And then I poked him in the eye

I love how asking a four-year-old a direct question -- when you KNOW they've done wrong -- never gets a straight answer. Instead their voice rises to levels of earnestness brought on only by remorse (at being caught, I'm sure) and the resulting "explanation" is like something out of a drug-induced dream sequence. I'm convinced that when Vincent "explains" why Dominic is crying, he's hoping I'll get bored halfway through his soliloquy and drop the inquisition.

The latest answer, after I heard a piercing scream from the boys' room and found Dominic clutching his eye:

"Well, we were playing dump trucks, and I was the dump truck, but then we got out real dump trucks and I said, 'Dommie, do you want to play real dump trucks?' and Dommie said 'Yea!' so I got out our dump trucks and then he dumped out EVERYTHING from the drawer and I said, 'Dommie, do you want some chocolate chips?' and he said, 'Yea!' and so I went to get us chocolate chips, and we filled up our dump trucks with them and I said, 'Dommie, do you want some marshmallows?' and he said, 'Yea!' but we were out of marshmallows and then we knocked over the chair and then we decided not to play dump trucks anymore because Dommie wanted more chocolate chips, and then he got out the eggs and ripped off the top and I said, 'No Dommie! Mommy will be so mad!' and he said, 'Yea!' and then we went back into my room and started playing dump trucks again. And then I poked him in the eye."

Partners in Slime

Saturday morning I was home with the boys while Catherine and Roger took the van to be vacuumed out (or something equally exciting), and I asked myself, "Hmmm, what kind of fun activity can I do with the boys?"

The obvious answer, of course, was "Make homemade slime." So a Google search later, we had a slime mixture of Elmer's glue and Borax that absolutely thrilled the boys. And by "thrilled" I mean they started throwing it at each other across the table until Mommy yelled at them to stop. Then they took baths to clean the slime out of their hair. Let's hear it for buzz cuts.

But the point is that the brothers really do get along well. Anything Vincent does, Dominic does, right down to trying to wear his shoes and jackets. Hero-worship at its finest.



It's like Vincent has his own little echo. If Vincent calls out, "Hey, let's be monsters!" we'll hear a tinny "Monsters!" behind him. Or, "Hey, let's be aliens!" "Aliens!" "Hey, let's be cowboys!" "Cowboys!" We probably ought to give singular credit to Vincent for his brother's recent onslaught of vocabulary.

Imitation is flattery, right? I think another way of putting that is that there is nothing as much fun as a big brother.

So, what have we been up to?

Well, a lot! We've had beautiful weather down here, which means lots of family run/walk/bikes along the American Tobacco Trail, or as Vincent calls it, the Kabaca Trail. Kabaca, in case you're wondering, is what people smoke in pompettes, and pompettes make people sick, as he is sure to tell everyone he sees smoking one.

Besides that little educational foray, the kids have been learning about the human body, so they did a neat project that involved tracing their bodies life-size on large sheets of paper and coloring them in. Roger thought Catherine's eyes looked a little too Joan Rivers-ish so he took an eraser and pencil to them. Vincent's doppleganger also got a facelift after he got confused and drew the nose above the eyes. At first Vincent insisted that his paper friend have a skeleton so he could carry him around, and I kowtowed to that by taping rulers together for a spine, but after the fifth broken bone (courtesy of Dommie) we bandaged him up. When I asked Vincent where we should hang him he decided that we should hang Paper Vincie on the closet doors the master bedroom, "so you and Daddy can look at me all night long."

Old faces: 

New faces: 

And then there's Dommie. Speech-wise, he has gone from "Uh, should we get the kid tested?" to "Be quiet for just a second, would you?" He came out with his first sentence in December ("Hit rooster!") and now strings together things like "Mommy help me puzzle" and "Dommie candy. Dommie candy. Dommie candy!" The other day when Vincent lost his popcorn privileges Dominic rather gleefully reminded us for hours on end, "Dommie popcorn, Vincie no popcorn!"

So the house gets louder and louder, and in March it'll get louder still! The other morning the kids came with me to a doctor's appointment and when the doctor asked the routine, "Do you have any concerns about this pregnancy?" Catherine answered, "YES. We are CONCERNED that the baby might not be a GIRL" while giving her brothers the evil eye.

And I do have to admit, sometimes, like right now when the boys are running around with their arsenal of guns and swords, I think that it might be nice to have a sweet, quiet little girl.