From the Mouths of Babes in February

Eileen:  Can I have one of those?  (Hershey Kiss)
Dave:  No. It has milk in it.
Robin: (trying to come to her rescue) I think it has almond milk.

Robin:  Pee pee poo poo (giggle)
Me:  No potty talk.
Robin:  Boogers.

Robin:  I have long hair. 

Robin and his long hair.  He ran throughout the house like this.

Eileen cracks me up.  While waiting at Linus' basketball game, she dug through my purse and found the hat, beanie, and necklace.  I think she wears a beanie well.

A Peek Inside the World of Eileen

There is no one quite like Eileen.  No one.  She is her own person, even when it conflicts with what I think.  Eileen is creative, imaginative, and an introvert.  She is shy until she isn't.  She is an observer of all things around her.

Words that describe Eileen: loving, kind, fun, mildly feral, with slight propensity for whining.  She is not competitive.  She is the girl on the soccer field, swaying and holding hands with a teammate while the rest of the kids fly around the field.   What I admire most about her is her ability to stay out of the fray.  She is comfortable in her own skin, doing her own thing.

Eileen lives in her own little world.  She is content to be by herself and spends hours in her room.  If you send her up to go change her clothes, you may not see her for a good hour or two unless you repeatedly hassle her.  Instead she will be drawing, playing, reading, rolling around....

The other day I attempted to go into her room.  Rather than be annoyed by the state of her room, I decided to document it as a moment in time of who Eileen is.

Frequently, it is difficult to open the door to her room.  If she is not sitting and blocking the door, something else is.  Her room is a minefield.

See the rope?  Eileen used her Goldie Blocks to rig a system that allows her to turn on or off her bedroom light from her bed.  The only flaw is that she has to decide which operation it will do.

The hanging necklaces, glow in the dark rosary, and bell?  Alarm system.
The pink thing wrapped around the stuffed fawn?  She took the cover off her alarm clock to use as clothes for the fawn.
Stuff hanging above her bed?  Clouds, a paper hummingbird.
Under her bed?  Her own personal chill corner modeled after the "chill corners" in mine and my partner's classrooms.

I can't believe how much stuff she keeps in her bed. So.many.toys. It's not uncommon to find the pooh bear adorned with random costumes, socks, winter clothes.  She has pencils, multiple books, the mickey mouse bubble wand/flashing light thing, random toys.

I'm pretty sure she purposely always slants the pictures on her wall.  Her floor and shelves are  littered with randomness.  If you look closely though, it isn't always so random.  The giant unicorn has a hair clip on its ear.  The two tiaras mirror one another with a carefully placed hatchimal reflected across an invisible line.  Symmetry.

I find peace and joy in order.  I like a clean house, free of clutter.  Eileen revels in the messiness of her life.  It's a struggle to find the balance.  I hope I am able to teach Eileen how to be responsible and organized.  In return, I hope to gain an improved ability to let go, embrace the chaos, and remember how it was to be young once.

Eileen is still a child who knows how to live in a land of make believe.  She isn't too old or too cool to pretend to be a sea turtle with her little brother, listen to stories, or truly play with toys.

I may not always understand you Eileen, but I do appreciate you.

Forced Family Fun

Sickness, work, more sickness, sports practices, grocery shopping, games, volunteer work, and more sickness has kept our family from spending quality time as just the five of us.  No longer content to let another weekend slip by without our little family doing something together.

Linus was not sure to make of this.  He kept suggesting things that fell along our usual lines of divide and conquer.  They weren't bad ideas, but they defeated the purpose of togetherness.  I decided that we should all go to the Living Computer Museum.  This museum had been previously recommended to me, and as luck would have it, there was a 2 for 1 coupon in the Entertainment book I bought from my niece.

The promise of Minecraft got the kids out the door....

This place is pretty cool.  The main floor has robotics and virtual reality.

Eileen loved controlling the robot.  Linus later chased me around the main floor with it. It was a little reminiscent of the part of the movie, AI, where there are all the outdated robots.

There were also robot cubes that you could assemble and play with.  Robin liked those.  Dave tried out the virtual reality.  Linus was disappointed to learn you had to be thirteen or older.

Luckily, Linus was old enough to do the self-driving car simulation.  Eileen hopped along for the ride.  I could not watch due to motion sickness.

The main floor has a digital art studio.  The kids all enjoyed that room.  When we first walked in, on one of the Apple IIg computers, someone had drawn a Pepe the Frog.  I was not happy about this at all.  It took me a few minutes to remember how to use the program and then I was able to successfully erase it.  Linus then created his own work of art.

We spent some time on the mezzanine level --aka where the kids could play Minecraft.  I personally played around with Super Mario maker.  Personally, I think upstairs was the best....

Right when you walk in, there is an enigma machine. So cool.

There is every kind of old computer imaginable.  Even cooler, they all have games -- the big floppy disks of the 80s, the square floppy disks of the 90s.  There was even a Commodore64!  It took me a while, but I found the Apple IIe computer with Oregon Trail.  I loved how they even had a pretend 1980s living room with an old Atari set up with at least 20 games to choose from.

Seriously, if you miss playing video or computer games from any era, this place has them.  If I didn't feel the need to supervise my kids, I probably could have spent way too much time there.  We didn't get the chance to check out the room with the giant mainframe computers.

We didn't get the chance because kids.  What is forced family fun without a trip to the urgent care?  Eileen had been complaining about her eye.  It had looked irritated, but she said she had poked herself with a stick.  While at the museum, her eye really began to swell and had crusties. 

We cut our visit short and headed home.  Dave took Eileen to urgent care.  Diagnosis: stye.  I'm just glad it isn't pink eye.  Thank God for the Everett Walk-In clinic.  I feel like we are there every weekend at this point.  Even if we didn't get to see everything, I think everyone had fun during our forced togetherness.