I love being a SAHM.

We've had a very lazy morning so far today. Yesterday was a long day and both kids slept like crap last night, so we all laid around piled up in bed until about 9:30. Then the kids got up and climbed into the cradle to play. Yes, it has been over a year since Sophie has slept in it and it's still sitting in my bedroom.

Anyways, I'm trying to tempt Sophie back to bed to play with me, so I pick up one of her little dolls and start loving on it. She screams at me, which is cute, but then Izzy upped the cuteness ante by saying, "Mommy, here's a real baby, right here," he says gesturing to his sister, "You can play with a real baby. Her's a nice baby, see?"

They keep on playing and I go ahead and start making the bed. Izzy runs off and I hear him rustling around in the kitchen. Very shortly he comes back with something in his hand that, due to my lack of contacts yet, I'm having trouble seeing. I ask him what he's holding, and he tells me, "I made my own sandwich." I go over and peek inside, and he has indeed made his own little grape jam sandwich, and the pieces of bread align perfectly. He turns and heads back to the kitchen and I finish making the bed.

Then I torture Sophie for a while by not lifting her out of the cradle. She climbs in easily, but she's still too afraid to climb out. I'm trying to talk her into it, because once she masters climbing out, I have a good excuse to convert the crib into a toddler bed. But it's a no go, so I lift her out and we head to the kitchen to fix breakfast.

I hear the sound of a butter knife hitting the counter, so I speed up and turn the corner to see a very guilty looking Izzy holding a knife over a slice of sugar cookie dough, the kind that has Christmas trees inside. It's been driving him nuts ever since we bought it, but so far he hasn't been well-behaved long enough to bake them. The cute part, however, is that he has carefully laid a paper towel on the counter, and then placed the cookie dough on top of it. Behind him in the floor is the jam-stained paper towel he had laid upon the counter when he'd made his sandwich. Little bits of evidence that he doesn't miss a thing we do around here.

Izzy tells me then that he didn't mean to open the cookies, what he really wanted was a bowl of cereal. Easy mistake. As I fix the bowls of cereal, Izzy's job is to get the milk out. I ask him to go get it, and he says, "Sure!" Then he runs back with it, hands it to me with a flourish and says, "Here you go, Your Highness!" Mom used to always call me "Your Majesty," and I couldn't help but think when Izzy said that this morning that my family is going to give me delusions of grandeur.

As we're eating our cereal, Sophie stands up in her highchair and I ask her if she's done. "Yesh," she says, so I reach to get her down and she bends to the table and pushes her bowl to me. That's her way of telling me that she wants a drink of milk. Then she very carefully lifted out both of her spoons (the one I gave her, and the little toddler spoon that Izzy gave her when he saw the regular spoon she was using) and laid them on the table, an exact imitation of how I'd given her a drink a few minutes earlier.

I am then suddenly hit with how many impossibly cute and sweet things these two do every single day, and how lucky I am to be here and get to see them all. Sure, I get to see all of the bad things as well, but I also get to really see how quickly they master new skills as well. I keep their new accomplishments on a calendar (a lazy girl's baby book) and I saw this morning that on the 19th, using a spoon finally clicked with Sophie and she fed her PaPa Ray an olive from her spoon. Now, just 10 days later, it's honestly hard for me to look at her, cleanly and neatly eating her cereal with only her spoon, and realize that's a skill she's only had for a week and a half. It's wild.

I figure I better get this morning down on my blog before I forget, so I sit down here and start typing and the kids are chasing each other around the house. Izzy runs into my room and shuts the door, then he opens it just enough for Sophie to come in as well. I keep typing away as I hear the muffled sounds of squeals and laughing and then it all gets quiet. That's my cue to zip down the hallway, where I find the door locked. Not a problem, however, that's why we keep the keys to the door on the top of the door frame on the OUTSIDE of the door.

I unlock the door and this is what I see:

Yep, they're back in the cradle. Sophie is playing with one of my makeup brushes and Izzy is in his "Bat Cage." His version of the Bat Cave.

I love my life.