the indoor pool and another missing tooth

When we got home tonight, we had a couple of fun things in store for us. First, Nicholas lost another tooth while at school. He said it happened in class and he told his teacher and everyone was really excited for him. He said he showed everyone and he said it was pretty cool that everyone thought it was cool. He assured me that he brought the tooth home and wondered if the tooth fairy would leave him $2 this time since it was his second tooth. I told him that I was pretty sure that it was still just a buck a tooth. He seemed mildly disappointed. The funny thing is that when Nicholas told us he lost another tooth, Sophia piped in, "me, too!" And insisted that I take a picture of her "missing tooth" as well.

Next, the kids informed us that they had built a pool in the living room. They had taken all the blue blankets and laid them down on the floor and created indoor swimming pools. Sophia started out jumping into her pool and then coming back out to tell me that she couldn't swim by herself. She wanted me to jump in with her. We held hands and she counts, "one, phree, two" and jumps--and I mean really jumps--in with her knees bent. Then we all had to wiggle around the blanket "swimming." It was pretty cute. Well, she was cute. I kept laying down and telling her that I was just floating. She seemed to buy that. Nicholas then decided that a swimming pool was no good without a diving board, so he pulled up the two little chairs and that was their diving board. He also did a good imitation of penguins swimming and flapping around. He's pretty hilarious.

Sophia then decided that she was tired to just swimming and got her little picture book and was looking at it while floating on her back. In the video, you'll notice her sort of wiggling her butt around while lying on her back. This is the floating. And throughout, you'll also notice her saying that she's swimming in her "purple swim soup"--referring to her swim suit. (I apologize for the sideway video...)

I realized later when the kids went to bed that the front patio blinds were still open. If anyone on the street or the sidewalk looked up into our window, they were probably wondering what we were doing, all jumping in and writhing around on the floor. But seeing that the weather was getting colder again and we are supposed to have 6 to 8 inches of snow tonight, it was nice that the kids took us swimming.

it's a ...

When we told the kids about the baby, they each had an opinion about what it should be. Sophia was first to say that she wanted a baby sister. Nicholas said he already had a baby sister, so he would prefer a baby brother. Then Nicholas said, "well, maybe it's twins and we could have one of each." Having had an ultrasound at that point, we assured him that we were not having twins.

Today was the day we were having a 20-week ultrasound and finding out what gender the baby was. Sophia said this morning that she wanted a baby brother. Then she said, "actually, I want a baby sister." I said to her, well, what if it's a boy? She said, "no, I want a baby sister."

After we dropped off Sophia at school, I was driving Nicholas over to a friend's house and asked him, "well, what do you think? Boy or girl?" He said, "well, I want a boy and a girl. But I've been wishing really hard everyday for a boy."

It's no secret that I have always wanted Sophia to have a sister. Don't get me wrong. I love my brother and I can't imagine having had my family any other way. But there is a special bond and relationship between sisters. I'm not saying that it was always great and we got along every second of our existence. In fact, we spent many of our childhood days fighting. Well, me fighting and making her life miserable and her putting up with it most of the time. She had to drag me along to everything and when I was in sixth grade, I even called up a boy named Tyler in her class and told him that she liked him. Honestly, at times, I was just rotten. But as we grew up, I just wanted to be like her and when I was mad at her, it was usually because I felt like I was never as good as she was. Never as good in school, in piano, everything. She got into Yale and I didn't. Not that University of Chicago is bad by any stretch of the imagination. I suppose if I didn't go to the U of C, I would have never met Greg and I wouldn't be writing this entry today.

Well, I had hoped for another girl, partly because I wanted Sophia to have a little sister that she could be love as much as my sister loves me. And partly because I didn't want to have to buy clothes for a summer baby boy since Nicholas was a winter baby. And also because I'm not sure I would be up for a fourth baby and a fourth c-section. Each pregnancy has taken a bigger toll on me physically and mentally and I want to be all I can for each of my children.

Anyway, if you've read this far, good for you. And if you scroll down to the last paragraph, you're a smart one to skip my blabber-blather.

Sorry, Nicholas. Looks like you'll be getting another sister. I know you'll be a bit disappointed now, but I also know you'll be so excited when she arrives and couldn't imagine things any other way.

a lesson in race relations

Yesterday, the kids and I went to the DuSable Museum of African American History with the Faith in God girls. I wasn't excited to take Nicholas and Sophia since the DuSable wasn't a "hands-on" type of a place like MSI and it certainly didn't have the choo-choos that Sophia wanted to see.

