Things They Say, Continued

Now that we have three kids verbally exploring their world, it seems that there's a constant flow of "things I should write down." The latest:

Louisa lost her 2nd tooth this week. Although she knows that Santa Clause is not real, she's holding out hope that fairies exist, and in this case, the tooth fairy. We've read a few books about the tooth fairy, one where a boy loses and tooth and his sister is jealous, so she fakes the tooth fairy out with a piece of corn. The robots at the tooth fairy palace detect her lie, and chase her out of the palace,  teaching her a lifelong lesson. So Cora's only comment about the tooth fairy is that she never wants to go to her palace. The other book was from the library and I wish I would have written down the title, because it was cute. Basically a rumor went around school that Mr. Smith was the tooth fairy, for every child, not just his daughter.

But back to Louisa's comment....

She lost her tooth at breakfast on Monday. I put the tooth in a ziplock and left it on the counter. Long story short, it was accidentally thrown away and Louisa was pretty sad that night when she went to put it under her pillow. I consoled her, saying that the tooth fairy would still come. For some reason I told Louisa that "I know the tooth fairy, and she will come." That actually dried Lou's tears in a magical way, and for the next couple days, she was obviously thinking about my relationship to the tooth fairy. Yesterday on the walk home from piano, she asked if the tooth fairy came to our wedding and when I said no, she begged me to tell her how I know the tooth fairy. I debated telling her that mom and dad are the tooth fairy, but I love the hope that she has, thinking that fairies are real. I told her that when you have kids, you meet the tooth fairy and left it at that.

Cora says all sorts of funny things these days. One of our favorites is, "we got some ______ going," where the blank is filled in with whatever she is doing at the moment, such as coloring or a game. You got it going on, Bean. She has also been thinking a lot about Gigi, Nate's grandma Trudy, who died at a beautiful age of 93 in November. Cora has been learning about dinosaurs at school, and the other day asked if Gigi died when the dinosaurs became "astinct?" She quickly added that 'astinct' means smelly.

Then there is Peter, who loves to mimic single words, or 2 word phrases like "over there" but won't say two unrelated words together, such as "mama eats." I only stopped to think about the difference between the two when doing Peter's developmental questionnaire for his 2-year check up next week. But a specific speaking moment I'd like to remember happened two nights ago, when he was up every couple of hours, wheezing and coughing. He had been sleeping on me or Nate and at one point when he seemed totally asleep, he adjusted himself on me, wrapped his arms around my shoulders and said, "hug" before drifting off to sleep. Then Nate was up helping Cora reclaim her blanket from Ries and Peter noticed that Nate was gone. When Nate walked back into our dark room, Peter patted his spot in the bed and said, "sit here." Oh buddy, you make us laugh. Thankfully this was just a one night illness and while his voice is still a bit scratchy, he slept great last night, and so did I.