What Do You Do?

When you pick up your kids at school only to find out that your four year-old daughter is already:

1) talking about "Marrying Maxwell" who is her best buddy, and,
2) is talking about having babies

Luckily those two things don't seem to go hand in hand yet. But she did encourage me to rush home from picking them up at school because the "baby was about to come out of her belly."

Then, you find out that your 2 year-old son had a bad day because:
1) he was "hitting Eamon, a lot"
2) poured out all five kids' milk while the teacher had her back turned for one second, and,
3) was throwing toys all day.

It's been really warm here so the past few nights we have come home and instead of rushing right inside we have had a great time staying outside and playing...riding bikes, playing soccer, running around chasing them as the monster. It's quite nice to have a husband who likes to cook, and cooks well, so that we can stay outside and play, only to come in and be served a delicious dinner.

It seems as though Brendan has gone from very few words to being quite a talker, like his sister. Since there have been Christmas lights we hear him all the way home yelling "YIGHTS!" and "snowman!" and announcing all of the things that he sees. He is putting more and more words together, which helps, and although he's headstrong, determined and stubborn (which I know are all synonyms), he's also a sweet little guy who more and more wants to spend time connecting to us, briefly, before he's off doing the next thing that interests him. I see photos of other friends who have boys his age, sitting down, looking like they're working on projects, but that doesn't happen at our house. He might play with Play-Doh a bit, but never sitting down, and never for long before he's off again.

He used to looooooooove time-out and would happily run to time-out yelling "time-out!" and then declaring happily "time-out" when it was over. I was worried. What do you do when your headstrong child loves time-out? Now he seems to mind it a bit, and genuinely seems hurt when he ends up there because he doesn't want to be away from us. This is a good change. I have to say I'm a quite a bit relieved.

They get along great, and really enjoy and love each other. Julia loves to mother Brendan a bit so once in a while we have to remind her that she's not his mom. But she's such a helper and is so very sweet with him. They are even sharing remarkably well most of the time. He really loves to play with her, especially chase and monster and soccer. At school they had to stop taking Julia to see Brendan after nap because he would cry when she had to go back to her room, so they see each other at the end of the day.

Someone once told me that her pre-teen children loved to see themselves on video as babies so I've been videotaping a lot for the last few years. I need to be better about taking still photos, it's just hard to stop the fun to pickup the camera. Especially since Brendan now coyly covers his eyes and says "cheese" every time he sees a camera.

What do you do?