Long Time No See

I apologize to anyone who still has the patience to check this site on a regular basis – I have not been very diligent in keeping it up to date. This was a very busy year. Apologies accepted, I hope?

Since I am pretty much known to most people as “Rebekah and Holly’s Mom” rather than by my own name, I guess I’ll give an update on the girls. This past year they have really gone from being preschoolers to “kids”. They are HUGE, at least in my opinion. I mean, I think they could actually get onto some amusement park rides by themselves. I would classify 2008 as “the year everything got a little easier”. They are really are best buds. I cursed the gods for giving me twins when they were two months old, but now it’s really starting to pay off. There really is no better playmate for a four-year-old girl than another four-year-old girl. This means that they play well together most of the time, thinking up games that wouldn’t occur to any sane adult in many, many lifetimes, and for that I am very grateful. Every once in a while I need to break up a fight or two, but usually I just perform a crowd control function when things get a little too boisterous.

Although I am thrilled (and rather envious) that the two of them will grow up with their best buddy at their side almost 24/7, the one way in which that has become difficult is in getting them to go to sleep in their beds. It’s like a slumber party every night at my house, and it always goes like this:

7:30:00 – Kris and I read them a story, tuck them in, “hug, kiss, nose rubs” all around. We are then assured that, “for real this time”, they’re going straight to sleep.

7:31:00 – The whispering begins. We yell at them to pipe down.

7:31:30 – Giggling. Either Kris or I storm in there, fingers waving, yelling that if we “hear one more sound, you’re getting separated – I mean it!”

7:32:00 – We hear the sound mattresses make when two girls are jumping on the bed.

7:32:15 – Kris and I enter the room to the spectacle of them climbing on the furniture.

Now the question on everyone’s mind is, with a four-bedroom house, why not give each girl her own room? Well, the answer is: that just smacks of effort. One of the other bedrooms is our office, and the other is the spare room. No one’s coming to visit us any time soon, but that kind of transition would be quite an ordeal. Definitely in the next house we get, they will have their own rooms. But for now, every night, we order one of them to march off the spare room bed, and then we transfer them back once they’ve fallen asleep. The whole nightly charade has become such a routine, it’s almost comforting – I might even miss it. Especially the carrying a sleeping girl back to bed – girl snuggles are the best, and they won’t be small enough for that very much longer.

Nightly shenanigans aside, the thing that has been on my mind the most since the calendar changed to 2009 is KINDERGARTEN. I still have trouble getting my head around it, but this year, the girls will begin Kindergarten. That’s a real mind blower for me. I remember thinking about the year 2009 as some sort of utopia – a fantasy world – in which a bus would pick my kids up at 7:30 a.m. on the corner and take them away to learn for the day, dropping them back off at 3:30. The fact that this blissful time is so fast approaching seems almost dreamlike to me. I’ll register them in May – that’s when they have “Kindergarten Round Up” as they call it here. How Texan – I wonder if they use a lasso?

I’m sure I’ll feel a little pang when I put them on that bus that first day, but man – kindergarten sounds like heaven to me. Not just because it will mean that I won’t need to run around like a chicken with my head cut off to finish all of my own school stuff, visibly adding to my grey hair tally daily. It also is a signal that these kids are moving into the stage that I envisioned when I decided to become a parent in the first place. They are really beginning to learn fun things now and it’s a blast. Their favourite game is one called “Countdown”, where you roll the dice and add or subtract the numbers. You then flip up wooden pegs with the numbers one to ten, and you win once all of your numbers have been flipped. We’re also doing multiplication by using the abacus – they love it. We’ve even tried division, which is a little trickier for them to get, but I can see the wheels turning inside their little heads. One of the great things about it is that it offers Holly a chance to shine. Rebekah has always been the super reader of the two – she’s up at level two books and even teaches her sister a few tricks. With countdown you can see that Holly is a real math girl. The beautiful thing for me is to know that she won’t have some bullshit notion drilled into her head like “girls don’t do math” – so we can have fun with it. They’re both so into it that it makes it really enjoyable for us.

Me? Nothing is new with me, just plugging away. I’ll be done the MBA by the end of this summer and if I have the energy, will go on to do the MA in HR after that. Still no green card, so I have nothing better to do with my time, and it keeps me out of trouble.

But who cares about me? I leave you with a couple of pictures of the babes.

Uuuuuggghhhh.....

Okay, I've been a very, very bad blogger. But that MBA isn't going to finish itself. Next week, for the first time in months, Ill be off and the girls will be at school, so I will post a 2008 Innanen family recap. I promise.

Until then here's a picture taken in the subdivision beside ours just after Hurricane Ike hit. And yes, it really does say, "Welcome to Bay Glen - Looters will be shot!!" (and no, they're not kidding).

Gotta love Texas. Yeehaw!

