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".