You can never start learning typing skills too early.

I thought this was the old, busted keyboard.  When the Webmaster got home that day, he told me that, no, this was a WORKING keyboard.  Apparently the old, busted one got tossed a while ago.  So I told him to find another one from the garage that Rerun could pound on.  After all, how many keyboards do we need???

It keeps him occupied and out of his siblings’ hair.  I brought out all the capital letters (left the lowercase letters and numbers in the bag) and set him up with a complete alphabet.

Rerun is absolutely obsessed with the alphabet.  He loves looking at letters everywhere we go – street signs, labels at the grocery store, in books.  I will be doing laundry, working on cards, typing, reading – and I’ll hear Rerun just screeching out letters.  His new favorite TV show is “Super WHY!”, because of the ABC song and the super letters that pop up.

It’s so much fun to watch him.  And other people are starting to notice/hear his alphabet, too.  I caught him singing the ABC song to himself as he was playing with the magnets.

So, it’s yet another win for Auntie and her super present-buying skills (five years later), total fun for Rerun and a lifesaver for me.  Because when he’s not bothering his siblings… everyone wins!

Well, his top two front teeth have been wiggly for some time, but that wasn’t the tooth he was referring to.  His bottom right lateral incisor was loose.  A couple of good yanks, and I had it out.

This is always a big deal, because then the Tooth Fairy comes.  And Tad knows this.  The tooth was safely deposited in a plastic baggie and carefully placed under his pillow.

The first “incident” occurred at bedtime, when Tad removed the tiny tooth from the baggie to examine it, and then lost track of it.  This caused a 20-second ruckus in the boys’ room when the Webmaster discovered it and bellowed for me, and then promptly discovered the tooth in Tad’s bed.  So that trauma was over quickly.

The Tooth Fairy visited shortly after 1 am, and it was at about 2:30 am when I heard a stirring in the hallway, and then the pitter-patter of little feet in the bathroom.  The Webmaster got up to find Tad using the potty, but also absolutely thrilled that the Tooth Fairy had come and left him “monies.”

Then the second trauma occurred.  When Tad went back to bed and the Webmaster began to tuck him back in, the quarter the Tooth Fairy had left was gone.

So I had to get out of bed, too, and join the search.  Rerun was snoring quietly in his crib, even with all the activity in the bedroom.  We stripped down Tad’s bed and looked.  No luck.  The Webmaster got a flashlight and we looked behind the captain’s bed.  Nope.  I pulled the mattress away from the headboard and had the Webmaster peer down into the hollow between the base of the captain’s bed and the headboard.  He couldn’t see anything (I had my glasses on and desperately need my new prescription in them, so that’s why Mr. Eagle Eyes had a look).  I finally sent the Webmaster, who needed to be at a seminar in the morning, back to bed (and he says I yelled.  I did not yell.  If I had yelled, Rerun would have woken up.  I spoke forcefully), and continued the search with a near-to-tears Tad tucked back in bed.

The problem with losing things when it comes to Tad is that we can never get a straight answer out of him.  We have to be very careful not to give him leading questions, because he will almost always go with the last thing you said, unless he really does know the answer.  In this case, he had no idea what had happened to the quarter.  I knew the quarter had to still be in the baggie that the tooth had been in, because if Tad had taken the quarter out, the baggie would have just been tossed on the floor.  So that gave me a little more to look for, instead of just hunting for a quarter in the bed.

I was looking all along the side of the captain’s bed, and shining the flashlight into the Batcave toy that lives next to the bed, when I saw something.  The baggie with the quarter was in the hollow between the bed and the headboard, and the Webmaster hadn’t seen it because it was lying flat.  I got a stick and fished it out through the side of the bed.  When I handed it to Tad, his eyes welled up with tears.  He was SO relieved.  He even got up and ran to show his Dad that the quarter was found.

We immediately deposited the quarter in his piggy bank and I tucked him back into bed, the trauma over.  I finally stumbled back into bed around 3:15 am.

Tad got up happy and went to school happy, eagerly showing his bus driver that he had lost another tooth.  I walked home from the bus stop and started drinking coffee.  Three mugfulls later, I was able to get some chores done.  But I ended up taking a nap at the same time as Rerun, before the kids got home from school.

And so ends the Tale of the Tooth and the Quarter.

But Bruce is always mindful of the clock.

And when the night comes (and before his bedtime), Bruce goes to the, uh, kitchen/Batcave, where his REAL job begins.

He goes from playing boy…

… to Gotham’s defender.

(Once he finishes getting his costume on.)

He is watching you.  He is the Dark Knight.  He is… BATMAN!

At least, he is Batman until bedtime.  Then Bruce Wayne’s mommy tells him to put everything away and get ready for bed, because the school bus comes early in the morning.

Auntie and JW had agreed to babysit the day before, so the Webmaster and I went out to dinner and a movie (The Avengers, which was awesome) and left the kids in Auntie’s capable hands.  When we returned, the kids were in bed, the boys had gotten the baths they needed, the dishes were washed and the toys were picked up.