Evacuation Complete

So we've been evacuated as we live in one of the mandatory evacuation zones. We're in a hotel on the western side of Houston, where we're sure to get some strong winds, rain, power outages, etc. We got a notice shoved under the door of our hotel room saying that we were under a "curfew" inside the hotel (i.e. have to stay inside our rooms) and should go into the bathroom for the worst of it. Fun times.

As far as our house goes, it's on pretty high ground - although still technically in "storm surge B" - so we're hoping for the best. Hmmm... concerning. The girls are just excited to stay in a "ho & tell" and they call it, so it's just a great big adventure. That will probably be truer than ever at around 2:00 this morning.

Yee-haw!

My Child, The Exhibitionist

What can I say? She knows she's hot, and wants to show it off. You go, girl!

"Parents of all the other campers are also being notified..." - really? 'Cause the only thing requiring notification is that those kids had better buy a lottery ticket this week, given they were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Holly's beautiful booty.

I'm Still Here...

Kris reminded me of this headline from The Onion the other day and I burst out laughing:

You And Me And Baby Minus Me Makes Two

It's one of my all time faves, followed very closely by, "Bullshit, Jesus, Those Are Obviously My Footprints". Why do I have time for such trivialities, you ask? Well, school's out, which has left me with an abundance of "free time", at least for another week or so until the girls' preschool is over. It's been a couple of weeks now, and I'm starting to develop a twitch. By Monday, I'll probably be simulating bank teller lineups in Excel, just for fun. I'm looking forward to my next course, which starts June 9th. Until then, Kris claims I will be insufferable.

But it will be all girls all the time around here as of Memorial Day weekend, and that's when the real fun begins. Pretty soon it will be a hundred degrees in the shade, but - unlike last summer - I'm not feeling an impending sense of doom. The girls have really turned a corner in the past year or so, and have become more and more fun everyday. I'm actually kinda looking forward to the summer. I miss my girls sometimes. They're at a cute age, they're playing well together, and they need from me things that I feel more capable of providing. I'm beginning to realize that I never really saw myself as the parent of a baby or toddler for a great length of time (let alone two at once). But the preschool years are turning out to be all that and a bag of chips. I'm trying to enjoy the moment - soon enough the tween years will be here, and their sole purpose will be to do me in, of course.

So what do I have planned? Not a ton of stuff - just a couple things. Swimming lessons. A couple of weeks at day camp. I'd like to stay away from hyperparenting, if possible, and have them do only one thing at a time. In the Fall, I've signed them up for dancing lessons - combination ballet and tap. The thought of them in tap shoes and a leotard with a little bun in their hair just thrills me to death - I'm WAY more excited than they are. Who wouldn't be? We've been practicing our shuffles.

Oh yeah, and we're also planning to drive to Toronto. Yep, I said DRIVE. Are we insane? Perhaps. But Kris and I really love driving trips, and now is as good a time as any to find out if the girls do too. Speaking of those babes - here they are in our backyard. I'll write again when I'm feeling wittier.

Tuppence a Bag

Kate is really busy achieving life goals right now, so having reconsidered my suggestion this morning that she hurry up and update the blog, I’ll make with the update myself. I think that’s what she was implying I should do when she snarled and clubbed me with a large hardcover text called Fundamental Accounting Principles, by several gentlemen called Mr. Larson et al. (7^th ed., Irwin Press).

There isn’t that much to say, really. Somehow we are managing to be really busy without generating newsworthy events. So let’s fall back on pictures of the girls. At the moment the park is generally a winner whenever there’s a quiet moment, and we even convinced Uncle Stephane to go on a playground tour of Clear Lake/Galveston Bay municipalities during a recent visit.

A couple of good representative photos of the girls too. Bekah, contemplating. She sat on my lap the other day and read Frog and Toad stories from start to finish. Couldn’t figure out the word ‘knocked’, but, that was it. Smart kid. On the other hand, her current thing is to pretend to be a waiter. This is the game now. A universe of imagination and astronaut/princess/superhero fantasy available, and the service industry wins out.

To really get the feel for the Holly of March 2008, you need to mentally add to the crafts photo the sound of her singing Mary Poppins songs---full volume, full bore Mary Poppins. The whole stage show is, she will walk into the room with the stool she uses to brush her teeth, set it down with a peremptory thud, get up and start singing. Hand motions include a rakish finger wag. You were aware that Beyonce Knowles comes from Houston, were you not? We will attempt to remember who you all are when we are famous.

I'm working on it....

Be patient people, I'm a busy woman. I've conveniently come down with bronchitis in the two weeks preceding the half-marathon I've been training to run on Sunday (on the heels of a shin injury to boot) and am too bummed out to write at the moment. I'll post next week. In the meantime, check out these babes, whose newest trick is to scream, "I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH, MOMMY!" [or Daddy] when we catch them doing something they're not supposed to be doing. Clever.