4th of July, Pool, Peppers, and Talking

I don't have anything super exciting for this post.  

(Potty stuff ahead!)The boys are still working on potty training.  They are reliable if they are in the house and naked.  I don't even need to remind them anymore.  If they have pants on, they either take them off to go potty and never get them back on, or just pee in their pants.  So yeah, lots of naked babies around here.  They still won't poop on a toilet, but they will ask for a diaper when it is time to go.  I'm taking the stance of refusing to battle with them over this, so here we are.  Pull ups don't work because they are perfectly happy to pee in those just like diapers.  Sometimes when we are in the house and they need to go, they will say, "Pee in grass?  I go pee in grass?"  I'm raising animals.  

Anyway, this constant nudity is ruining a lot of perfectly good pictures.  That coupled with the fact that it is too hot to do anything except hang out in the kiddie pool, I don't have many pictures of the last few weeks.  Here are some of the ones I could salvage.

I have a chinese food place in a nearby town that I love.  It's about half an hour away, so we never drive there to eat.  Cody brings me takeout if his work travels take him that way, but that is rare now.  One day we decided to go eat.  The boys don't love restaurants.  They just don't.  They can't explore anything, they don't really care about food, and they can't make all the noise they want.  Restaurants are no fun.  Well here is Alex showing how much not fun he is having.  

He slinked his way down to the floor and curled up in this ball under the booth.  He would not move and would not eat.  He was quiet, so I opted to leave him like this as long as he would stay there.  Cody was pretty horrified by how dirty the floor was, but what can you do.  I LOVE the tantrums where they theatrically throw themselves on the ground and curl up silently.  LOVE.  He eventually came around and climbed up, but they were still causing too much trouble and we had to eat as fast as we could and then leave.  Not doing that again for a while.

They almost never nap now.  They nap maybe one day out of every 2 weeks.  Some afternoons they really need naps.  One day they pulled their sleeping bags out and curled up to watch tv in the afternoon.  Alex open bag, Ben closed bag

They love tooth brushing.  It is weird.  They will ask for like 3 rounds of toothpaste per brushing episode.  I don't like it, but they do generally spit in the sink.  I'm sure I'm killing them with toothpaste, but whatever.  It's better than other stuff they eat.  One day Alex stuck his tooth brush in his bottle of water.  I watched him try to fish it out for a while before I offered to help.

Yes this post is Alex heavy.  I don't know why.  I'll try to go heavy on Ben next time around.  Alex tipped over his car that you push with your feet like the flintstones on the driveway.  He got a bit of a road rash on his forehead.  He took it like a champ.

This series is filled with nudity, and all the same, but precious none the less.  Alex holding the blanket.  

They like to hold a finger while they walk to the playground area.  If you try to walk back without holding their hand, they desperately yell, "Finger!  Finger!" Then you have to wait and let their popsicle goo covered hands hold your finger.  If they are walking back without an adult, they will often hold hands with each other while they walk back.  The funny part of that is they both like to be the holder, so they stop every 5 feet or so to fight over who gets to be the holder and who is the holdee.

Discussing hand position

Now they run

And skip

They are big on raisins right now.  They will each eat like 5 of those mini boxes a day.  They will basically eat their body weight in fruit every day.  It's disturbing and a constant battle.  They will never get scurvy, but they need to eat something other than fruit.

Alex

Ben

Alex putting on his sunglasses all by himself.  Good job!

Cody was going to build be an above ground garden this year, but there are not many vegetables I really want to grow.  I can't have any tempting fruit dangling around for my monster children.  I told Cody not to worry about it.  Instead, I bought a few deck rail boxes to plant some peppers in.  That was the birth of the pepper garden.  Unfortunately, I didn't have enough experience to know I was massively crowding out my peppers.  So I have a bunch of miniature pepper plants growing miniature peppers.  It's actually pretty hilarious.  They are delicious tho!

My habaneros, well the underside of one of my tiny plants.  They won't be ready for quite a while, but some of them are pretty big!  I have like 6 habanero plants.  I have NO idea what I will do with that many habaneros.  

on the left is another habanero plant.  It is one of my better looking plants.  On the right is some green onions.  The green onions are grocery store bought.  It is pretty amazing.  I bought 2 bunches from the store. I just cut them down and stuck them in water for a couple days.  That made the roots grow out a bit.  I threw away ones that didn't grow, and planted the rest.  Now I've had 3 additional onion harvests.  I chop them up and freeze them in a water bottle for later.  Now I have all the green onions I could ever want.

Here is the rest of the pepper garden.  On the far left and far right are the yellow hungarian wax peppers.  They are like banana peppers.  Delicious.  They are all way too small.  That's okay. There is also a giant jalapeno plant that makes tiny jalapenos.  The middle green tub has more habaneros.  The green tub on the left is entirely mint.  It started out with chives and cilantro and other things.  Unfortunately, I didn't realize mint is the beast that it is.  It sent runners all around and strangled everything else planted in the tub. There can be only 1: mint.

They fell asleep together again.  I check on them every night to make sure things are okay before I go to bed.  Alex bottom, Ben top

Ben's face. 

They no longer wear clothing when they sleep.  It started with Ben refusing to put on clothes at bed time.  After about a week, Alex started refusing also.  It is really a bit sad that they are getting big enough to have an opinion and make a choice about that sort of thing.  They are getting big.

Tiny jalapenos harvested

My 2 pitifully skinny jalapeno plants and my best habanero plant.

Jalapenos.  I will have peppers until the end of time.

The boys are getting really good at swinging.  They generally do it on their belly like this and call it flying.  "I fly!  I fly away!"  Alex left Ben right

Alex

They occasionally pick a pepper.  Only once have I had to rush a baby in to the house to pour milk on his face.  Only once, but Ben hated it.  

