Pout Pout Fish...

March is a tricksy month. She taunts us with warm near 70 degree weather than snaps back to the 30 degree mark. It makes me cranky, and more importantly, it makes the kiddos cranky. Oddly enough, Norah's favorite book of late is called, quite aptly, The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Deisen and Dan Hanna. It's repeating chant of "I'm a pout-pout fish / With a pout-pout face / So I spread the dreary-wearies / All over the place" is charming somehow. Maybe, I just like to hear my 17 month old say "pout-pout fish."

Besides having a copy of "The Pout-Pout Fish" in my bag of trix, we've also been spending a lot of our indoor time making art. Needless to say, our resident artist, Kai, is in heaven. Yesterday, he inked himself purple -- he colored one or two of his fingers completely and placed frog stamps up and down his arms. The kid loves his glitter pens too, which he piles on thick and then folds the paper in half to get a design; my mom and I taught him to do this since we didn't know what else to do with a volcano of glitter glue that would not dry. They end up looking like iridescent Rohrschach designs.

Kit also pulled out our dusty jars of seeds and got the kids going on planting them to get a jump start on our vegetable, flower and herb garden. He also had Kai plant several tree seeds since Kai has been especially interested in those as of late.

Every year when we plant our seeds, I am reminded of that Frog and Toad story in which Frog (or is it Toad?) can't believe how long it takes to see the new little plant push up and out of the soil. I very much have a Frog (or Toad) personality while Kit is more like the little boy in the book "The Carrot Seed" who patiently waters and cares for his seed while everyone around him is impatient. I so hope the kids take after Kit on this one. We did warn Kai though that it would take some time to see the new little plants and that some might not grow just in case he takes after his Mama.

Here's hoping that like the Pout-Pout Fish in the story...we (and March too!) will realize that we are in fact truly "...kiss-kiss fish / With a kiss-kiss face / For spreading cheery-cheeries / All over the place!"