Long Day

Thanks for being excited with me about the swing. I was going to paint it today, but it rained a lot. My friend, Jodie, said she is having trouble reading my new font. If anyone else is, please do let me know. Don't want to cause any unnecessary eye strain. But I know a lot of people do google reader.

So today has been an exceptionally crazy day for the Barber family. If you came to my house tonight you would think Steven and I had been sitting on our rears all day while the kids ran wild doing whatever they pleased. This is mainly due to Ellie's "cooking", which I will get to in a minute.

I mentioned several weeks ago that since Luke turned three, he has become especially whiny and has many more meltdowns than what seems normal for him. It is not uncommon for him to be sobbing all of a sudden over something completely irrational. Which is exactly what happened today coming out of Wal-Mart. Or actually, it started in the check out line when he saw his new underwear being scanned. We still can't figure out what made him start sobbing, because normally you would think new Toy Story underwear would make a 3-yr. old boy excited. But all we could make out in between sobs was "buzz witeyear", and "woody". Handing him the underwear didn't help at all. It just made him more upset, because he couldn't get it folded back exactly the way it was in the package. He sobbed the entire ride home. And would say things like, "I'm so sad it's not my birthday" and "can I pwease get woody and buzz for my birthday" Of course, we said "sure, Luke" since his birthday is almost an entire year away. And through the sobs, he says "Thanks mom, thanks dad". When he receives any type of toy, or anything, such as the underwear, that comes in a package, he becomes almost more obsessed with the package. He gets very upset if the object won't go back exactly like it came. He wanted the underwear rolled up and taped, just like they were to begin with. Obsessive-compulsive?

He requires lots and lots of patience from me these days. And not because he is stubborn, but because he will repeat a question over and over and over in the same monotonous tone until it is answered. And since there are normally a thousand things going on at once and several different voices wanting to be heard, his question doesn't register in my head until the second, or third time. But he just keeps asking it until he gets his answer. Bless him. He kills me. Often, when I am not as patient, and I cross his sensitive line, his face breaks and he sobs, "I'm sorry, mom. It was my fault." He makes me melt.

While Luke has been having a rough time, Ellie has been doing really well lately. She truly is a help to me a lot of the time. She is always very eager to help and the other day she fed Andrew his breakfast completely on her own. I was like, "wow, this is good." She gets very busy pretending and playing. Super creative. And I think I have talked about her "pies" before. Today she was making a cake. And it was in a shoebox. When she makes food, it makes such an incredible mess. But it's fairly easy to clean up and she is so serious about it, so usually, I just let her cook. Sometimes the cakes and pies go in the oven and often into the fridge. I'm afraid one of these days I will pre-heat the oven and smell cardboard burning, or worse. Here is her cake chillin' in our fridge.

Does the Nike shoebox look out of place?

Here is the school situation. I'm not sure what's going on, but I think she has set out something for each student in her class.


We have been discussing Halloween costumes for a little while now. Luke said he wanted to be Dash from The Incredibles. He loves the movie. We have been told he looks like a Pixar character, in particular, Dash. We've looked around some on E-Bay, but tonight Steven found a Dash costume at CVS that was really on sale. So we spent the last 30 min. or so before they went to bed, playing dress up with Luke. We even put some hair gel in his hair to make it look like the real deal, but we'll save that for later. Here is a little preview:




Pretty close, don't you think?