Nashville Glewwe Kids

I’m a little behind on posting some pictures, so this post will contain a big handful.
Here we have a rambunctious Megan decide to play with her brother. Before…
 
and after…
 

She really is a great big sister and mostly takes great care of her little brother. They like playing together:

Of course, sometimes Megan regresses and wants to be treated more like her brother:
 

Michael is generally happy. His Mama got him laughing one day in the tub:
 

Soon thereafter I decided to do Wash Two Kids with One Tub:
 

She kisses him sweetly:
 

Aunts Tobi and Abby joined the kids and Sandra at Cheekwood. Here is Megan in the Candy Cane House:
 

You can see our library in the background. Megan loves a walk in the park finished with a stop at the playground in River Park. You can see her eyes are on the equipment, while Michael’s eyes are on his mama.

Michael hanging out in the exersaucer below. He has four total including the two at Nana/Granpa’s house and Mima/Papa’s house:
 

Sandra’s childhood “Go-rilla”.
 

Michael is getting more tummy time, and we hope he will start crawling soon. (Well, I hope. Sandra lives in fear of two mobile babies!) 

Michael sits up very well now. He enjoys sitting on his big sister’s Monkey Mat and playing the music. He grabs everything.
 

Love of the zoo has passed from parent to child. Both of our children love the zoo. Michael here is wearing his zoo hat to keep the sun off his little head. 

The park in Franklin includes this spring horse. Megan likes to jump on and ride. We picked up a consignment rocking horse for the house which she loves too. She also rides the horse at the Green Hills YMCA. Woo fun!

Here is the picture of Megan with my two cousins, Kelli and Arlene.
 

Here she is making Michael laugh. She has really started entertaining him on a regular basis. 

Sandra just called to relay the following story:

She walked by where Megan was playing. Megan was chatting on her “phone.” She was saying:

       “E - W - W - E”

Clearly she was spelling Glewwe to another telemarketer. Wow! Start with the hard words! We expect she will soon be saying “No. That’s spelled right. It’s German.” I guess she has heard us spelling our surname to people enough to pick it up.

Maybe we should spell ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ more? I wonder when she will see through our attempts to mask information from her buy using combinations of Spanish words and spelling English words. Maybe we will be forced to switch to spelling Spanish words. I might be in trouble!

So, in the past week, I started worrying about Michael’s hearing. He was in his exersaucer, trying to get at the duck under the dome (he works on that all the time!), and didn’t look up when I called him. He didn’t look up, in fact, until I waved my hand in his face. In his crib, he watched his little soother and didn’t seem to notice I entered the room. At the Y, sitting near a crying baby, he played with a little light-up toy and never once responded to my calling his name as I sat down in front of him. I was getting rather worried!
Today, though, things seemed better. He did respond to his sister’s voice, and jumped once when she made a sudden noise behind him. He also turned to look at me when I called him downstairs, when he was once again in his exersaucer. Finally, I figured it out: Michael is a thinker! When he’s working on figuring something out, he tunes the rest of the world out. I always say “If you marry it, don’t be surprised when you birth it.” It’s time to take my own advice, and to allow the Glewwe boys their time to think things through!

Apparently I’ve gotten too excited when I’ve been able to run errands by myself lately. Megan has spent the last several days talking about all the places she will go by herself. My personal favorite is “I will go to Wild Oats by myself and get the pink pretzels and the brown pretzels and the white pretzels.” And people ask if she’s putting words together yet… Ha!

Mima and Papa/ Poppa (how should I spell that, Dad?) are on a road trip for the month of July, and were in Alaska when the kids and I got to talk to them yesterday. Michael is still amazed by the phone and reaches for it constantly, staring in almost horror when voices he knows are coming out of it. His little face is so cute when he gets those little thinking wrinkles above his brows!
Megan had some stuff to say to her grandparents, but mostly told them they were interrupting her and Michael watching Baby Einstein.
Well, once they were off our phone, Megan called them back on her phone from them, the one they recorded their voices on. I didn’t hear the entire conversation, but I did hear Megan greet Mima and Papa, and I later heard her say “And the living room is a mess. Momma needs to pick it up and vaccuum it.” She then followed with “She needs to clean the kitchen and start the dishwawa (dishwasher).” Great. Megan is now telling people about my housekeeping skills. No wonder the ladies in the Y nursery enjoy her so much…

Sandra is out-blogging me; so now it is my turn!

