Last week, Mr. Eagle Eyes saw the Star Wars lego box on top of the fridge where Tom had tried to hide it. And we’re suckers, so told Owen he could have it Monday if he was good all weekend. Well, he did pretty good but on Sunday had a bit of a failing so the reward got pushed to Tuesday (which his reaction almost got the reward pushed to Wednesday).
So come this morning, he was READY. He did 99% of it on his own…and it’s an age 7-12 project!
Then requested another after breakfast!
Owen: Mama, Katie and I are holding hands. Take a picture!
Owen: My belly’s still loaded.
Me: Your belly?
Owen: No, my batteries!
Talking on a play cell phone: Hi cousins! I’m a Jedi now!
Owen: Daddy, do you want to find the eggs I hid? There’s a green egg right here and a pink egg in the bag.
Owen tried Grauntie Marge’s beets again at dinner. He hasn’t liked them before.
Tom: Do you like them?
Owen: Looking surprised and excited. YES! They taste like pickles!
Owen pointed out a blue jay on our walk.
Me: How do you know that’s a blue jay?
Owen: I learned it at bird school.
Me: Owen, why does your imagination always include people shooting you?
Owen: I don’t know.
Me: Why doesn’t anyone ever bring you cake or take you to the beach?
Owen: Shrug. Do you know why [whoever] shot me?
Me: No, why?
Owen: Because I wasn’t fabulous.
Owen: I make good imaginations!
Owen desperately wanted to go out and draw with chalk, so out we went. He is big into writing words (well, letters and numbers) and trying to spell things, so this was the first thing I saw—can you see it? Right by his feet: STOP 🙂
Then, what follows STOP? GO! (He’s finishing the O.) He spelled these on his own!
Then he was talking about hopscotch so I drew it for him. I showed him how to play and he understood but after trying it for a few minutes he said he wanted to go back to his way. 🙂
It’s a blurry pic but I caught him mid-jump.
Then it was back to chalk, where he drew…a snowstorm! And a snowman!
It was a gorgeous morning—about 70°, sunny, and breezy—so we went for our first long walk together! (Normally Katie and I just go up and down our street or to the golf course. I never get to walk with just Owen anymore.)
I tried to get a picture but Katie wasn’t cooperating.
Katie took a tumble while trying to run down the hill like big brother, but she was no worse for the wear. 🙂
At the top of the hill on the golf course (Owen used to play a lot here back in the day). He kept warning Katie not torun down the hill and to stay out of the golfers’ way. 🙂
Off we go!
Anyone want to go swimming in the community pool? I can’t imagine using the same water that’s been sitting in it since last summer and is now dark brown…? I know there are chemicals and stuff…but still. Barf.
Finally! Some wildlife! (Yes I know it’s not a duck but that’s what she calls it.)
Waving hello to the duck/goose. 🙂
She wanted to sit at the picnic table.
Owen collected sticks to make an art picture. 🙂
I saw this going on so I had to try and get a good sibling picture.
Ha.
At least I ended up with a decent one!
And then the ham:
And then someone was throwing sand and got warned so we had to go.
Stopping to roll down the hill.
Owen asked for cheese toast—like he has at school—for breakfast. We determined it was literally cheese melted on toast…so we tried it. NO, ITS NOT GRILLED CHEESE, PEOPLE. 🙂 Baby steps.
I was worried because we’ve tried to replicate “school foods” before unsuccessfully…but he liked this! Yay!
She loves to crawl into any bed. Today he wanted to get in with her! She wasn’t thrilled. 🙂
We were busy cleaning upstairs but I went downstairs for some random thing and saw the door to the garage open about 4″. Huh?! I looked out and yep, both garage doors were wide open.
INSTANT PANIC.
Almost immediately I saw Bella come running toward me (she must have heard me) and she darted right back in the house. So then it was off to find Charlie—if she was even out. Luckily she was on the porch and didn’t jump or dart and let me grab her.
CRISIS AVERTED.
I went to tell Tom what had happened, thinking maybe he accidentally left the door ajar when he got something out of the garage but he said hadn’t left the door open, so how…?
OWEN.
Before he went to bed (like AN HOUR previously) he had a screaming crying panic attack* when he realized we weren’t downstairs with him (he was on ABCMouse) and he must have opened up the door to the garage looking for us then in his panicked state didn’t shut it.
Holy crap.
He’s going to get a lesson in door closing tomorrow.
* This is worthy of its own post as it’s been happening A LOT lately. Stay tuned.
I really think he wanted to wear his new helmet… 🙂
This was Tom’s major project today…getting rid of the four-color accent wall.
He even had a helper!
She likes it up there—and it keeps her from wandering!
Coloring at the farmers market! Do you see that “YES” by Owen? He did that…starting with the S and working backwards!
She pretty much just sat there the whole time scribbling while mostly people watching!
Walmart! Someone got a new bike helmet!
We also got Katie her own pink Radio Flyer trike—stay tuned for pics of that!
We then lucked out and ran into the Easter Bunny! Owen refused, but Katie was excited! Her first Easter Bunny pic! It only took me 12 shots to get this perfect one (in about a minute)!
And running around with daddy!
We are surely not going to get a deck like we have now—that opens to a huge back yard with a cool playset…
Hopefully we’ll get something just as good, but different…
Owen had an egg hunt at school today! Here he is with his spoils!
And then opening them with Katie’s help!
Time to eat some!
