Beginning of February

We had a long stretch of rainy gloomy days and were going crazy being stuck inside, so we put up our tent in the living room. The boys had a blast! We ate picnics in there, read stories, and pretended to sleep.

James teacher suggested the website reading a-z for printing your own simple readers for your kids. James gets overwhelmed if there is more than a few words on a page when we practice reading, so these were perfect. We got sidetracked when we got to this page and started talking about the difference between venomous and nonvenomous snakes. James had a lot to say about getting bitten by the snake. He said, "If you are getting ready to go to the store and the snake bites you, then the store might close while you were in the hospital. And you don't get to push the cart and you would miss out on all the fun".

Going for a bike ride around the neighborhood.

This is Rett chowing down on some chips for the first time after days of barely eating anything when his tongue and mouth were hurting him. I was so happy to see him eating!!

James wanted to play in the sand at the beach park after school and since Rett doesn't have his own sunglasses, he demanded mine. He was so excited!

 Getting nice and sandy.

Rett walked right past us in the kitchen carrying a little blue chair. We said, "Rett! What are you doing?". He stopped and looked at us and said, "Lollipop." He totally thought it was ok to just get a chair and stand on it so you can help yourself to the Halloween candy. It was such a Rett thing to do, not wait for anyone else, just do it himself.

 We decided to visit Chuck e Cheese again since we had a lot of leftover tokens from James' birthday party. Both boys had a lot of fun, although most of the time Rett looked like he was being tortured :) I don't know why it is, he gets excited and runs up to the rides but once he is on it he gets this serious and unhappy look on his face. Except when he gets to ride with James, then it is ok to smile.

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While Rett was napping and Anthony was working on his aquariums, James and I took his bike down the road to the park. He rode around on the tennis court for awhile, racing back and forth and then we noticed some sort of rc helicopter club racing their helicopters. We sat and watched them for a long time.

I watched my friend's two boys for the morning while they were packing to move to their new house. I had four boys in the house ages 5,5,3, and 2! It was a lot of energy, so we ended up taking the circus outside for some fresh air.

I convinced James to watch The Neverending Story with me one afternoon. I was so excited! He asked a lot of questions and seemed to like it. He hasn't requested to watch it again yet, so I am thinking of more classic movies from my childhood that I need to introduce him to.

The last time I cut James' hair with the clippers, he had such a meltdown about it that I promised him for his next haircut I would take him to a place where they will just use scissors. His hair was looking pretty rough, so he and I went early in the morning right when they opened. He did great! So cooperative with everything! He even let her use the blow dryer to get some hair off of him and he agreed to try to let her wash his hair in the sink (he sat up after one second, but he tried!)

He almost never lets us put gel in his hair to spike it up and the few times we did it anyway, he would cry until you washed it out, so I was pretty sure he wasn't going to let the hairdresser put any in. She asked him if she could and he said sure! The rest of the day he kept worrying about his hair getting messed up and the next day he wanted me to put gel in it for school as long as I "did it just like her".

James' 5th Birthday

Our baby is 5 years old! He woke up the morning of his birthday and told Anthony, "I think I am bigger. See my feet? They are longer today."

The morning of James' birthday Anthony strung streamers across his door and the hallway outside of his room. He loved it! We would crawl underneath because he didn't want them to break, he wanted them to stay up for forever. Unfortunately Rett didn't get the memo and he barreled through it and broke it later in the day. There were tears.

I had fun asking these questions this year, but it was hard to get just one "favorite" out of him. He would start listing all of his "favorites" and couldn't stop!

For the very first time we did a birthday party for friends and James invited all the boys from his preschool class and a few kids from church. I didn't want to plan a party or do any work, so we decided on Chuck E Cheese. It was so easy!! They had a hostess dedicated to our party and she made sure everything went well, handed out the food and cupcakes, and even lit the birthday candle for me. It was so worth the money!

Poor Rett was miserable :( I set him up in a booth with a movie to watch and he stayed there for a little while. He had a sore on his tongue that was really bothering him and making him not want to eat or drink. He got worse and worse over the next few days, crying all the time and not sleeping until we realized he also had thrush in his mouth and throat and got him some medicine for it. We even had to hold him down and force feed him water in a syringe at one point, he was so dehydrated!

James' party table.

Two of his friends from his class came and they had fun running around and playing everything.

Rett agreed to ride one ride before going back to his seat. He couldn't suck on his pacifier because it hurt, so he would just bite the side. Poor thing!

James and his school friend Matthias playing his favorite pirate game. James does his pirate face while he is shooting the bad guys. I don't think he even realizes that he does it!

Pizza time! James wasn't interested in eating (of course), so he went a played a few more games while everyone else ate.

It was time for Chuck E Cheese to come out and say happy birthday so they asked everyone who was ready to party to raise their hands.

James didn't want to give Chucke a hug, so he gave him a high five instead.

Waiting to blow out the candle:

After blowing out his candle, James jumped out his seat to tell me that he wished for a real live space shuttle with real parts.

Rett attempted to eat some icing off his cupcake, but started crying right away and saying that it hurt. Poor kid!

The birthday boy also got to go inside the ticket blaster and try to catch as many tickets as he could. We ended up grabbing a few that added up to 200 tickets!

The actual day of James' birthday was a Monday, which is my usual day to stay and help in his preschool class. We brought donuts for everyone and we spent the day playing outside (his regular teacher had a lot of computer work to do on assessments). They played with hula hoops, basketballs, and we looked for roly pollies under the leaves. They all got to eat their donuts while listening to a story book. So much fun!

After school we drove to the go-kart place we went to for my birthday last year to ride the go-karts. James was in one with Anthony and I was in one with Rett. Every time James would pass us, he would grin and stick his tongue out at me. He had a blast!! Afterwards he kept telling me that I was a slowpoke :) We also took a walk to check out the pirate ship on the mini-golf course. One of these days we will actually play mini-golf on it!

We had so much fun celebrating our little man! Happy Birthday James!