Firsts

Today my children received their FIRST haircut on my watch. It went extremely well at first. We went to this very cool kids hair place. They have a special play area for kids with a table with trains and a kids movie on the DVD player. We decided to do Victoria first because we felt it would be easier for Tino to keep himself occupied, which turned out to be accurate. He was mesmerized by the trains. Victoria was well behaved during her hair cut. They have these tiny metal cars on pedestals where the children sit (buckled in, of course) The stylist, Kim, found it challenging to cut her hair, as she was constantly turning her head in all directions to inspect her surroundings, but with the help of some toys and goldfish crackers, we got the job done. When Victoria was finished, we brought Tino in. They were not very busy, so the children got to sit in adjacent cars during Tino's haircut. He watched his favorite movie, "Mater," and sat incredibly still during the haircut. Kim was really nice and gentle with him, showing him and letting him touch all her various implements before using them on his hair. Tomorrow I will see if I can post some photos of the new haircuts.

When they were done, she complimented me on how well they behaved. We lowered both of them to the ground and I went to go and pay the bill. This was our big mistake. Tino headed right back to the trains and when Mommy was ready to leave, he was not. He screamed and cried and pitched a fit when we left. Finally I managed to get him strapped into his car seat. Meanwhile, Victoria was in my seat, turning on the hazard lights, windshield wipers, honking the horn, etc. This has been my strategy for handling the situation when one is throwing a tantrum. Let the happy kid sit in the driver's seat and entertain him/herself while I wrestle with the screamer to get them in the straitjacket (Did I say that out loud? I meant car seat...) The only problem with this is that the happy kid never wants to be removed from the driver's seat and especially not to have a dirty diaper changed, which was the case today. (FIRST time changing a diaper in the car, BTW)

So now both kids were screaming. I bribed Tino to stop crying with goldfish crackers and he settled down immediately. What do they put in those things anyway? Some kind of baby addictive substance? The goldfish crackers did not work on Miss Victoria, however, because she did not want me to hand her one or two at a time- no, she wanted me to give her the entire container so SHE could dispense the fish herself. I held out for a long time in the interest of not cleaning up a pile of goldfish later, but eventually she won.

Okay, and are you ready for the most exciting "first?" Well, we all had a nice family dinner with no screaming involved, and then the kids climbed into their nightly bath. We were all having a nice time- no one was complaining about using the tub as a place to WASH. no one was fighting over any bathtub toys, and Mommy managed to only soak her jeans tonight and not her shirt too. Then all of a sudden I noticed a small brown toy floating around in the water. It didn't look familiar but there were seven or eight of them in the water. I took a closer look. What are those little brown things? Well.... I'm sure some of you can see this coming... yes, it was poop. Fortunately, Dave was close at hand to whisk the kids out of their tub and into our tub, where they had their FIRST shower to rinse off all the soap. And Mommy did her FIRST poop scooping out of the tub.

And last but not least, this evening we had our FIRST Skype session with Grandpa Bob, Dave's father who lives on the east coast. I was really proud of him for buying and installing a camera for his PC, downloading Skype, and setting up his own account with no assistance. (I required some guidance from my cousin MFB to accomplish this myself...) So Grandpa got to virtually meet the kids. It was really fun.