling from the "FreeCreditReport.com" commercial, something is either very right or very wrong with the world.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

No more pencils, no more books...

Tomorrow is the last day of school. I have this recurring daymare that it's not really the last day of school and I have it wrong and I'm gonna get busted when I don't show up next week. But that's me. I have a crapload to do in my room and I haven't even stuffed my report card envelopes yet, so I need to get to school molto early tomorrow. School dismisses at 9:22 a.m. Yep, 9:22. It was 9:15 but we had to add 7 minutes to our day, every day, between March and now to make up for our 2 snow days this winter.

So today was our last real day of school. Tomorrow, I'm handing out diplomas and little presents and we're gonna have tearful goodbyes. I am a total wimp and manage to cry every time I leave a class. It happened with student teaching and I think it will be worse this time. I am going to try to hold it together, for everyone's sake.

I love kindergarten for a few reasons. One is that if kids are acting up, you can pick 'em up and move them to a safe spot. You can't do that with highschoolers; even short ones. But more to the point, kindergarteners love their teachers and they're not too cool to admit it. It's quite gratifying. I don't know if it's necessarily healthy, but my kids ask me if I can be their teacher next year. They're super excited to be first graders but at the same time they don't want to go. They really love kindergarten and they love our class and that's so fun, because I figure whatever I did or didn't do for them, they don't hate being in school. So I count that as a victory.

So yeah, I'm going to miss them this summer. I don't think it's sunk for me yet that the year's over. And next year they'll be big first graders and they probably won't even talk to me :-( . Plus, it's a little overwhelming to think that in the fall we start ALL OVER AGAIN with a brand-new crop....

Tuesday, June 3, 2008