 My Uncle Bob (Mom’s brother) brought two of his daughters, Kelli and Arlene to Nashville this week. We were all sad Linda couldn’t come too. Maybe next time. They arrived Friday night while we were at dance. We met them Saturday morning at the zoo at nine. We wandered around the zoo for 3 hours or so before taking our angel home to bed. She refused her nap though! Kelli and Arlene were great “big sisters” to Megan, watching out for her, helping her, and keeping her in hand. They also loved playing with Michael who adored them. He enjoyed grabbing their noses!

On Sunday, we all went to church to hear Grandpa play. The regular church musician, Lynette Dunuvant, was on vacation with our Rector Randy (her husband), so Dad slid behind the keyboard. I enjoyed hearing him play. We all feasted on goodies at Coffee hour before the service (that The Glewwes had provided - it was our week). After lunch and nap, we met back up at The Adventure Science Center to play. With Kelli and Arlene to lead her, Megan did several things she had never done before: she went up a crawl tube with Kelli and into the heart with the girls. That pushed Sandra into going down the blue slide (a tube) with Michael in the Baby Bjorn. He didn’t give much of a reaction though. After playing in the tower, I led the girls over to the bee hive they have in the museum. A tube lets the workers go outside to collect pollen and nectar. All the girls enjoyed the bees, and we did the “Bee” rhyme from Megan’s music class a bunch of times (Here is the bee hive, where are the bees? Hiding away where nobody sees. Watch and you’ll see them come out of the hive: one, two, three, four, five! Bzzzzzzzzz!). We went down to the science area next. Megan found a slide with a “whopee” cushion at the bottom that made a solid fart noise as you jumped out of the slide. I don’t think she ever noticed. The slide was too much fun. Kelli and Arlene faced off on the “relax your brain” competition. There was an ambulance, a surgery, and lots of other fun things to explore. We ended downstairs at the dinosaurs which Megan decidely did not like. We left to meet for dinner at Las Palmas for a quick dinner.

Monday night we had lasagna at Nana’s house and Grandpa played a few of Megan’s music class songs out of her Dolphin Collection book. One of her favorites is “I’m so Happy”:

              http://www.themusicclass.com/virtualClasses/default.asp

We sang I’m so happy to see Kelli, Arlene, Megan, Michael, Nana and Grandpa!

Tuesday, we all met at Shogun, a local Japenese steakhouse for a tepanyaki meal. The big surge of flame at the beginning was an interesting experience for all the girls. Michael startled. Alas, this was our last visit. Megan went home for a nap, and all else procedded to the Purity Dairy Ice Cream tour. Uncle Bob, Kelli and Arlene headed off for Florida this morning as the head back home to the Rio Grande Valley.

It was great to see them all. I know Megan will miss them!

Just in case you haven’t been around Megan as much or need a refresher course, she does have a few words for which she has an “interesting” pronunciation. (Grant, feel free to add any I forget)
There is the mild “Mimo” for “Mima” and Amy’s name is still said “Ah-me,” but there are some that definitely need a little help to be understood:
turkey-tilla = tortilla
fri-cha-cha = refrigerator
Woo-la-la = Woody, as in the guy from Toys
opama = oatmeal
Back’ins = the Backyardigans, of course!
poucon = coupon
fowler = flower
and Grant says:
por ha ha = por favor (that’s Mima’s fault, of course)

Yeah, we don’t get it either.

