LKF

A few Little Known Facts about my children:

These pictures were taken at the beach a few weeks ago when it was sunny and warm. Today it has been raining all the live-long day.

Ridge sleepwalks. Well maybe not quite sleepwalks but he isn't awake. It doesn't happen very often, thank goodness, but it happens. Last night, for instance, he came down to go to the bathroom around 11:30. He does this often enough that we don't have to go in and help him. But last night he started crying once he was in the bathroom. I rushed in there, thinking he was about to be sick, but he wasn't, he just wasn't really awake. His eyes were open and he was standing in front of the toilet, holding himself, and crying. I calmly told him to pull down his pants and go to the bathroom but he didn't respond, just kept crying and getting upset. So I kept saying it louder and louder and finally tried to help him which made him more upset. He did finally go but he made the BIGGEST mess of pee all over the toilet and floor that I have ever seen in our house. Then this morning he comes in laughing, and tells me that Cannon missed the toilet really bad and there was so much pee on the floor (I didn't clean up after him last night, it was 11:30 and I had been asleep!). So I laughed and told him that no, he had made that mess last night and didn't he remember? He didn't remember a thing and he thought it was even funnier that he had made the mess. I need to add that last night I asked him to tidy up the living room and he even emptied the trash in the kitchen. He is a good boy.
Cannon can scream and wail louder than any child I have ever heard. Take yesterday, for instance. We were at the bus stop in the morning and Ridge pulled out a small transformer that he had traded the day before for a hacky sack. Cannon really wants transformer toys for his birthday and is getting kind of obsessive about it. When he saw Ridge with the toy he really wanted to play with it until the bus came. Ridge didn't want to let him since the toy was still new to him so Cannon starts getting mad and chasing Ridge all around. They play chase at the bus stop a lot but this time Cannon was out to get him and Ridge was staying away and keeping the toy out of reach so Cannon starts his screaming wail cry and gets even more angry. I grabbed his arm to get him to stop chasing and calm down but that made him mad and he just wouldn't give up. I'm sure that all of the neighbors must wonder what goes on at our house; I would think beatings were going on with the kind of screaming Cannon has been doing lately. But no, Cannon is just screaming mad. So we got back home and he wailed and screamed for another 20 minutes. In my pre-huge belly days I would yank him over my shoulder and march up the stairs and put him in his room but doing that now is too much so he kicked around the living room for a long time. I have no idea how to get him to stop screaming his frustration out. It comes and goes so I'm not sure what triggers it. He'll grow out of it, right? He is generally such a sweet boy. He loves to try to feel the baby kicking. I just need to figure out how to keep him from acting like a 50 lb. baby.
Laine holds her breath when she starts to cry hard. It isn't on purpose, it is just the way she has done it since she was tiny. You know when kids get hurt or upset and it is that bad cry where there is the initial wail and then the breath hold and then the louder wail? Well Laine holds her breath so long that her lips will be faintly pale and she has no strength left. If she is still standing when this starts she'll stagger to me and eventually breathe again and kind of collapse and cry her breath back. Not that she is close to passing out. Yesterday, for instance, something set her off when we were driving in the car and she started to cry her big cry. She didn't breathe for a while and I'm yelling at her to breathe and I can feel her kicking my chair, trying to gulp breath in, and then she finally does and she just sobs. Then today she started to cry and came and found me in the kitchen, kind of staggering, waiting for her cry to come out, which it did so I picked her up to soothe her. I'm not sure what the cry was about. I'm pretty sure she'll grow out of this soon. It seems like little kids stop the wail-breath-wail thing around 3ish. Right? The boys didn't hold their breath the same way. It scared me at first, and sometimes still makes me worried, but she hasn't ever fainted, now I know it is just Laine. And now you know too.