Police Officer Colin

I took this video tonight with my phone. The quality is horrible (lighting!?!) and my voice beside the phone is WAY too loud and you can barely hear Colin. Cell phone video is not great. All that being said, this a very good representation of what I do all day long. This is Colin playing police man and ordering me around including me in the action. If you can handle the loud and rather annoying beginning, the last minute of the video is the best part. I love my adorable boy. :-)

Little Things

I have a million things to do, most of which involve cleaning my house, and so I decided to blog. I am getting almost nothing accomplished at the moment besides reading about cooking, shopping for cooking ingredients, and...wait for it...cooking. My friend Eren told me about this website called Pinterest and let me tell you, it has totally sucked me in. At first, I was a bit confused by it. I played around with it for a couple of hours and then forgot about it. Then, another friend posted herself rocking some new curls in her hair that she set without heat. I asked where she got the idea and, you guessed it, Pinterest. I went back to the site a few days ago and have been hooked ever since. When you join the site, you start "pinning" things you like to your virtual bulletin boards. Then you can see all your friends pins, as well as search for anything and everything you can think of. I searched "brunch" this morning and ended up with ideas for everything from table centerpieces to bacon and egg muffins. I now have a million things that I want to do, from buying a fantastic purple sweater for fall to craft projects for Colin to cooking balsamic glazed ribs. It is out of control. The food is especially too much for me...no shock there. I had about 10 food blogs saved to my favorites and now I have too many to count. I see all these beautiful dishes, click on the picture and voila!...I am taken to yet another food blog that I didn't know about before. I love this site and there is a good chance that I will end up trying to build my own shelving unit as well as prepare 400 new dishes. **sigh** I really shouldn't have signed up for this.

One of the ideas I got off the site was the "sock bun curls". The idea involves wrapping your slightly damp ponytail around a rolled up sock and sleeping in it. You are supposed to wake up with fantastic curls. I tried it last night and it didn't really work for me, but I wasn't shocked. My hair is very thick and very curly/frizzy. Without heat, you really don't want to see my hair. ;-) I rolled it up in the sock and this morning, I did have some nice waves, but it was still mostly frizzy. I pulled out my flat iron and fixed the frizz in the front and then used a curing iron on the top layers of my hair. It looks beautiful now. I will say that it only took me about 5 minutes to do the fixes this morning, so the sock bun clearly saved me some time. I didn't have to curl or flat iron the back part of my hair and it does look pretty, although a little "fluffy". I can see that girls with naturally smooth and silky hair would love this. If I didn't have all the inherent frizz, I would have probably been satisfied with the result. As for me, I need heat. LOTS of high heat. I also have very layered long hair and the top layers didn't curl at all because most of that hair wasn't hanging down into the ponytail. This method would work best for folks with long, mostly one length hair. And there is my review for the week. ;-)

Colin has been his usual adorable, precocious self this week. While I was cooking dinner a couple of days ago, he asked me for an appetizer. He seriously used the word "appetizer". He has been collecting books from the "Let's Read and Find Out Science, Stage 2" series. Now, these books are for older kids in primary school, but Colin loves them. Jer brought one home from his trip to Washington, D.C. and he has been hooked ever since. We now have about 12 books, on everything from energy, forces, gravity, weather, electricity, space, friction, solids/liquids/gases, the human skeleton and bodily functions/reflexes. I have been letting Colin pick out the titles and they are always the science ones. I bought one on volcanoes to give to Hayden for his birthday, but Colin caught sight of it before I was able to wrap it up. He brought it to me, all excited that I bought a book from his collection. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it wasn't his, so I let him have it. The funny part is that we read it last night and he HATED IT. I got two pages in and he announced that it was boring. I love this for several reasons. First of all, the other books are easily what I consider "boring". It is actually hard for me to keep my eyes open when I read them to him each night. Just one excerpt from his current favorite:

Water is a special type of matter that can change easily from a liquid to a
gas. It can also change easily from a liquid to a solid and then back
again. When matter changes form, we say it is changing its state. A
change in temperature is what usually causes a change in its state.

For the first few weeks that we read these books, I remained in shock that he seriously wanted to listen to this stuff. Finally the shock wore off and I assumed that he would like any of the books in the series. It blew my mind that he hated the volcano book immediately. It showed me that he has already developed a major interest in specific science subjects and he knows what he is doing when picking out the titles. He is not interested in volcanoes and therefore the book was boring to him. But he will gladly listen to me drone on about electrons, atoms and matter. That just blows my mind. It also reminds me that getting Colin to pay attention and learn when presented with material he is not interested in is going to be a long term battle. You wouldn't believe how fast that volcano book was sent off the bed. The good news is that Hayden is now getting his book back. ;-) I asked Colin to help me clean the playroom last weekend and his answer was, "Mommy, I would be delighted to!". It was so cute...I have no clue where he heard that phrase. He is also very into public service people of any kind, as usual. He was playing police man last night (complete with hat, badge and whistle) while Jer and I were sitting on the couch. He told us that he was going to direct traffic and he proceeds to stand in the living room, whistle in mouth, and holds his hands out clearly stopping one side of traffic and waving the other one on. He was stoic and did not make a sound...totally in his own world. Then he blows the whistle and yells, "SLOW DOWN!" and then keeps directing. Jer and I were literally crying with laughter on the couch. We were holding our noses and mouths, trying not to erupt in guffaws. I had tears rolling down my cheeks; for some reason, it was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. :-) This morning, I had to do bloodwork at my doctors office to check my cholesterol. etc. Colin went with me and when the nurse started to do it, he asked if he could watch. She approved and he jumped onto the exam table with me and bent all the way over my arm, with his face just inches away, to watch. The nurse looked up at me worriedly and asked if he would be okay to watch the blood. I assured her that it was not a problem. She took 5 vials of blood while Colin watched in silent awe. He even asked to hold the vials so that he could "check them out" afterwards. This kid...I swear.

Next Tuesday is "meet the teacher" at Colin's school. I am more than a little nervous about how the switch to a new class will go, but I am staying positive and thinking on the bright side. He keeps telling me that he will miss Gina and Keli and that he can't go to another class without them, but I think he will shake it off quickly once he sees how much fun the 4 year olds have. :-) I am praying! School is starting on September 7th and I am truthfully very excited. Having a couple of mornings a week to get things done really helps my sanity! I miss getting to clean up, vacuum (Colin has real trouble with that dang vacuum noise!), plan our menus, grocery shop and get the random errand accomplished without a child in tow. I also miss temperatures under 100 degrees, so the start of school = fall coming = THANK GOD.