A wonderful, magical, golden era

Okay, so sometimes caring for two toddlers is taxing and stressful. The house is always covered in crumbs and sticky fingerprints. There is some whining and carrying on that occurs daily. But recently, I was reminded of some of the perks on the horizon, like the fact that Laine is almost old enough to do chores. Not like her chores she has had up until now of helping carry in the grocery bags or putting the poopy diapers in the garbage. I am talking about the kind of chores that I had as a kid. If you hold on just a tick and I think I can scrounge up some photographic evidence i.e. Nicole and I doing nightly dishes at age 2 and 3.

I know my Mom worked hard and even felt as most mothers did that her job was never done {the house was immaculate and the counter underneath the answering machine was wiped daily. NOT an exaggeration. There was a constant threat of having to wash walls and baseboards when we acted up or wouldn't go to sleep} But we as 5 little girls in the house felt that we did quite our fair share of the work {looking back we probably didn't, but at the time we did feel like we did a lot} Anyway, I think back to those times and am now excited that Laine will soon become somewhat more of a helper and hopefully less of a dead weight.

There have been some subtle clues lately that the time is arriving soon. We have now reached the days where I can offer her "incentives" for doing me "favors". Like just last week at the Gold Coast, for instance. The jets on the hot tub kept running out so I kept telling her that I would give her a dollar if she would go turn them back on. She would get so excited and carefully run around the corner and they would instantly turn on as she pressed the button. She would run back and I would say, "okay, here you go, thanks!" and give her a pretend dollar. She loves to imagine and pretend so much, that this fake dollar is no doubt even better than a real dollar. She is so into it, and one of the times she forgot to collect her "dollar" and about 10 minutes later reminded me of it. Oh, silly me, here you go, here's your dollar...

Laine has also seen her TV friends receiving medals. She loves to give and receive fake medals. I now have a whole closet full of them. If they weren't imaginary, I think they would be taking up too much space and I'd have to get rid of them. Thanks goodness their fake! They are fun, and are another great way to help "inspire" Laine to help me out with things that need done around the house, like getting me my drink or fetching my slippers, rubbing my bunions and corns, etc. And the best is yet to come, I haven't even broken out the, "do it, I'll TIME you!" bit yet, which of course works every time and is shear genius.

Laine loves TV {she calls everything movies though, so I guess I should say she loves her movies}. Anyway, she loves her little Movie friends so much, {she is constantly saying things exactly as they are said on tv -"oh no!, now we'll never get home!" "oh no, it's ruined! We will never fix it!" Wait, I have an idea!"}

She kind of reminds me of a cuter, more wholesome, not creepy, kid version of "Model Walk" MW was a girl at USU who always walked and talked like there were cameras following her every move. You would be talking to her and looking around, instinctively desperate to find where these hidden cameras were, all the while thinking, Model Walk, come back down to Earth, please, no one talks like that. No, seriously Model Walk, there are no cameras, no one is paying attention. Stop prancing, stop giving me canned mumbo jumbo like you are in a beauty pageant. -Please tell me some one out there remembers who I am talking about, Rex, I know at least you Ben and I will. If you didn't know this model walk, though she was one in a million, maybe there are other MW's out there that you have found and can relate nonetheless

Okay, I think I've rattled off on Laine and MW long enough, sorry Gabe, all of the cute things that you are doing will have to wait for another day. I'll leave you with some of Laine's recent one liners:

Said as we were reading The Hungry Caterpillar together: "Look! The caterpillar is going in his raccoon!"

I promised the kids we could go to the park on the way home from the Towers. We spent too much time shopping and it was dusk as we pulled out of the parking garage. I told Laine it was probably too dark to go now. All of the sudden, from no where, she starts singing to the tune of One Republic's Apologize: "It's too late to go to the park, it's too late..."

In Laine's primary class they were talking about their siblings and Laine agreed with her classmates: "I have a sister too, but he's a boy"