Kids to me: “You can’t come in because you’re a boy.” Apparently I’m banned from the bathroom and their room. I blame a classmate.

Miranda was instructing Eleanor how to pronounce “Madeline”, and when Eleanor said she couldn’t do it, Miranda threatened to bite her.

Eleanor loves to write her name. She writes it on every drawing she does, and always underlines it. One thing I noticed, though, is that the letter “a” in her name has been morphing. At one point, the vertical line of her “a” shifted from the right side to the left side of the oval. Then, it started getting longer.

I told Eleanor that the “a” in her name was supposed to go the other way, and her response was “it’s okay…” She said it in a way that sounded like she was prompting me to say that it’s okay that her “a” was backwards. I didn’t though, and I said that it really does go the other way, and I drew an “a” as an example.

Eleanor took out a new sheet of paper and got to work writing her name again using the sample “a” as an example. When I checked back on her later, this is what she wrote:

She couldn’t just turn around the “a”. She was so convinced that she had it right, that she thought I must have wanted her whole name to be flipped around. I wasn’t sure what to say. I said that her whole name was backwards. She said “it’s okay…”

Our kids have been obsessed with “The Sound of Music” for the last two months. We have the DVD constantly cued up to play any of the songs, as well as the CD in the car. This obsession culminated in “The Sound of Music” sing-a-long at the Hollywood Bowl, where we, and 20,000 other people sang along to the movie. It was the kids first official movie.

So, for Halloween this year, I ordered two dirndls from Germany. A dirndl is the traditional Austrian and Bavarian dress that is worn by Julie Andrews and all the girls in “The Sound of Music”. Note, the Baroness, played by Eleanor Parker, never wears a dirndl because she is a sophisticated evil woman from Vienna.

The girls tried on their dresses and sang “Do-Re-Mi”.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.4MB).]

Eleanor wasn’t napping–she pointed out bugs on the wall, which turned out to be ticks. I killed the two, but I’m worried about more.

We took the kids to their first swimming lesson this morning. It went fine, but I think we’re going to do some practicing in the bath.

This weekend we took our first vacation as a family. We went to Santa Barbara for two days. Even though the kids are over three years old, I haven’t really wanted to take a vacation with them. Basically, I don’t find parenting to be relaxing, and the thought of taking a trip–where everything is even more stressful–just is not appealing at all.

So, why did I bother trying to take the kids on a vacation? I have no idea. It literally popped into my head on Wednesday, and we left on Friday evening. That was mistake number one–trying to drive to Santa Barbara from North Orange County at 6pm on a Friday. It took three and a half hours when it should have taken less than two hours. But surprisingly, the kids did okay. They ate dinner in the car and fell asleep at about 8pm. The last hour and a half, Bernard and I pretended we were a childless couple on our way to a nice weekend at the beach. It was quiet, the moon was up–I almost relaxed.

When we arrived in Santa Barbara at about 9:30 pm, the kids had fallen asleep in their car seats, so Bernard and I placed them onto the king sized bed for them to sleep the rest of the night. At 4 am they woke up bewildered at being in a strange bed, so I climbed into their bed, explained to them that we were on vacation and that they needed to go back to sleep. I slept with them until the morning. Big mistake. The next day, they went on and on about how the big bed was for Eleanor, Miranda, and Mommy, and the sofa bed was for Daddy. At naptime, there was a huge fuss when I said, “No, Mommy is not going to sleep with you guys.”

The hotel had a king sized bed and a saggy sofabed. The kids normally sleep in very low beds, so we brought these “bed bolsters” to keep the kids from falling out of bed. Overall, the kids slept okay, despite never having shared a bed before. Needless to say, they talked and played the whole time they should have been napping during the day on Saturday, but they did sleep most of the way through Friday night, and all the way through Saturday night.

On Saturday, we went to the annual Harbor and Seafood Festival and played in the sand for a little while. I think the kids had a good time, except for when the wind blew sand in their eyes, and a huge flock of seagulls descended on us, a la Alfred Hitchcock.

On Sunday, we went to the Santa Barbara Zoo, which I highly recommend for families with small children.

I was quite amazed at the lion. He was sitting two feet away from us (and behind a thick pane of glass). The zoo has a cute little train that goes around the zoo.

Overall, we were able to have some fun with the kids–I might actually do this again.

The kids are napping, but when I heard talking, I opened the door. They both flattened onto the bed, but Eleanor bashed into the headboard.

Miranda: “Your bed is look like a sofa.” We’re at a hotel in Santa Barbara, and Agnes and I have been sleeping on the sofa bed.

This is what the kids were talking about in the car this morning.

ELEANOR: What does a red light mean?

MIRANDA: Stop.

ELEANOR: What does a green light mean?

MIRANDA: Go.

ELEANOR: What does a yellow light mean?

MIRANDA: Slow down.

ELEANOR: What does a purple light mean?

MIRANDA: Monkey.

Miranda answered that last question without missing a beat. It makes you wonder what they talk about when we aren’t listening.