They are always watching and learning....

One of my big parenting things is being very aware of the fact that kids learn by example. Kids learn how to live through watching their parents or whoever they happen to live with, and they do not miss a thing. If you sit around cursing, watching TV all of the time, being disrespectful to others, eating exclusively junk food, do not exercise, nine times out of ten that is the way they will be - fat, lazy and rude. Because of this, I expect the same things from myself that I expect of my children, minus a few cuss words here and there when they are not around - there is always a double standard hidden somewhere. :)

That brings me to this funny story: Evyn has been questioning a lot of lifestyle-related things lately, one big topic that she keeps revisiting is smoking and another is exercise. Her grandpa is the perfect example of why we should not smoke (and should exercise), and he is referred to a lot during our anti-smoking conversations. He is also referred to quite a bit in regard to our why-you-should-exercise conversations. Evyn has asked all kinds of questions about what will happen if you don't exercise, what kinds of things can exercise help you do and things like that.

Holly was sleeping in last Saturday for much longer than she usually does when it is her morning to sleep in (she also had a girls' night out the night before which explains the prolonged "sleep.") Anyway, at some point late morning Evyn went back to Holly and was talking about one thing and then another. At this point, Holly was informed that if she did not get up soon her muscles would basically waste away. Needless to say, I laughed quite hard when Holly asked me what I had been teaching her. I love the logic of a 5 year old.

See what I mean? They ask to use the treadmill and play on "my" ball and doubt they would if they did not see us using them. I am not so hardcore that I would make them exercise at 3 and 5 years of age - they get plenty of exercise just playing.

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In Reed news, well, lets focus on the cute stuff and not on the fact that his latest obsession is climbing his closet shelves to unfold and move his clean clothes around, thus pulling the shelving units out of the wall not once but twice in a week. Oh yeah, sorry, I was not going to talk about the unpleasant things..... This morning he came into my room as we were about it get up. We snuggled for a while and really enjoyed a few peacful moments. As we were lying there, he started rubbing my head and said "you're so cute mommy." He then repeated it again after I obviously seemed to enjoy his compliment. These are the adorable moments that keep me from strangling him when he is being not-too-cute.

P.S. Blooger would not spellcheck, so ignore any typos. :)