By the time all the girls arrived, we only had about 30-40 minutes to walk around. Our group was probably the only visitors there at that time, so we just wandered around. Nicholas was occasionally interested and Sophia was disappointed there were no trains. They did have a fairly significant exhibit on Martin Luther King, Jr. and others that related to segregation in the U.S. At the MLK exhibit, Nicholas recited for the girls the poem he had learned at school in honor of MLK:

"Martin Luther King, Jr. said I had a dream to live in peace and not be mean."

When he first learned this at school, he recited it for us at home. The second time he said it, Sophia piped in at the end and finished it for him by saying, "mean."

They had an interesting exhibit where above a water fountain, they had one of the old "colored only" signs hanging up. And around the fountain, there were pictures of a couple of different places that showed a fountain or a sink for the "whites" and another for the "colored" folks. The girls all thought it was unfair that the stuff for the black people were smaller and not as nice as the ones for the white people. They also thought the distinction seemed like a silly one to make.

The rest of the visit was fairly uneventful, except for when we stopped to talk about the shackles they had on display from the ships that carried over slaves from Africa. But after about 45 minutes, the girls and my kids were ready to head out.

My friend America drove her girls and several of the girls home and I offered to drop off three of the girls. The girls all sat in the back of the van and Nicholas and Sophia sat in their car seats in the middle. As I was driving away from the museum parking lot, the kids were being silly and just talking. Then Nicholas said, "you know, in the olden days, you guys wouldn't be able to ride in our car with us because you are black." This statement caught me completely off guard and for a second, I wasn't sure how to respond to this, if at all. I took a second to gather my thought and said, "you're right, Nicholas. Isn't that the silliest thing? That people couldn't ride together just because of the color of their skin?" He said, "yeah." Then one of the girls said to me, "if Nicholas and Sophia were twins and were our age, would you have let them play with us?" I said to her, "probably, but I bet there would have been a lot of people who would have been upset and angry at me for letting you all play together." She said, "even if you wanted to, you couldn't let them play with us because you would have gotten in trouble if you did." The kids then all talked about how silly it was that people were segregated because of the color of their skin. They talked about how we were all the same, except for our color and how people couldn't be together because of that. Eventually, the conversation turned to something a bit less intense and I was grateful for the conversation to end well.

I told Greg about it tonight while we were putting the dishes away. I told him how amazed I was at how Nicholas would even raise something so intense. He was surprised that race was even on Nicholas's radar. We figured that he probably learned some of it at school during their discussions about MLK, but it was interesting to hear how he had processed it all. It just goes to show you that these hot topics come up with our children much earlier than we would think, and that they catch on and register a lot more things at their very young ages than we may like or be comfortable with.

I love Nicholas and his never-ending sense of curiosity and thoughtfulness. He's so bright and inquisitive about the world around him. He loves those he cares about with his whole heart and he is loved. He is indeed my favorite Nicholas.

the tooth fairy arrives

From the moment that Nicholas realized his two bottom teeth were loose, he has been waiting anxiously for the day when one or both of them would fall out. And sure enough, Sunday afternoon, he ran upstairs and handed me a small tooth. He was excited until he realized that not only did it feel funny to have a gaping hole in his mouth, but he also tasted a little bit of blood. After drooling for about a half hour, he finally went back to playing. When Greg got home later that afternoon, he gave his dad a big toothless grin.

That night, after getting ready for bed, Nicholas calls out and when Greg asks him why he wasn't going to sleep, Nicholas replied: "I can't go to sleep, Dad. It's too hard to go to sleep when I don't have a tooth here. It feels weird." After reminding him that the tooth fairy wouldn't come unless he went to bed, he promptly turned over and eventually went to sleep.

The next morning, he was pretty excited to find that the tooth fairy left him a dollar bill. The price of a single tooth has seriously gone up since I was a kid.

scary faces

On Saturday morning, we had some of the girls from church over for Valentine's Day crafts in the morning and after they left, the kids sat down for lunch. Since the camera was sitting on the kitchen counter, I decided to snap a few pictures because they were being especially silly. Nicholas likes to make his crazy face that he learned from his cousin Whitney last summer (although no one can come close to being as creepy as Whitney when she makes her scary face!).

Sophia, of course, had to follow with what she considered to be her scary face.

And then finished off with just a silly, cream-cheesy face.