Kids at Play

Kids are so fun and so funny! I love seeing what my kids decide is important or hilarious or interesting. Here’s a couple stories and pictures from this past week to illustrate.

First of all: Portia. She is just plain mischief lately. One morning the kids and I were coloring with chalk in the front yard when I realized it was getting to be lunch time. I began the several minute long process of herding the kids inside to eat. I made the mistake of putting Portia inside at the same time I asked Fay to bring the chalk in (and not specifying that I wanted the chalk put up on the counter). When I finally got the two older kids inside Portia was–quite happily–munching on a giant chunk of chalk. I unsuccessfully tried to get already chewed up chalk out of her mouth, and finally resorted to just washing it down with a cup of milk. I rejoice every new day that she is still around to put more scary things in her mouth.

Mischief.

Fay loves to color. She loves to color more than she likes her dolls, her princess toys, her puppets, her food and kitchen combined. If she is interrupted in the middle of a coloring session, she gets very defensive about it. She talks about the importance of her coloring as though she was in the middle of writing her PhD dissertation, as in how could I possibly interrupt her or force her to go to bed when she is working so hard on something so critical. I also love it when she tells me about how she has been coloring pictures all day long and is therefore exhausted because of working so hard.

Hard at work.

Carter often likes to take time and play by himself, uninterrupted. He gets really excited by large amounts of cars and doesn’t want anybody to throw off that groove. But then there are times when he craves attention and just wants to show off! Those are fun and silly times. As an aside, this mode of Carterness reminds me of how he loves the word “cock.” Whenever things start to get silly, Carter starts calling everything cock, the punch-line to every joke is cock, and everybody gets called cock a few times. He’s a fun, silly guy! We love him!