I know, I know. Everyone says their kids are smart. The difference is, ours really are! For tonight, since I am eager to get to sleep, I will offer just a few points of evidence.
Today, at naptime, we went through the usual routine- change the diaper, read a story, allow Megan to torture (kiss and hug on) Michael, then a quick kiss before the covering with blankets and the “I’ll leave the door open if you’ll stay in your bed” line that she loves to hear. I took Michael into my room to nurse him a bit and turned the tv on to monitor her.
Some time later, I hear sounds coming from her room; they were talking sounds, but not Megan’s voice. I focused. Sure enough, she had turned on her Teddy Ruxpin! I didn’t teach her how to play him! Who taught that child how to get the bear to read her a story! Please hold while I think accusatory thoughts in my husband’s general direction…
Okay. Thanks. Anyway, it turns out she can play him and even learned how to rewind a bit and have him repeat the same line over and over and over and over and over and over… so you can see why I muted the televison.
MORE proof of her abilities. And this one involves some mental, some physical. Apparently I wasn’t doing quite the job I thought I was of monitoring the muted tv; I think I must’ve gotten too into my book or maybe Michael did something. Yeah. I’ll blame Michael. Regardless, at some point I hear Megan’s voice, then look up in time to see the door to my room open and Megan walk in. She still hasn’t slept yet, mind you. No, instead, she has worked to put on her pink sandals. She shows me, triumph in her smile and the devil in her eyes, that she has gotten the pink sandals onto her feet, and even put them on the correct feet! She said “I stay awake now.” I smiled, terribly amused by the little booger, and congratulated her on her success and then reminded her it’s still naptime and she has to go to sleep. Things got worse for a moment there.
Megan, being a genius child, saw that Michael was nursing and knew I probably wasn’t going to get up and disturb him unless it was an emergency. She pointed at the bed and said “You stay in that bed or you get a time out! You read your book now! If you get out of your bed, I close the door! ” I couldn’t help it. I snickered, and tried to cover my grin with my hand. She saw the smile and knew she had won the battle. It took several more minutes, but I did convince her to go lay down, and I promised to come check on her in a few minutes.
She did go back to her room and sleep. Her momma is pretty smart, too.

I’m trying to write while Michael fights nap and Megan practices her Pooh matching game, so please forgive my possibly totally off track trains of thought…
Michael didn’t get much of a morning nap today, so I was eager to get him fed and down for a nap as soon as possible. Megan got up at 5:30, so she was pretty tired, too. I’m still recovering from Michael waking up half the night Saturday, then asking for a little smackerel last night, so I was praying for a wee bit of a nap for myself as well.
I fed Michael some baby food, cleaned him up, sleep-sacked him, and put him down for his nap. It took a couple of tries, but he went out. I let Megan out of her high chair so I could rinse off lunch dishes, then prodded her back to her room to start naptime negotiations. I read her the shortest story I could find, then reminded her to stay in bed if she wanted the door open.
I went into my own room and propped my door open with one of Megan’s tennis shoes. I was asleep within a few minutes. This was just before noon.
I heard a noise sometime later. I looked at the tv and saw that Megan was awake. A quick glance at the clock told me it was only 12:39- way too early for Megan’s (and my!) nap to be over! I saw on the tv that she was getting out of bed. I closed my eyes, determined to have her wake me if she wanted up. I heard my door open, and she said something (I don’t recall what- I was sleepy!). Then I heard a rustling about, and my door slammed. Silence. A moment later, I got up enough courage to open my eyes. No Megan in the room. I looked at the tv. She was back in bed, reading to herself! I closed my eyes for another minute (pitiful, eh?), and she returned to my room. I heard her work to open the door, and she flung it wide before returning to her room. When things got quiet again, I forced myself to open my eyes. Megan was in her bed, butt in the air, asleep! I guess she decided that if I was asleep, naptime wasn’t over. Woo hoo!!! Awesome! She slept for another 25 minutes after that, and woke up happy, if not a little tired.
Oh, but my evil plan was thwarted, though. Michael woke at 1:00 with a poopy diaper, so my naptime was over. Oh well- at least I got a little sleep today!