I really ought to give her a raise.

Sunday was our annual potluck with family, which was at our house this year.  Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa, Obachan, Grandma, Gichan and Auntie all came over and we had dinner.  Everyone left pretty early – Auntie had to catch a ride back to school, and it was a school night for the kids as well – but I finished the day with my three little monkeys and ice cream cones.

It was a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend.  I hope all the other moms out there had equally wonderful weekends, too!

It makes one long for the days when it was all so much simpler… and when one of them didn’t move on his own power…

Oh, how things have changed.

It started in the morning, when Ane insisted on wearing her hoodie to school, even though I had sent Tad to school in his raincoat and warned her that rain was forecasted.  She didn’t care.  She walked out the door toward the school bus, got as far as the end of the driveway in the damp, chilly morning, stopped, looked at me and said, “I’ve changed my mind.  Can I have my coat?”

So I went back in for her coat while she walked to the bus stop, and I managed to get there before the bus showed up.

Rerun was stir crazy, and I let him watch some of his favorite shows so I could get the ironing done.  He has a bad habit of wanting to use the ironing board as a jungle gym, so I really do need him distracted.  It didn’t work so well.

He did finally go down for a nap, and then the kids got home from school.  I’ve been kicking them into the backyard to play after school (and for Ane, after her homework is done), so they can burn off more energy and be out from under my feet.  Not yesterday.  It was a whinefest.  I tried TV, I tried pancakes for dinner, I tried baking cookies – there were still wrestling matches, screaming, tattling, and finally enforced reading time for Ane and an early bathtime for Tad.  Rerun was still running around, trying to disassemble the kitchen and sneaking cookies right off the cooling rack, until finally I turned him over to his father for pajama time.

O Lord, have mercy upon me, a mother, and clear the skies and dry out the grass so that my children can scream their heads off outdoors once more.  Amen.

Forget those other ones.

(He thinks that he is big enough to play with real Legos now.  Did I mention that he is obsessed with Star Wars?  OBSESSED.  If only they made Star Wars Duplos…)

And happy birthday to my favorite sister-in-law, Q-Bee!  (I can say favorite sister-in-law because she’s the only one I have…)  :)

The class all were encouraged to choose an animal that they like, and to not pick the same animal as someone else so that everyone could present a different animal when the reports were all written.  Most of the kids went for more zoo-type animals, like koalas, pandas, elephants and orangutans (can’t just pick “monkey” – too many options).  Some chose more domestic animals, like horses and chickens.  And some went for the life aquatic – dolphins, orcas, and sharks.  (Yes, one girl in Ane’s class picked sharks, which was a report Tad could have written with his eyes shut, and probably asleep.)

What does Ane pick?  Clouded leopards.

Are there clouded leopard books in her class?  Nope.

Are there clouded leopard books at the library?  Nope.

What does her sucker of a mother do?  Buy a book off Amazon, and print up scads of information off the internet so she can write this report.

How did she pick clouded leopards, anyway?  Well, it all started with our annual trips to Point Defiance Zoo.  They are involved in a breeding program with a zoo in Thailand (where clouded leopards are native), so there have been breeding pairs at Point Defiance for the last few years.

Then, last year, a pair of cubs were born.  Ane was instantly in love with these cute little ones.

These two cubs, a boy and a girl, were paired off with other cubs and sent to other zoos to continue the breeding program.  But now, the mom and dad to the first pair have had another boy/girl pair of cubs, and Ane is dying to go and see them.

In the meantime, though, her report has been written, and she is supposed to illustrate her report with pictures of the clouded leopard.  She asked her teacher if she could just have some of our zoo pictures printed for her report.  Her teacher said that was fine.  Ane told me that she was relieved, because she “didn’t want to do a bad job on the drawings” for her report.

What a perfectionist.  No idea where she gets that.

I say “vintage” because that is my dress, brought to me by my grandmother (I think) from a trip she took to Hawaii when I was Ane’s age.  It fit her perfectly, and I found the silk flower clip that I bought in Hawaii myself in 1997, and clipped it her hair for the night.  But it wasn’t just a Daddy-Daughter night.  It was also a night for good friends.

Lina went along with Ane and the Webmaster, because her dad couldn’t get off work that night.  And why should she have to miss all the fun just because her dad couldn’t go?

The Webmaster was completely into the moment.

We couldn’t find a Hawaiian shirt for him (he later claimed that it must have been because all the other dads had bought them), but he looked pretty good in a white polo, shorts, and a silk flower lei.

The Webmaster was pleased to have a second “date” for the evening, too.

And after the dance, which I heard was a lot of fun, he treated them to ice cream at Baskin Robbins.  It was a successful date, and everyone was home before 9:30 pm.

I love that the high school puts this on every year, and I love that Ane looks forward to it as a special time for her and the Webmaster.  I am also proud of her for “sharing” her Dad for the evening, too.