For months now, when Jonathan has gotten a bonk on the noggin’ of some sort, he referred to his head oddly. For example, if he fell and you asked if he hit his forehead, he’d often say, “No. I hit my fivehead.”

Tonight, I decided to see whether he was just having fun with forehead/fourhead or if there was more to it. The conversation went like this:
Me: Jonathan, where’s your forehead?
Jonathan: [Points to his forehead]
Me: Do you have a one head?
Jonathan: Right here. [Points to back of his head]
Me: Where’s your two head?
Jonathan: [Points to a spot on the side of his head]
Me: Do you have a three head?
Jonathan: NO! [Breaks into giggling fit]
Me: What about your five head?
Jonathan: It’s right here! [Points to the crown of his head]

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s a 1, 2, 4, and 5 head. But the mere thought of a 3-head? Hilariously preposterous!

Mikaela had her Jewish Community Center dance recital last week. She did a great job, tapping to “We Are Family” and doing ballet to a Star Wars medley. We were really proud of the great job she did dancing, especially since she’d been sick most of the week before the recital. We were sure that this would be her last year of dance, but when we told her that we thought this was her last recital, Mikaela asked why, and insisted that she wants to continue dancing next year.

Just thought I’d share a couple of Jonathan stories from the last week. The first one comes from last Wednesday morning. I had an early meeting, so I left for work before anyone else in the house was even awake. And just as my meeting was about to start, I got a text message from Miriam, “Jon just pooped in the toy box.”

I was in meetings all day, so I didn’t get the full story until later. Apparently, it went something like this:
Miriam was upstairs helping Mikaela get ready for school. Jon had gone on downstairs, still wearing his pull-up and a nightshirt. Miriam looked down from the landing, and saw Jonathan standing in the entry hall naked as a jaybird. They had the following conversation:
Miriam: Jonathan, where’s your pull-up?
Jonathan: I put it in the garbage.
M: Why did you put your pull-up in the garbage?
J: I put poopy in the toybox. I forgot to use the potty.
M:
The good news – Jonathan actually took ALL of the toys out of the overflowing toybox before leaving behind his “deposit,” so cleanup wasn’t too bad.

Today, on the way home from daycare, sweetheart Jonathan says,
“Mudder’s Day’s comin’ up. I’m gonna make you a present.”
“Do you like snakes?”

Mikaela took a class from Theater of the Imagination. During the class, she and her classmates put together a show called “The Clones vs. The Hannahs”. Mikaela had a great time doing the class (their teacher called her a “natural”) and is looking forward to taking more of them in the future. Here’s the video of her show – it’s almost 13 minutes long.

After we were introduced to Soggy and Nat just a couple of weeks ago, we thought we’d heard the cutest thing EVER from Jon. But he just keeps them coming. Today’s trumps them all.

Jonathan explained to Miriam that God is married.
God is married to Charlie.
Both God and Charlie are boys.
And how does Jonathan know this deep theological information? Cargo (the stuffed dinosaur) told him.

Editors Note: I have been informed that Cargo is actually Jonathan’s imaginary friend. Sometimes Cargo takes the form of a dinosaur. But not always.

I turned 42 back on March 30 – the day of Second Seder. We celebrated at home a couple of days early, so that I could enjoy a non-kosher-for-Passover birthday cake. Miriam made a small cake, and Mikaela handled the decorating. It was great to be able to spend my birthday with family – Corey and Mo even made a point of calling to say Happy Birthday and Happy Passover to everyone who was over at the house for Second Seder. I got some nice Apple Gift Cards as birthday presents – they’re helping me save up for an iPad.

Our Passover season started with Jonathan’s CDC model seder. We enjoyed the usual mix of cute Passover songs about working for Pharaoh and a plague of frogs and opportunities for the kids to sample seder plate foods (Jon liked the hard-boiled egg, the matzah, and the celery dipped in salt water. The horseradish? Not so much). First Seder was our usual Seder at Aunt Judy and Uncle Lloyd’s house, made notable by Mikaela leading the Four Questions (in English) for the first time.

We hosted our usual small second Seder here at our house – just us, Grandma Marcia and Zaydie Larry (Grandma Sali helped us prepare while she was in town, but had to head back to be with Paca Steve for Passover), Uncle Matt, Aunt Sarah and cousins Ella and Samantha. The kids were great, considering they were being asked to sit through a much longer than usual dinner for the second night in a row. Mikaela took a regular turn reading parts of the Seder and led the younger kids to open the door for Elijah.

March was a busy birthday party month of Mikaela, and the last one (before mine) was a party at Zonker’s out at the Great Mall. Jonathan mostly spent that afternoon playing in the Great Mall indoor playground, but he eventually decided he wanted to try out the Zonker’s rides too. He rode the train several times, tried the banana planes (which he mostly liked, but didn’t want to try again), and tried the little roller coaster (which he HATED). Mikaela, as usual, had a blast, and capped the afternoon by getting her face painted.

We also got a taste of times to come with Mikaela’s schedule this month. Dance on Monday afternoon, Wednesday evening Theater, Thursday late-afternoon swimming. Add in a Daisies meeting and/or field trip and short work trips for me on back to back weeks, and I’m starting to think we need a family appointments secretary to keep up with it all.

Just before Passover, Jonathan introduced us to his pals, Soggy and Nat. Who are Soggy and Nat, you may ask? They are his right and left foot, respectively. Perhaps most interesting of all, we were informed that Soggy and Nat live in California. We let Jonathan know that they were welcome to stay for as long as they wanted to visit. Jon also added a new “friend” to his stuffed animal collection – a long-neck dinosaur that Jonathan dubbed “Cargo”. As you’ll learn in another post, Cargo is a remarkably spiritual stuffed animal.

In a remarkable bit of typecasting, Mikaela was asked to play the role of a mule in the first grade musical. She worked really hard learning her lines and all of the songs, and Miriam did a great job with Mikaela’s mule costume. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get close enough to get good video of the performance, but I did take a lot of pictures. Mikaela was terrific – unbeknownst to us, she developed a HILARIOUS “mule accent” in which to deliver her lines. She stole every scene she was in, and had a ball doing it. (And Miriam gets to look like a genius for signing Mikaela up for a theater class about a week before this show).

February was a busy month, and once again I fell way behind on my blogging. It started with Mikaela’s debut as a Junior Dazzler. She attended a clinic put on by the Blue Valley Northwest Dance Team, the Dazzlers. After the clinic, she got to perform at halftime of a girls basketball game. She met some nice kids, and the high school girls who ran the clinic were great with her. Next up was the Cottonwood Point Elementary School Daddy-Daughter dance. We missed the dance last year, because Mikaela was sick, so Mikaela was really looking forward to this year. We had a good time – Mikaela even danced with me a bit before abandoning me to dance with her friends.

Mikaela and Jonathan helped Miriam make hamantaschen for Purim. Jonathan wore his dinosaur costume to the CDC Purim celebration on Friday, and was excited to wear it again to Beth Torah’s Purim service on Sunday morning.

But for some reason, once we got to Beth Torah, he didn’t want to wear it any more. Mikaela reveled in getting to dress like a princess in public, and readily joined in with the parade of princesses during the Purimshpiel. Jonathan looks forward to going to Beth Torah on Sunday mornings most weekends now. He has his own routine – get his bagel with cream cheese, go to services, hang out a bit, then go on in to babysitting to play with his friend Emma and watch a video.