The tech savy 6 year old

Or should I say 6 and a half year old since at that young age you count the 1/2 years too. Samuel just got his first e-mail address. He named it himself... "samuelsfirstemail@.......". It made me chuckle. I am amazed at what he learned on the keyboard at school already. He sent a message to Buppa (grandpa) asking him to ride bikes with him and another one to Papi.

Weight resistance

I started on the elliptical again 3 weeks post partum. With the exception of taking the week off while my in laws were here I am back on. Now 7 weeks post partum I am actually starting to feel some muscle aches. That is a good thing because at least I know I have muscles...those abs and thighs. Or perhaps my muscles are returning since I have added resistance to my workout; my daughter. And the good thing is that she is gradually getting heavier which is more natural resistance!

How many people can you fit....

It almost sounds like a joke. How many people can you fit into two double beds? Well, a couple of weeks ago we went to pick-up my mother-in-law and overnighted in a hotel. Even though there are six of us I see us as a single entity. We got to the hotel and then realized that seven people in 2 double beds would be a tad mooshed (even though 4 were children). But we made it happen. Perhaps it was due to all that training had when we promoted ourselves in our house to a king size "family" bed that we made it work. AJ, the two younger ones and myself on one bed (the youngest one is nursing). "Abuela" and the two boys on the other bed. Did we sleep? Yes. Was it comfy? Um, do I need to answer?

FORE!

The kids like to go to N&B's (Nanna and Buppa's). Besides swimming they take the golf cart out with my parents and go out to putt or just for a drive. Yesterday my parents took Ale & Annah as Samuel played with his Razor scooter in the front yard. They came back and we all had a good laugh. They had one of those moments where you wish you had a camera with you.

They gave Annah her little putter and were on one of the greens. Everyone got out of the cart and Annah had this shiny little black purse with her. She reached her hand inside and got out a golf ball (she had several stashed inside). A perfect way to carry golf balls around for such a little lady. One of the balls she had had an "eye" on it so she held it up to her eye and walked around saying "eye, eye, eye" (my father has a machine that instead of dispensing bubble gum dispenses golf balls and the kids enjoy putting a quarter in and getting a ball out in return; that is where she got the ball). Onto putting...Annah was going to putt. She held the putter sideways so was hitting the ball with the edge of the club instead of the side. One time, okay. Two times, okay. Enough is enough! Annah will be two in just under a week. She thought it through....this is taking too much time! The next stroke she decided to not use the club at all but instead kicked the ball. The perfect solution for such a delicate game!

A little of this and a little of that!

Ale likes his water warm when he bathes. He also likes his food warm. But warm does not exist in his vocabulary...yet. Right now, according to Ale, he likes his food (and water) "a little bit of cold and a little bit of hot". Another thing that makes me chuckle.

I'm dook!

Children's language ability amazes me. The amount of rules that they learn and then the acceptions to them. And then if they are learning more than one language....

Samuel was a very clear speaker from the beginning. He had little/no trouble distinguishing Spanish from English. I remember he used to play with this little train set and their was a mummy. He would call it a "mami-O" instead of a momia. He'd do the same thing (flip a word) when we'd read "The Hungry Little Caterpillar". It was a "pater-killer". Samuel picked up this habit somewhere along the way and he'd also add an /s/ to anything that began with a /th/. Oh, "sthank you". It was just that, a habit. When he was four it took little effort for it to be corrected.

Now Ale is four. You can tell he has a worldwind of information moving around in that little head of his. There are sounds that he cannot pronounce yet like the /s/ and there are others like the /l/ that he can but by the same habit that Samuel had with the /sth/ he will correct soon enough. One of the cutest things he does is when someone asks him how he is doing he replies "DOOK" which is "good". The logic is astounding. When I listen to myself and others speak from here many substitute a /d/ at the end of the work with a /k/ so that makes complete sense.

Of course, now we have two little monsters that say "dook" as Annah is all monkey-see-monkey-do. And now if we ask Annah what she is doing she says "I'm doinK". It makes me chuckle.

Paulino

So, who is Paulino? The children's cousin is PaulinA. Yes, with an "a" at the end as in she is a little girl. When we found out we were expecting we told the kids the names we had picked out. Andrea if we had a girl and Joaquin if we had a boy. Ale wanted the baby to be a boy and wanted to call him Paulino. We couldn't figure out why but then it came to us. Alejandro's cousin was born a week after he was and her name is AlejandrA. So naturally since his cousin's name was PaulinA there needed to be a PaulinO.

The kids now have added a 7th member to the family. You guessed it, PaulinO. They carry him around the house and even took him to the outdoor theatre with us last night to watch a movie. Here is a picture of Paulino. He was made for us as a gift (adopted, I guess) from a family friend in Mexico when she found out we were expecting Alejandro four years ago.