On the Saturday before Mother's Day, we tried something very daring. We went to three different stores, one after the other, with the twins. This merely sounds easy. If only the level of difficulty in doing such a thing were about the same as the effort to type those words. However, it is ...an undertaking. But, we survived, and in the end - a gift of tricycles had been purchased, which is something that Mormor (Janne's Mom, for you new readers) had been anxious to give to Liam and Morgan for quite some time.
We then picked up the helmets to go with them at a different store, and got the grocery shopping done at yet another different location. Liam had all but completely lost his patience by the time we'd made just a couple of selections in the grocery store, so we wisely didn't take the time to shop every aisle. He did, however, like the crackers that were being sampled, but felt that all of them should have been for him. The poor kid working the sample booth actually looked a little scared. I whisked Liam away as my little guy became more 'vocal', and before the 'sample kid' called an authority figure. The funny part - for me - came about five minutes later, after I had shared this info with Janne, who'd been tearing through another part of the gigantic grocery store with Morgan in her cart, in an effort to make the whole experience 'go faster'. Janne then decided to take Morgan to the sample booth, hoping a cracker might help keep her calm.
The booth was closed.
Unmanned.
'Sample kid' had escaped to the depths of the stockroom, no doubt to silently weep and gnash a few teeth.
At this point, instead of Liam shouting, "More cracker!", his top-of-register chant had become "I go that way!" while pointing in the opposite direction of whichever way I was pushing the cart. Those of you who don't see how this is actually fun have obviously never experienced it. Or maybe I just like having the power to be 'off-putting' for a certain portion of the population without actually participating in the putting off. Honestly, people who let little kids get under their skin need to take a step back and smell their own poop.
You know what I mean.
By the time we went through the checkout, Liam's pitch was a little higher, and a little more desperate. "Go that way! Go that way!" As I exited, trying to console, I said to him (mostly for the benefit of the cashier), "Where shall we go to get into trouble now?"
The cashier laughed.
Liam cried.
"Go that way!" ...oblivious to the fact that he'd just answered my question, albeit unwillingly.
The gifts of potentially faster forward mobility from Mormor then had to be taken home and assembled. Assembly did not begin immediately after arriving home. Mommy and Daddy had to feed the twins, and then try to get them to nap...and 'recover' while they were napping. However, before the scheduled trike outing the next day, the vehicles were assembled in daddy's kitchen plant.
We'd originally had a nice blue and green Supercycle picked out for Liam, but as soon as he saw Morgan sitting on the Dora bike, he insisted on having one just like it. If, when he reaches 3, it's not cool to have a trike with purple on it, I'll add a painting room to my assembly plant...but I think he'll consider anything 'Dora' cool for a while yet.
While feeding the twins breakfast on Mother's Day, I put their helmets on them, to make sure they fit snugly, and Morgan's looks ridiculously cute on her. An aside:
I like to call Morgan 'my doll'. The other day, when I was conducting a little 'descriptors' lesson, I asked her,
"Is Liam a boy or a girl?"
"Boy, daddy!" she exclaimed.
"Are you a girl or a boy?"
"I a doll."
Nothing gets past this girl.
At this juncture, we're going to wait a bit for Liam's arm to heal before taking him back out on the trike again, but we've got something else to keep the two of them occupied in the back yard this coming weekend. Stay tuned.
The above picture is my favourite from that day. Liam and Morgan are both so literal in their translation of Janne's prompt to "Look up!" as she's trying to get them to look toward the camera, this is what we get. Fun.
