THE GREEN(wald) HOUSE … (growing rosemary & raising a little wolf)

TWENTY TEN! Wow - I feel like we are living in the future…

Yeah, it’s been a busy year already, hence the combined update for both January and February.

Well, let’s see, we have been having a TON of snow, pretty much non-stop and it is lightly snowing again as I write this. The kids have been a little crazy because we have been spending a lot of time indoors. I try to find new, creative things to do, but the kids favorite activity seems to be to just to dump out all their toys and spread them all over the house.

We had a lot of fun visiting Florida at the beginning of February. It was a very generous treat from PaPa and GiGi to fly me and the kids down for a week. PaPa hadn’t seen the kids in well over a year, and it is always great to see GiGi. (Happy Birthday GiGi!)


It was a nice break from the cold and snow and it was great to visit all the rest of the family and to see some color outside again! The kids had fun visiting with cousins Stephen and Bailey and going to cousin Ella’s basketball and cheerleading practices and games.

Sammy has now been obsessed with basketball, and Rosie has been practicing cheering and I promised I would find a cheer program for her next year when she is 5. We enjoyed some sunshine at the beach and had some gorgeous weather (though the FL residents were freaking about the cold weather - high 60’s low 70’s).

When we got back from Florida, we had a hair cutting mishap. Rosie and Sammy both decided to take their little safety scissors and give themselves haircuts. It wasn’t really that bad, considering I cut my bangs at my scalp when I was 5. Rosie just delicately trimmed about 2-3 inches off the ends of her hair in the front and around the left side a bit. I think she was trying to give herself bangs. Her hair was all one length to her shoulders, and now I had to trim it up and it is shorter all around and a bit shorter in the front. We had to invest in some new headbands and hair clips to keep it out of her eyes now. Sammy just cut a tiny bit on the right side of his head, at the temple, so he just got a bit of a trim to even things out too… Hopefully they will remember that scissors are for paper cutting ONLY and we won’t have a repeat of this (knock on wood)!

BEFORE above - and AFTER below

We took the kids to see Elmo Live on Valentine’s day again this year. It has become kind of a family tradition. The show was cute and the kids loved it, but the rampant commercialism and the push to buy Elmo products is kind of hard to bear. Rosie was such a cutie though, and when they came out into the audience at intermission, selling cotton candy in the aisles, and big Elmo balloons, Sammy wanted a balloon and Rosie told him “No, Sammy, we don’t buy things like that”.

The above photo courtesy of my fabulous photographer friend S.
Rosie has been very creative lately, always wanting to do a “project”. She has been making a ton of books, writing words and spelling everything phonetically herself. She made me a book and wrote “WENS EPON E TIME”.



She recently started writing her “s” the correct way instead of backwards after I told her S was like a snake - and the top of the S was like the snake’s head, and the snake was looking to the right. She loves to add captions to her drawings, she will draw a cat and label it “CAT” etc. She still loves performing and dancing. She will put on a show and she makes sure all attention is on her - telling us “quiet, quiet, eyes on me, eyes on me” before she will begin her dance performance.
She and Sammy also both still love telling knock knock jokes and any other jokes, making up their own silly jokes that make no sense.
One of our latest projects was making objects out of clay - I was really impressed with Rosies’ skill, she looked in a book of ideas that came with the clay, and copied out a lot of intricate designs on her own that were pretty advanced.

Another new obsession is bowling. Rosie decided out of the blue one day that she wanted to go bowling, so we took the kids one night and they loved it! They were so enthusiastic about it that I turned it into a fun learning/counting/addition game for at home. I remembered we had a few little wooden bowling pins, and I set them up on the floor and let them roll a ball or a toy car into the pins, and then they have to count how many pins they knock down, and then add that to how many they knock down with the next ball. Sammy is getting really good at counting and actually knows the value of the numbers up to 10 (instead of just reciting the numbers with no real understanding).

Rosie has been talking a lot about future plans, always mentioning things she will do when she’s 5 - and things she can do when she’s a mommy.
She has already decided that she wants a real kitty for her 5th birthday. She got a toy kitty from GiGi for christmas that meows an moves and purrs and she loves it. She named her “snowy” because she is white and looks like snow. I told her we would think about getting her a kitty but she had to prove that she could be responsible and take care of her kitty and feed her and make sure to clean out her litter box. We’ll see….

