Samisms

I love when kids are learning a language and they say things that only those who know them best would understand. Here are a few of Sam's:

If he asks for macaroni and cheese, don't make it before checking to make sure he isn't really talking about cottage cheese.

If he wants a "valentine," he means a clementine.

When he says he saw someone riding a popcicle, he is talking about a motorcycle.

"Ice squishing" means ice fishing.

This one only happened once, but it cracked me up: Sam was getting ready for Church and he said he was going to tuck in his shirt "so I'll look sharp." Once his shirt was tucked in he said, "There - now I'm sharpened."

Elena has taken to turning nouns into verbs. Here are 2 recent examples:

Pointing out a No Smoking sign, she said, "There's no cigaretting allowed here."

And her friend, Matthew, got back from a trip to Oklahoma a few days before the tornados hit this past week, causing Elena to remark, "I'm glad Matthew is home from Oklahoma so he doesn't get tornadoed."

"Sister"

I failed to mention earlier that we have a new addition to our family this spring: our exchange student from Germany, Natalie. She joined us in February, and we have thoroughly enjoyed having her here with us.

At Easter, Elena mentioned to my cousin's wife, Anne, that "my sister is sleeping." Anne had a brief panic attack thinking that we had had another child and she had somehow managed to miss it entirely. It was then that I realized that I hadn't gotten around to writing about her on here.

As you can see from the picture, the kids love her! Sam had a little trouble remembering her name for the first couple of weeks. He knows it now, but continues to just call her "Sister". She does not have any younger siblings and comes from a big city so living with small children in a small town is a big adjustment for her. After a couple of weeks, she said that she will miss the small town life when she goes back home (not that she would want to live here permanently :) We sure will miss her when she goes home in June.

Thanks for the help, Mom and Ricky!

I have never been so thankful to be in a town full of relatives that I can call on at a moment’s notice as I was today.

While I was watching our 2-year-old nephew this afternoon, he managed to lock himself into our bathroom. He had already gone to the bathroom 3 times that day without evenshutting the door, so I have no idea what made him decide to shut and lock the door this time.

Since all of our doors have knobs from the early 20th century, our only options for locking them are hook latches or bolts. This door had a sliding bolt a few inches above the doorknob, which makes it impossible to get at from the outside. The hinges on the door were on the inside so removing the door that way was not an option. And the window was locked from the inside so the only way through that was to bust it open, which I didn't really care to do.

Of course, he did it about 10 seconds after Seth left to go running so I was home alone – and getting through locked doors and windows is not my forte. I spent about 5 minutes explaining to RJ how to unlock the door. After trying to reach it once or twice, he just sat down and started
yelling for his Mom, refusing to try again. Fortunately, my brother-in-law, Ricky was working next door and came over to help. The 2 of us (and Sam) spent another 5 minutes trying to get him to move the stool across the room so he could reach the lock, to which he repeatedly responded, “NO! I want my mommy!!” Even having his mom talk to him over the loudspeaker on my phone didn’t help. (His older sister later told me that he’s going through a period
of really not liking people to tell him what to do. Lovely.)

We could see him through the window trying to reach the lock, and his fingers couldn’t reach it well enough to move it. I’m still not sure how he managed to lock it in the first place. After about 20 minutes, I was starting to think that if he didn’t agree to move the stool soon and unlock the door, we were going to have to take an axe to it. Luckily, Ricky’s mind is much better at mechanical problem-solving than my own.

He figured out that he could pry part of the trim away from the door enough to stick a knife through and slide the lock over with that. Then he just pounded the trim back in place and you couldn’t even tell it had been disturbed.

So the door was finally unlocked, and we were able to get to RJ, who was happy and unharmed – hooray!! – and covered in poop. Double hooray. Seth came back from his run about this time,
so he ran RJ upstairs for a bath while I cleaned poop off (and sanitized) the stool, sink, door and floor.

Oh, and did I mention that this all happened at the same time I was supposed to be picking Elena up from preschool? It’s a good thing Seth’s parents live 2 blocks away from the school and his mom was able to run over to get her.

#87 on our to-do list: move locks out of the reach of small children.