3 June 2003 - Kid Stuff

3 June 2003 - Jonathon now refers to me as Nonny. He can say Mommy, but automatically defaults to Nonny, and I have no idea why.

One funny thing he does is call for me around the house, but once he finds me, he puts his hands on his mouth and yells “Nonny!” telling me that, well, he was calling for me mom. Just in case I didn’t know. Katherine’s 2nd top tooth is very very loose, but it’s been like this for over a week now and just doesn’t seem to want to pop out. Nicholas is adamant that his teeth are falling out too. We’re working with him to practice making various sounds currently lacking from his vocabulary. The sound “k” is completely missing, while several other sounds are being left off the beginnings of words but are present within some. Now at least we know he can make those sounds, even if he’s still having trouble putting them in the right places. For example, he says “‘ar” instead of “car.” And “may” instead of “play”. Oh, have I mentioned that his eyes are turning green like Rebecca’s? Katherine still has the grey-blue color. Rebecca is starting to make sense of reading words, but boy has she been a pill lately. Even after a discussion about how rules apply to her even if we aren’t standing in the room staring directly at her, she still feels the needs to push everything to the limit, pick on her siblings and generally be unpleasant. Was Katherine like this at 5? Nicholas is now totally into Spiderman as he hops from one piece of furniture to the next, flinging webs and catching the “’een guy go Rrrrowr!” Rebecca likes the role of helpless MJ. If Katherine is playing too, then she gets to be Spiderman and Nicholas takes on the role of the Green Goblin. It’s all a very intricate dance of rescuing.
Um, it’s June. We’ve been here for 2 months. Wow. And last night we cleared out 2 more credit cards leaving us with 2 dead cards and one live one to pay off. With our new and improved updated plan (as of yesterday), we’ll be out of old debt a year earlier than planned. Of course then there’s still the car, the house and all those student loans. But there’s a federal program that we qualify for that pays off some of our student loans each year up to a set amount. As it is, we’re scheduled to pay student loans until Katherine heads to college, so every penny in these early years will save us wads of cash later. A happy thing indeed.
Katherine’s last day of school is Thursday, June 5th and it's a half day. She’ll be receiving her first report card from ISM and I do hope that it’s a good one. We still have some left over bits to do in preparation for the next school year like buy new uniforms and order school supplies, register the bus for both girls and get their IDs. Next week, the 3 older kids start going to Camp Critters, a summer camp program that runs 9-1 for eight consecutive weeks but we can pick and choose which weeks to send them. It’ll be just me and the munchkin all morning, what will be do?? Nicholas is already getting worried that daddy and I won’t be there, but I think he’ll be just fine once he sees his other friends too.
Oh yeah, we did finally hire a housekeeper. She's OK. She works M-W-F from 9-3 and I know it sounds like a lot, but this place is too big to do myself and spend any time with the kids. Last Friday our housekeeper decided to bring her 8 year old daughter to work. We had talked to her before about her kids and had mentioned in passing that it would be fun to get her daughter together with our kids at some point at the playground. I guess she took that to mean anytime she felt like it her child could spend 6 hours playing in our house. I mean, Katherine was at school, I had to go to the grocery store and now I had an extra stranger in the house to contend with. Of course, Rebecca thought it was the coolest thing to play with a big kid. But I ended up making her lunch, and hanging out with them while they watched a movie with some popcorn. Not what I'd planned. On Monday I mentioned that while Rebecca enjoyed having her over (and Katherine after school), next time she has to give us some warning ahead of time. I often plan activities or errands while the housekeeper is here, and having her daughter around throws a wrench in my plans because then I have to fight with the kids to come along, or I just feel that I can't leave since the girl is hanging around the house with nothing to do. Arg.
On the whole I have become accustomed to having a housekeeper. Now that we have the car though, I am much less comfortable with a driver. He seems to be very temperamental and I'm never quite sure if he understands my requests. And my seating options are limited in our van. I can either sit up front in my usual seat and have no one to talk to (he doesn't chat, and if he did I have a hard time understanding him) or hurt my neck turning around to talk to the kids. Or I can sit all the way in the rear between the 2 girls. We could move the seats around in the car so that I get a middle row captain's but that puts Nicholas between the 2 girls in the back and I don't think my head could take that sort closeness in the car. So my other option. Learn to drive in this country. Bets anyone?