these kids….they’re learning

There are a million little pieces of white paper on my kitchen floor.

This gives me goosebumps.

If you know me, you know that floors are my thing.  My crazy comes out.  They must be clean.  I think every woman (person) has their own kind of crazy.  Maybe yours is that you can’t stand having dirty laundry or you can’t seem to filter the things that come out of your mouth or you have to sleep in a certain position or your whole day is off.  I don’t know.  I just know that floors are my thing and having a million teeny-tiny pieces of white paper on my kitchen floor gives me anxiety like no other.

Food pieces (or wet, mushy poop pieces) would be worse.  So today I’m thankful that it’s just paper.

Clara is learning how to cut.

With big people scissors.

(That’s not a commentary on dwarfism.  Just adult scissors versus small child scissors.)

I drew some shapes on a piece of computer paper and I let her have at it, cutting them out.  The circle I drew came out looking more like a rectangle when she cut it but she’s only four and I don’t think they have any type of scissor-skill competitions at her age so we’re good.  ….For now.  I really should have given her the smaller scissors but I can’t seem to find them in our junk drawer right now.  There’s just too much junk in there (seriously I found a roll of pennies!  Who keeps rolls of coins in their house??  Me.).  I looked in the backup junk drawer and the scissors are lost.  This means I’ll put them on my grocery list, spend $6 picking out the pink pair of kid scissors (because Clara will insist – if they had a glitter pair, I’m sure we’d pick that one), then arrive home and the old $3 pair that I already had will pop out at me and scream, “Here I am!!  You ninny!  Now you own two pair of ridiculously small scissors!!  Ha!”

Story of my life….

Anyway, Clara is trying and she’s getting the hang of it.  I haven’t told you the story of our trip down to Cabbage Patch General Hospital (yes, there is such a place) or about how I tried my hardest to talk her into getting a doll that I’D actually like looking at or about how she quickly slapped that idea right out the window and picked one of the uglier babies at the hospital (when a mama knows, a mama knows) and named her, “Ayizabeth.”  The doll is laying on our living room floor right now, “playing” and “being SOOOOO good.”  “She doesn’t even cry, Mama!  She’s SOOOOO good.”

I smile.

Porter has learned to clap.

And it’s the most precious thing in the world.  And he KNOWS he’s doing something monumental.  He just lights up with the biggest grin.  The way that children learn is just fascinating.  One day they just DO IT.  They just learn.  He’s also found his “pincher fingers.”  I’ve been waiting.  For a few weeks, it seemed like he might go his entire life just batting and swatting at the Cheerios in front of him (people would call him baseball-mitt hands – this is what I was envisioning) but luckily he just started pinching at things this week.  I think Henry gave him a lesson while I had my back turned (searching for the scissors).  Henry gets a star on his chart for that one.

Speaking of…

Henry is learning to how to put stickers on his chart.

He has a reading chart.  One sticker for every book he reads.  He’s getting super sly about what he defines as a “book.”  It’s really funny to watch.  He’ll get a book and mentally cut it into chapters (even if there aren’t chapters) then call the individual chapters “books”.  I think I was distracted one day (yes, really) and said that he could put a sticker on for reading only a couple of pages of a book and since then he’s tried to pull one over on me every.single.time.  Like I said, it’s fun to watch.  And oh man, I get the proudest-mom smile when he chooses to read his Bible.  All by himself.  Like my heart just bursts and I want to go shower him in kisses and say “YES!  This is the BEST book!  And don’t you just love Psalms?!?!  Aren’t the poems just beautiful?!?!  And isn’t the story about Moses just the COOLEST!?!”  But I don’t.  Because I want him to want to read the Bible for himself and not because it pleases his mother so I sit back and watch and pray over the time he reads, praying that God will turn him into a sponge and he’ll soak up all the goodness that’s in that book.

So those are the things my kids are learning at the moment.

And those are the things that I am learning.  The mess, the sticker trickery, the joy of clapping.  I get to take a front seat to all of that.

And it’s good.

So, so good.

splendid…lindsay