Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week was a long one. We had a reorganization happen this week. I still have a job, but the team I am a part of was split up. Which was very frustrating.

Robert has also been sick this week. He has had a cold and has had a very hard time. He will not sleep more then two hours without waking up and screaming. This has been especially difficult on Susan, as the only thing that seems to make him go back to sleep is nursing.

We also spent much of Saturday painting, or I should say I spent about 4 hours on Saturday painting while Susan went to a meeting. Luckily we had a friend who helped us out by watching Alice during the meeting.

All in all it was a very long an tiring week.

Field Trips

I was a chaperon on Alice's field trip today. We visited Lincoln Square for a few fire safety demonstrations and a "puppet" show put on by the Urbana Fire Department. You can learn a lot on a field trip:

1. As Alice clearly demonstrated the whole car ride over, silly rhyming sounds and "kid Spanish" will always get a giggle out of your preschool classmates. Always. I stifled both the urge to calm her down (I really want her to be friends with this girl and being silly is no way to build lasting relationships) and the urge to join in (maybe I could be a "cool" mom for once). Neither urge was actually rooted in Alice's best interest, so I kept my mouth shut. I won't even go into how much I wanted Mrs. Strom's approval. Sheesh. It's no wonder where Alice gets her "pleaser" tendencies. 
2. There is a WHOLE lot of difference between preschool kids and Kindergarten kids. How they line up, how they answer questions, how they interact with adults, and how they interact with each other is so different. Practice helps, I guess, but the older kids just "get it" better. They kinda know how these things work.
3. We don't have enough fire danger in our home. There was a game "Hot or Not" that the kids got to play. The firefighter would hold up something and the kids had to say whether they should play with it or not. When he held up the cigarette lighter Alice was dumbfounded. She'd never seen one before. Then he held up one of those long lighters that light gas grills or candles. Uh, no clue. Then he held up a book of matches. What's that? (We use boxed matches, not matchbooks) Then a scented candle. We don't have those at our house. And finally, he pulled out a curling iron. Huh?! I laughed and laughed and laughed, wishing for someone to laugh with me. *sigh*
4. Very, very, very loud hip hop music sells anything these days. Even "Stop, Drop, and Roll."
5. When you have a REALLY cool activity, please let everyone get a chance to try it or else you will get tears. Quiet, obedient kids don't always get a fair chance at such cool activities, either. It's the ones hopping all over the place and getting up and asking loudly that end up with the attention...and the turns. Doesn't seem fair, but perhaps that's my bruised mom-ego coming through. 

I can't wait to hear what Alice has to tell Bobby about this field trip today. What stood out to her? What will she remember? I'll post her description when we get it :) 

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week has been mostly normal. Susan has had a lot of things in the evening, but Susan has already talked about that. At work there have been some reorganizations going on, but we still don't know any details about exactly what our next project will be. There is no fear of me being laid-off, hey need people too desperately for that to happen. Just curious what I will end up doing.

Today I decided that I wanted to make scones for breakfast. But just so you know these are Utah Scones. They turned out a lot more like fry bread then the big puffy fried bread balloons that I remember growing up. If you happen to know a good recipe for them please let me know (Dad). We will probably not try them again until next year though.

Alice wanted to include that we read lots of books this morning. She is starting to get into chapter books a bit more. Not that she reads them herself, but that she likes to listen to a story that is a bit longer then a picture book.

Castles and Characters

Bobby has taken the kids three evenings in the last week. Good man. I love that baby Robert is old enough to leave home between feedings (i.e. much lower maintenance than he used to be, so it's not bad taking both on at once). Bobby has done a great job getting Alice excited about this Daddy-Daughter time. He called each of the evenings a "party" and they did something special. Most recently, they made a castle (and a camera, of sorts) out of recyclables. This girl loves crafts with the glue and the beads and the cutting stuff out. She also likes to draw. Here are the characters Alice created to accompany their new castle:

Top row: "Princess with Really Long Hair", "Prince with Freckles", "A Really Tiny Lady"
Bottom row: "A Monster"

I checked out "Rapunzel" at the library today. With Alice's fascination with long hair and a moderate interest in the princess world, I thought it was a good pick. She was disturbed by several of the events (a father trading his unborn child to a witch for rapunzel plants, witch collecting the child the day she's born, witch cutting the girl's hair, witch banishing pregnant Rapunzel to the wilderness, witch blinding the prince, prince and Rapunzel reuniting at the end and living joyfully with their twins..."what happened to the mean witch?"). She asked me to read it twice in a row, then again later.

I don't think she's scared of the witch. If she were truly scared, she wouldn't ask to revisit the story. I think she's trying to figure something out. I can't blame her, there. It's a strange and twisted tale.

Getting Crafty

Last week, for our "Saturday Family Fun" event, we made a craft. I've been wanting to try out some freezer paper stenciling, so we cracked open the fabric paint and experimented on a couple old/stained shirts. Alice wanted "a bat, a pumpkin, a bat, a pumpkin, a bat, and then a pumpkin."  I think it came out nicely. She did most of the painting herself. Then, when I selected a fat little hen to paint on my t-shirt, Alice decided she also needed a baby chick and an egg (She tells me often, "Where you go, I go."). The chick stencil was created by Bobby. Alice put in the feet herself freehand.

The shirt is OBVIOUSLY too small...it seems like only yesterday when I threw it onto the "hopelessly stained" pile. She's actually posing in this picture to make a silhouette of herself that we then painted onto another extremely small and stained shirt. I won't show you here 'cuz it's not modest, but it's pretty cute. On Monday morning, as she ran into preschool, her first words to Mrs. Strom were an emphatic "Guess what?! I painted my shirt!"

I wonder what else she tells her teacher out of context :)