March came in like a lion, and kept on going. Phoebe's birthday was the lead-off to the month. She turned 4 years old. After breakfast, we opened up presents. This was the birthday that Phoebe got her own bike. I picked it up on the way home from work the night before. She had picked it out a couple weeks before: a bright pink Gary Fisher Gamma Ray. Phoebe calls it her "Shooting Star Bike." She was quite excited. Of course, the presents she seemed most enamored by were the slippers from Auntie Mandy and the Princess kit from Aunt Shelly and Uncle Allen. After work, we went out to dinner with the Caseys since Kevin is Phoebe's birthday buddy. We all went out to Benihana. The kids enjoyed the show including the "volcano" (as seen on an episode of "The Office") made out of onion slices, and Ellen really likes using chopsticks. Phoebe liked the scrambled egg that the chef made, but not much else. Ellen enjoyed the shrimp, surprisingly enough. Then Phoebe and Kevin got the birthday treatment - balloon hats and the birthday song. All 4 kids got sundaes since they all had celebrated birthdays over the past previous weeks.
Phoebe continues to be quite trying with her stubbornness and attempts at getting what she wants by crying. (you'd think she would have already figured out this ploy wouldn't work through Ellen's example, but I guess she thinks that she's just a little cuter because she's younger). She still loves her pre-school, and doesn't mind at all when she has to be dropped off earlier on some days or picked up later. In fact, she's pretty much always disappointed when she sees me walk in the door regardless of the time I get there. Phoebe enjoys music and is quite the inventive singer. She can really turn a lyric. This morning after breakfast, she sang the "Eenie, meenie, minie, mo" song to really nice tune. I don't know if she made up the tune or not, but she made it work. She also made up a verse for "Wheels on the bus" that goes, " the daddy on the bus reads his newspaper", and she added the movements of pretending to hold up the paper and move her head back and forth like she was reading. She does seem to be a natural when it comes to building with the Legos or creating a new song with lyrics and words on the fly (Yes! finally evidence that she's a Pearson. With Ellen at least, she has her Auntie Mandy's nuclear temper from when she was little...ok, I had one too). She does experiments with magnetism on her own or with her sister. She built a robot out of Legos that used it's hip and leg section for a table when it wanted to stop and eat. She now gets to brush her own teeth with toothpaste. She's still getting the hang of it. She's outgrowing everything now too. She's not far behind Ellen in size as you'll see from her dimensions. We've had to break into the next box of hand-me-downs already. When we finally had a nice weekend, we got the girls out on their bikes. Phoebe did a really good job of getting going and keeping going. Though she has a habit of concentrating on her front wheel and not what's in front of her. She almost ran into a parked car in the cul de sac the first time she headed across that way. Finally, as I mentioned, the girls had their yearly inspection. Phoebe is doing well. She peed in a cup this time (both girls managed to get the side of cup. Thanks a lot ladies). Her ear infection had cleared up finally. They did the eye check. Her sight isn't perfect, but coming from Jada and me, we knew they'd be in glasses at some point. Here are her bodily dimensions:
| Weight | Height |
| 35.25lbs | 40.25in |
Ellen's vocabulary and reading level continue to increase. She sometimes says things that are absolutely mature sounding, and funny at the same time when she pulls things out of her books and uses them correctly in a different setting. El has really learned the art of the segue. Her favorite is to use "speaking of...". She genuinely loves to learn...and not always just to be a know-it-all. She's still writing quite a bit, and she's adding pictures to them that are quite detailed. Her spelling is coming along, though she has the kindergarten spelling where she's playing with the sound of the words and putting the letters she thinks should be there. She's surprisingly close much of the time. In play around the house, Ellen is quite bossy and always trying to dictate what Phoebe plays with and how - sometimes from the kitchen table when she's supposed to be eating. She doesn't so much care what Phoebe is doing until she's doing it, and then it becomes paramount that she is the one doing it. It's frustrating to her that Phoebe comes up with lots of things that she likes to do on her own because she loves playing with her...just not if she doesn't come up with the game. Ellen likes to sit on the couch near the window when she's having a little time to herself to read one of her chapter books. She has read through several of the Beverly Cleary books on her own now in the waiting rooms for Grandma's doctor appointments and during Jada's staff meetings. We also had a bit of a jam session one weekend where I was playing guitar, and the girls got out a bunch of their musical instruments. Ellen learned how to play "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" on her toy piano using the sheet music that came with it. So I played along with her on guitar. She's learned how to snap her fingers now, and she's still working on whistling.
