Monday, June 20, 2011

The Post Man was Naughty

Saturday morning we were enjoying the sun on our morning porch with amazing Amélie.  She loves the morning porch and she's always very busy there.  This particular morning, the morning porch was turned into a treetop kingdom complete with Disney princesses who were skipping around and visiting each other at their palaces.  Of course their music was playing in the background on the iPod.  Every once in a while, Amélie would shout out "Beast is happy" when "his" song came on or when the iPod switched to Annie, our ears were blessed to hear a resounding "Tomorrow, Tomorrow, I Love Ya Tomorrow...." - all on key and man, can she hold that last note! Reminds me of her mommy and her "Aunty Brentny."  For breakfast, we had animal dominoes with chocolate sauce that had been baked on with the pink princess hair dryer.  They were "yummers."  One observance didn't make too much sense though - the yellow school bus that was parked on the far side of the porch.  It was covered with Mardi Gras beads like it was chained up.  Greg and I decided and that it must have been an MPS bus that was perhaps being detained for reasons unknown to the media.

Recently, Ashli decided that Amélie had developed a mommy filter.  Her frustrations are not alone - I often hear all of my children and their spouses question whether their children are listening to them. They share their frustrations of parenthood with me and my job is to just keep encouraging them to continue doing what they're doing.  They are all very diligent and "on-top-of-things" parents and I know they are making progress in training their children.

Case in point . . . after Amélie had spread all of her Disney princesses around the porch, she reached into the box and found a plastic figurine of a postman.  She was obviously a little confused about this guy because as she was looking at him and thinking, you could see that she didn't recall him from any of her favorite Disney movies.  She quickly decided that he must be an invader and was up to no good because she held him up to her face and said "now you have been very very naughty and you have to have a time out."  She found a chair from the playhouse, took the chair to the very edge of the outer kingdom and sternly put him on a time out.   I think she thought he was at least 15 years old because he had to endure about a 15 minute time out.  She came over to him a couple of times and said "when you are good, it's your time out."  I know that she was trying to replicate her mommy's words to her when she isn't taking her time out.

Naughty postman!


So just a reminder to my kids . . . don't get discouraged.  They are listening to you....they are listening to everything and soaking it in!  It's just their job to make you think they aren't. I know this because I used to feel the same way and yet every so often, I have heard my words coming out of my children's mouths just as I heard my mother's words coming out of my mouth.  We joke and say things like "I've turned into my mother" but that's mostly a good thing.

Speaking of my mother . . . she was a very particular grandmother just as she is in everything else that she does in life.  She wanted the girls to have a perfect dollhouse that would last so when they were little, she asked my sister-in-law's father to build a dollhouse.  The dollhouse now lives in our attic and comes out just when the time is right.  Saturday was the day for Amélie to become the new landlady of the dollhouse.  I loved watching my girls play with this house.  I loved watching Lindsey play with this house......and now it's Amélie's turn.  Talk about The Circle of Life . . . how cool is that?  This is serious stuff!

A perfect palace for all of the princesses.

Beast is happy!  He's dancing with Belle.

 "Play is the work of children." Friedrich Froebel."

1 comment:

  1. Love it! Thanks Mom! I love that quote and seeing our children play together! With each new toy and exploration, it seems a new world opens to them and they are transported with sheer delight into the new and incredible. Oh to have that childlike wonder!
    One week to go and cousins unite!

    ReplyDelete