Ben sniffing a pepper.  It smells spicy!

Ben showing off his pepper

Both carrying around a pepper.  Alex picked them both and gave one to Ben.  Alex with the square of modesty.

4th of July was good.  Our neighbor friends had a birthday party for the husband.  More accurately, his surprise 30th.  I ended up in a playroom with my 2 and a couple other moms trapped with their little ones.  Fun.  The boys were in a mood and it wasn't super awesome.  When we came home, Cody shot off the fireworks he bought.  Alex was not a fan.  Every time there was a bang he would run in to the garage.  Eventually he opened the door between the garage and house and ran in to the house.  Poor kid.  The loud noises didn't bother Ben as much, but he was not a fan either. 

Our HOA does a fireworks show at 945 or so every year.  We were going to watch it with the boys, but since they hated the noise so much, we just put them to bed.  They ended up going down during the beginning of the show, so we watched the last part from our deck.  Next year will probably be better.

After the HOA show, the neighbors around us started shooting off some pretty big fireworks.  Here is a little clip.  To the camera's right is the house next door.  to the camera's left is a neighbor on the corner

Ok, this story is way more hilarious to me than it will be for any of you.  Let's face it.  I'm a mom.  I have NOTHING going on more exciting than when my life butts up to quality children's tv programming.

Cody and I have a kiddie pool for the boys.  It is about 9' round and fills to about 20" deep.  It is the kind with the inflatable circle ring and a flat tarp bottom.  It is absolutely perfect for the boys and perfect for an adult to sit in. (It has 4 cup holders for beverages.)  The water warms up quickly and stays warm.  The down side is it really needs to have the water changed out every 3 or 4 days.  I can stretch it a little if I dump some bleach in it, but it still collects bugs, grass clippings (!!!!), and naked baby pee.  (I'm a mom.  I was talking about how awesome my pool is to sit in for adults in one sentence, followed by a sentence about how it is filled with baby pee. Sad.)  Anyway... it is deep and a lot of water to get out of the pool to clean it.

Cody and I started cleaning it together one day.  First we tried to just combine our strength and pull the one side over to dump the pool over.  HAHAHAHAHA yeah right.  It was way too heavy and wouldn't budge. We started using what we had available: the tools from the gravel pit.  I pushed down on the inflatable side and scooped water toward the lowered side and out of the pool with a plastic shovel.  It sort of helped, but not much.  I then started using the sand buckets.  It really seemed like it would work quicker.  It was at that point that Curious George came roaring in to my brain. 

A simple siphon!  I remembered that George used his knowledge of straws to relate to using a hose in a pool to suck all the water out.  I was like, "Cody!  Cody!  A hose!  Trust me, Curious George."  He gave me a weird look and told me we didn't have any hose and it was a stupid idea.  Luckily, I remembered we had bought a long thin plastic tube to use to make a beer funnel way back in Texas (7 years ago?!?)  Anyway, we still had it.  We hooked that baby up and eventually mostly made it work.  Thank you children's tv.  You teach me a lot.

A couple of weeks ago I randomly watched a Curious George episode with the boys.  We don't usually watch it, but they liked the monkey, so we watched it.  It was an episode about a  Simple Siphon.  (If you click on the underlined simple siphon, you'll see the episode I am talking about.)  I didn't watch it that closely, but George was trying to drain a pool and they followed the EXACT same progression we did.  1.  Tip over pool.  2.  Shovel.  3.  Bucket.  I am basically a monkey.

Anyway, here is our siphon.  You can hear the boys laughing in the background.  We can't do it with them around because they just play with the tube. FUN.

Other fun baby talking stories:

1

We were sitting around watching tv between bath time and bed time.  A Red Lobster commercial came on with lots of glorious food imagery.  

Ben:  Chicken!  Bock Bock!  (I would just like to note how hilarious it is that he has connected the food chicken with the animal/animal noise of chicken.  He does this whenever we eat chicken.)

Me:  Oh look, it's lobster.

Ben: Cockadooooodle dooooo!  Rooster noise!

Me:  Yeah!  Good Job!

(pause)

Me: Wait, that's a lobster, not a rooster.

It was actually a crab, not a lobster.  We are all winners here.

2

On another note: I had a really hard time teaching them chicken noises.  Every time I try to do chickens with them, I think of this Arrested Development joke: chicken dance. (You can click on that to see the video.)  Basically everyone in the family does a chicken, but they are all very crazy and very wrong.  A chicken says, "ca ca ca-cha, ca ca ca-cha"

3

In the pool, we are trying to teach them to float on their back.  We lean them back and hold their head and say, "I got you.  I got you."  Well now they will say "I got you" all the time.  They say it when they are falling and need me to catch them.  They say it in the bath tub.  They say it when I'm carrying them around.  It is precious.  It's not their most gramatically sound statement, but whatever.  I got you.

4

Their new favorite number is 18.  We will work on counting and at some point they always end with 18!  18!

5

Alex ran up to me crying with both his arms straight up in the air.  He was crying too much to get a lot of good words out, but I slowly realized he was talking about something being gone.  After a bit more questioning and soothing, I finally figured out that he was upset because he thought his nipples were gone.  "Oh-pples all gone!  Oh-pples gone!" I have NO idea why he was thinking about his nipples, or why he thought they were gone.... but he calmed down once I showed him that his nipples were still safely on his chest. Toddlers are weird.

There's probably more, but I'm done for now.  The boys are a lot of fun.  I'll try to take more pictures.  Sorry about the overload of pepper garden.  I want to save those memories.  I don't usually grow things successfully.