Ellen had her doctor appointment too. She's where she should be too (and she peed on my hand too!), but when they checked her ears, she found that she had an ear infection in each ear. That's the first one in 3 years. They tested her eyes as well, and she's seeing pretty well so far. Parent teacher conferences were this month. I took the day off for Jada's first 12 hour day full of conferences to stay with Ellen. I dropped Phoebe off at school since she wanted to go there rather than run errands with me all morning. I had to start with getting x-rays of my back (I'll get to that later), and we ended up waiting for over 40 minutes before we found out that we still had another 45 minutes before they were going to be able to get me in. So we left and went to Krispy Kreme since it was close, and Ellen had done a very good job waiting as patiently as she could. While I was in for the x-rays finally, she had to stay out with the receptionists behind the desk where she quietly sat and organized paper clips and stickers. I noticed that one of my tires was low while walking to the car, and luckily there is a Les Schwab tire center right next to the chiropractor's office, so we dropped off the xrays, and dropped the car off to have it checked. By the time we got the xrays dropped off a the chiropractor's office, it was time for lunch. We walked over to the Panda Express since Ellen liked Happy Panda so much. This wasn't as good though. By the time we got back to the tire shop, the tire was fixed. We had one more stop to make at the post office, and then I stopped off at the Playground at Conestoga Rec Center to let Ellen have some time to play out in the sun. One weekend, she decided to start labeling all the rooms in the house. We're not sure why, but we let her keep them up for a week. Finally, after many warnings, Ellen was throwing one of her patented fits in her bunk, and she fell out of her bunk bed. She was ok, just shaken up, but hopefully she learned an important lesson. Here are Ellen's stats from the doctors appointment:
| Weight | Height |
| 43.25lbs | 44.63in |
We were finally able to have a weekend where we could have the girls birthday party. They chose to do a skating party, so we went to the Oaks Park rink. We picked up cakes from Beaverton Bakery. I don't think any of the kids that came had skated much (or parents for that matter), but they seemed to still have a good time. That same afternoon, the weather ended up being unexpectedly nice so we decided to give the bike train a try. We hooked up the tandem to the Piccolo, and connected the trailer to that creating quite the long load. Our maiden voyage with this configuration went pretty well. Ellen was learning about how her gears work. Phoebe was playing with her bell, and we all got quite a few stares and smiles. We only did 7.5 miles around the neighborhoods, but it was nice to be out and get used to the feel of the additional length and turning radius. We were out about an hour.
Other tidbits from the month include the girls had their last ballet class of the winter term. Jada said she taped it, so I'll get to see the performance when we make the copies. They have also suddenly started getting much braver around dogs. Ellen is less timid about petting dogs, and Phoebe let a dog lick her hand recently. They still prefer smaller dogs, but it's still a small feat that they even prefer them. We all were able to attend a party at Jada's co-workers house this month. They brew beer themselves, and they brewed up a special batch of root beer for us to test out since we don't imbibe ourselves. It was pretty good, and very similar to the micro-brewed root beers that I prefer over the mass marketed ones (Thomas Kemper, Mt. Angel, Weinharts). Ellen also got to bring her Kindergarten class's butterflies home for Spring Break (which was the last week of the month). That was an adventure. It started out fine watching all the butterflies emerge from their chrysallis. The girls named all of them. I don't remember all of them except Curly and Upsie-Downsie. Curly was named for its wings being curled, and Upsie-Downsie was named because we kept finding it upside down in the sugar water at the bottom of the container. We had to let that one go since it was getting stuck to the sticky bottom of the container, and it didn't look good.
Not all has been good this month. We haven't seen much of Jada this month between her dogged determination to try to keep her mom well and her work with the political action committee that she chairs. I finally decided to go to a chiropractor to see what could be done about the nagging back problems I keep having after playing basketball. I'm optimistic. The x-rays showed that my hips are tilted and rotated, and my head is off center, but he said it's correctable. In addition to the cracking, he is giving me some exercises to do to re-adjust my muscles to carry myself correctly. There's currently not much movement in my hip (but those of you have seen me dance already knew that.)
We also lost our neighbor, Daniel Mostajo, to his 3 year struggle against cancer in the last week of March. He was 63 years old. We'll miss seeing him working on his yard. (We will be riding LiveStrong again this year. As soon as we have a few minutes of time, we'll be getting the notice out.)
We keeping hoping things will calm down next month
Journal entry: April 1, 2007