milestones

We’ve hit a few milestones in the past month. 1. I have officially “pulled the car over” for each of my children.  Karis’s purposeful and high-pitched screaming on the way home from school pickup on Monday earned her that honor. 2. Jafta is officially too big to be carried.  At 70 pounds, I can no longer lift him.  I have some very sad feelings about that, and I regularly grab him and threaten to squash him back into a baby . . .  and then squeeze him tight.  I swear, this time next year he will be as tall as I am. 3. He’s also officially out of his car seat, a fact he is thrilled about.  Although, the APA just announced that Karis is supposed to go back IN her infant carseat.  Until she’s two.  Which is in two more weeks.  I may or may not be following that guideline. 4. Karis has started crawling out of her crib.  And by crib, I mean pack-and-play.  Because a few months ago I got sick of how much space the crib took up, and I disassembled it and sold it on Craiglist, and set up a much more compact pack-and-play in it’s place.  And then I wondered why I had used a full-sized crib with any of the kids, when a pack-and-play is so much smaller.  Well, now I know. Because a pack-and-play is also much easier to climb out of.  Which means that a few nights a week, I hear a stirring in the hall and open the door to find a toddler standing there, all RED RUM style.  SCARES THE CRAP OUT OF ME.  Also, the climbing out is making naptime pretty unbearable.  For me.  She’s having a blast with it. 5. I had my first story published in a print magazine.  Yay! 6. Kembe learned to ride a bike without training wheels.  He asked us to take them off for about a week, but Mark waited until he had some time to spend teaching him to ride.  Well, that was unnecessary.  Kembe took off without a hitch.  This is Mark filming him on his second lap without training wheels. I love this video, because you can see where he starts to get a little overwhelmed and frustrated, which used to lead to a tantrum.  But we’ve been teaching to “take a yoga breath”, and here he did it by himself, without prompting.  I think I was prouder about that than about the actual bike skills. I don’t really have anything to report about India.  She’s been working on earning the Tangled DVD by going a whole week without being “sassy”.  It has been several weeks.  The sass . . . no one warned me about the sass.