Fierce and fiercer

Today the kids and I went to the North Carolina Zoo with 3 other sets of mamas and kiddos to celebrate the end of school and to enjoy a rare day together with our best pals with no camp, no swim lessons, and no vacations.  We promised the kids we'd let them ride the carousel and they were all SO excited to pick out their animals to ride.  Dash picked a lion and man did he love roaring at it.

Fierce

Fiercer

Reading girls

By the time we make it through dinner, bath, pjs, teeth brushing, and stories, I am usually ready to turn off my Mommy-ing for the night.  Ella however wants to be with me, often right next to me.  We have found a good solution, though, which is to cuddle up and read together.  It's a sweet and relaxing time with my girl.

Hat

So what if it's 90 degrees and we're headed to the pool?  Dash's fashion choices are not to be messed with.

Mom of the year or worst parenting ever? You decide

Often times after the kids go to bed, I stay upstairs in my office near their rooms catching up on work or doing the endless parenting 'third shift' (i.e. signing up for swimming lessons, arranging babysitters, setting up play dates, ordering new shoes/swimsuits/coats/mittens/sunglasses online, coordinating volunteer activities at the preschool, blah blah blah).

Ella likes to stay up in her room reading and we often have conversations across the hallway.  I try to encourage her to stay quietly in her room, but she sometimes wants to talk about what she's reading or what's happening the next day, and I do try to engage in those conversations.

Tonight, she called out to me that she is "really excited about the Merlin Missions!" which are apparently some sort of book or series of books in the Magic Tree House library (which she is currently devouring).  She told me that she really wanted to see if our library has "Christmas at Ca-may-lot" (this turned out to be her pronunciation of Camelot).

I went to our local library website to see if I could put a hold on that book and discovered that I could not only request and hold the paper copy of the book (which I did), but I could also download the ebook version immediately.  As a test, I 'borrowed' the ebook and had it sent to my ipad.  I was so darn excited to see that book show up five seconds later on my ipad that I took it into her room for her to read in bed.  So I am either the awesomest mom ever for getting her book request in no time flat, or the worst mom ever for giving her yet more screen time, in bed no less.  We'll see what Josh says....

Sunset by Ella

When we were at the beach last week, we stayed up late one evening to watch the sunset.  As we were watching the changing colors over the horizon, Ella told us that she was taking pictures in her mind so she could paint the sunset the next day.  And sure enough, she and Mimi sat down with their watercolors the next afternoon and Ella painted the sunset.  Maybe all kids love art this much, I don't know, but I sure do love seeing how much Ella loves it.

First dentist visit

Dash had his first visit to the dentist today.  He was a total champ.  And check out his fabulous orange headband.  He insisted on wearing it since "It orange!  Orange my favorite color!"

The name game

I saw an interesting article on the New York Time website which you can read here.  The name we chose for our daughter, Ella, received quite the snarky comment (at least in the cool, hip parent world) when the writer noted that Ella has shown up on monogrammed items in the Pottery Barn Kids catalog.  Ouch.

I do sometimes worry about the fact that we gave our children very different names in terms of their popularity.  Ella hopefully won't be Ella C her whole life the way that I was Sarah S growing up, but she will undoubtedly encounter a lot of Ellas in her cohort.  In 2012, it was number 12 on the Social Security Administration's list of baby names for the third year in a row.  It skyrocketed into popularity in the early 2000s, after being relatively obscure around the time I was born (#881 in 1977).

Dashiell on the other hand, is a name that has yet to crack the top 1000 on the Social Security list in the last century.  This doesn't mean he's immune to ever meeting another one - there is in fact another little Dashiell running around Durham who seems to travel in all the same Farmer's Market/Oval Park/Fullsteam Brewery circles that we do - but I think we can confidently say that his name will elicit more interested comments and  be more memorable than his sister's.

I was made very aware of the differences in my kids' names last week when we were in a souvenir shop at the beach, and Ella gleefully found placemats, mugs, keychains, snowglobes, shells, and so much more, all painted with a big E-L-L-A.  Dash kept asking where the "D Dashiells" were and I was reduced to showing him the David tchotchkes and talking excitedly about the D. That pleased him for now, but I foresee tears around this issue in our future.