Rosie wearing one of her dollies in a sling

A few days ago she told me her name was going to be Melody when she was a mommy. I told her that her name wouldn’t change just because she was a mommy, that her name was Rosemary, but if she wanted to she could change her name when she gets older - so she told me she wanted to change her name to Melody Rose when she grew up.

She has had a big imagination lately, pretending to be animals, people, inventing stories and scenarios. She is most often a dancer, but has also been having parades around the house lately, the other day she was having a picnic with her brother and her friend M in “California”.

Her expressions and things she says crack me up sometimes. She now says “You’re kidding me - right?” and “Totally Awesome!” I love how she uses the word “voila” when telling a story too. She has been practicing telling time and can tell the time in hours on a regular dial clock. She is almost completely independent when getting dressed and undressed. She still has a bit of trouble with buttons or snaps sometimes, but she usually dresses herself every day and does a pretty good job when it comes to matching and picking out a cute outfit. I am going to start to work with her more on tying shoelaces so she can wear this cute pair of tennis shoes I bought for her this summer.

Sammy seems to be talking non stop lately. And it is common to hear him trying to interrupt me by saying “mommy, stop talking, I trying to tell you something”. His favorite thing still is imitating his sister, or repeating things and jokes she tells. Every time Rosie tells me how to spell a word, Sammy copies her and tells me that _______ is spelled “S-O-P”. That’s how he thinks his name is spelled, and longer words are spelled “S-O-P-Q-R-S”
He is so enthusiastic about everything - always shouting “Hooray” about the littlest things. I love it though, it always makes me smile.
“What do you want for breakfast”
“Ummm - oatmeal”
“Ok, I’ll make you oatmeal”
“Hooray!”

He also has been saying “Ta Da” and “Presto” (mostly copying his sister). One of his and Rosie’s favorite new games is to take blankets and their playsilks and wrap up their toys and pretend it is somebody’s birthday or christmas, and unwrap gifts with the big “Ta Da” presentation. His effort at telling knock knock jokes is getting better, he gets the actual joke and delivery right about 50% of the time.
He still mumbles a lot, but he is always perfectly slow and articulate when he says “I don’t know”.
He loves feeding Daisy, and he and Rosie fight over who gets to feed her in the morning and evening. Sometimes I can get them to share the duty (one holds the bowl, and the other scoops the food) but more often than not, it turns into a big screaming match.

He has been making big strides in potty learning. He has been dry in the morning, and will go on the potty first thing if I take him there. He will usually continue to go throughout the day if I remind him. Sometimes he refuses and throws a tantrum if I try to take him to the potty, so I haven’t been pushing it too much. He also has been going on his own, and taking his diaper off and trying to sit on the potty, but it is usually AFTER he has gone in his diaper, meaning I have been cleaning up some BIG messes. If I keep him diaper-free, he goes in his pants, and when I put a diaper on him, he tries to take it off and go on his own. I need to get some cloth pull-up diapers - but I am loathe to spend money on something that I will hopefully only have to use for a couple months…

He has been such a sensitive boy, screaming and tantruming at the slightest offense. I will usually let him scream and lie on the floor for a few minutes, and get it out, and then he will almost always come up to me afterwards and say “I sorry mommy, pease cuddle me”. And I will give him a big hug and then he is all better. Sometimes he will be crying and whining for apparently no reason, and he will come up to me and say “mommy, I crying” and I’ll say “why are you crying?” and his answer will be “cuz I crying”. Thankfully, a cuddle almost always fixes everything.

I have been extra busy because I started in Real Estate again, and I have been dragging the kids around showing houses, hoping to make a little (or preferably, a LOT) of extra money. We have lots of ideas in the works, and I really think that this will be our year to become financially independent, working for ourselves, allowing us more time together as a family, so we can be happier, less stressed, and hopefully do a lot of traveling and fun stuff too!

Another one of our new favorite things is weekly movie nights. We will rent a movie, or find one on TV and DVR it and watch it on Friday or Saturday night. We make popcorn, and all cuddle up on the couch in front of the fire, or in our big bed, and enjoy a movie. Some of the kids recent favorites: The Land Before Time, The Aristocats, Coraline in 3D, The Fox and the Hound, Lassie (cheesy 1994 version), Horton Hears a Who and Peter Pan.

I’ll leave you this month with a picture of a movie night, when Rosie needed her little brother to give her a hug/cuddle to protect her from the scary part.