Monday Snapshots

I was eating a salad today for lunch. Owen and Daniel were puppies who came and begged for a bite.

Cute to see them playing pretend -

These puppies like tomatoes.

Cute puppies. 

A few other snapshots for today. After Natalie went to school, I was upstairs for a bit and left Owen and Daniel downstairs to play. Owen fell asleep, and it was all quiet. I went down to see where Daniel was. He was in the unfinished side of the basement just exploring. He saw me and looked at me with the cutest face.

"Hi Mom!" he said, followed quickly by him holding up a toy and saying "A car!" He was holding a little yellow truck. You are such a cute little guy. Let's go get you dressed. This afternoon the kids enjoyed riding their little cars outside on the driveway and up and down the sidewalk.

Natalie wanted to walk all the way to the top of the street. And she did. And her little brothers followed her...

Ok, Natalie! That's far enough! Come back! I'd let her go without worry, but not with her little brothers following her, I don't want them to be that confident to walk that far away from home yet.

One last pic - Ethan likes to snuggle with Daniel. He often wants Daniel to come to him, but Daniel often refuses and just wants to be left alone. 

So the way he gets him to come to him is by playing a song that Daniel is scared of - West Side Story song "The Rumble". Daniel gets really worried and puts his hands over his face and says "Bad guy!" and tries to hide his eyes. Someday when Daniel is older, he's gonna listen to that soundtrack and have some weird déjà vu flashback to this time of his toddlerhood.

I'd really rather that Ethan not use this tactic to manipulate his little brother, but it's hard to get this teen to listen to me, we need to pick our battles carefully.... We sometimes feel like we're always nagging and correcting him, we're trying our best to get off his case and give him space. (Is it good for us to let him to sleep from 2:30 pm to 10 pm on a Sunday afternoon, as happened yesterday? When he woke up at 10 am? We're kinda struggling here!)