Very interested:
The egg Owen decorated at school:
So then I photoshopped two pics together to get this good one:
He was in my closet with me this morning as I was picking out clothes and I asked if he wanted to pick my shirt and he eagerly said YES! Then without any hesitation picked this. 🙂
So, they’re coming to pick up our bed tomorrow…and the new bed won’t be here for a few weeks so we had to do a bit of a bed switcheroo.
Owen has a Queen (only because that’s just how it worked out over the years—that’s what we had available) so we figured we’d use that and he would get a new Twin (what he should really have anyway).
The pros are that it gives him a lot more space in his room and it will look good for staging purposes…but the cons are all the money we’ve sunk into Queen bedding (quilt, sheet sets, mattress pad cover, bed skirt) and having to buy him all new Twin bedding.
I took him shopping with me and there wasn’t much to choose from at Marshall’s, Ross, or BB&B—so he ended up with a comforter set very similar to what he had.
I feel bad because Target would likely have had superheroes or Star Wars…but he was tired of shopping. And I wanted it today vs. ordering from Amazon. And I failed to plan ahead.
So…in order to move the Queen into our room, we had to take down our King headboard/frame and put it in storage—and that thing is a BEAST (poor Tom). Then Tom set up a regular bed frame (which we happened to have) and brought in the mattress and box springs. And moved our nightstands in a bunch because they were obviously placed for the King.
The pros? The room looks bigger and will be good for staging purposes. We’re not sleeping on an air mattress.
The cons? We get to move it all back when the new bed gets here! And we have to try and sleep on a Queen until then—OHMYGOD I miss my space already and we haven’t even slept on it yet. Both of us were like “Is there even a bed here?” because we can lean across the bed and touch hands. (We did fine in a Queen on vacation but it was only for a week…and it was vacation. This is real life.)
We’re seriously contemplating selling the behemoth King frame—even though it’s only about eight years old—but it sucks because it was EXPENSIVE and of course we’d still want a different (though smaller) one.
So Owen had obviously seen his new bed (we even let him pick out the mattress—and of course he picked out the cushy $199 one vs. the $99 one!) but when he actually got in it for the first time, he said “Wow, this is a small bed. There’s only room for one person!” 🙂
So I hope the return/bed pickup goes well tomorrow and I hope we can sell the beastly frame…and I hope our new bed gets here on the short end of 3-4 weeks!
Owen didn’t want to try the noodles until I showed him you could do this:
Unlike Owen, Katie likes helping in the kitchen!
Tasting!
Offering to share!
Then Owen heard Katie having fun so he had to come in.
Or really, how we get 20 or so minutes without the kids pestering us for something and letting us rest…
Owen’s watching the iPad Mini, Katie’s watching the Kindle Fire, and Tom is watching the Roku on the TV…I guess I could use my iPhone or the iPad if I wanted to join the group. 🙂
We went over to Mitchell’s for Virginia’s birthday and the kids loved the trampoline!
Caught in mid-air:
Daddy does the bouncing:
Katie saw this bike and wanted it and made a beeline for it. Of course she couldn’t reach the pedals but she had fun sitting on it and being pushed in it.
Both kids had A BLAST running around the big yard and getting on and off and on and off the trampoline. Virginia held Katie while they bounced and I think she liked that the best!
The kids got to stay up WAY past their bedtime because they were having SO much fun (and because we were visiting)…
The city held a Life-Size Candyland Adventure and as soon as I saw it advertised a month or so ago, I signed us up! Since we don’t live in the city, it cost $7.50 instead of $5, but ALL of us got to play! 🙂 Owen was VERY excited about it, and kept pestering us all morning because he thought we were going to miss it.
You had to arrive 15 minutes early to be sure you were there for your scheduled start time. In that 15 minutes, there were two games to play (ring toss and peanut toss), a coloring station, a Froot Loop necklace station, and a build-an-airplane out of sticks of gum, lifesavers, and a roll of smarties. 🙂
Both kids tried the ring toss, and Katie actually got one! (Owen went back to play this one about 15 times, taking turns with other kids who wandered up.)
They also liked the peanut toss—Owen was actually pretty good and Katie had fun walking up to the basket to put them in. 🙂
Notice Owen’s style! Vaguely reminiscent of his frisbee style… 🙂
Post-cereal-stringing…Owen didn’t want to wear it, so Katie did! (And you can see her holding the candy plane.)
Here’s about what the plane looked like:
Now, even though I honestly didn’t know what to expect, it was a little less exciting (?) than I expected on first glance—I had hoped it would look MUCH MORE like an actual Candyland board. But after thinking about it, how much can you really do on an (I’m guessing) limited budget…?
So here’s the board (click for a bigger picture)! They used activity mat squares for the path—which was a good idea, except you don’t get all the colors of the board.
We all got gingerbread numbers to hang around our neck. Then they had someone calling out our numbers and then telling us what card we drew (one red, two yellows, etc.). While it worked fine, I would have liked it better (it would have been more like the real game) if they somehow showed us what the card was and WE had to decipher what it was. (They did have 11×17 sheets with the actual squares on them, so they could have…?) But I’m guessing all the shortcuts were for the sake of timing as each group has to be done in 15 minutes. Which I’m guessing is also why there were no pink candy cards. (But the pink candy cards are what make Candyland CANDY LAND…but I digress.)
So we had just barely started when another group of people joined us. I’m not sure what happened…if they were supposed to be with us to start but were late or what…but we had three more kids join us. It was okay and obviously we all still had fun, but I honestly would have liked it just a bit better if it had just been us. (Their kids were super annoying, one was really young and had NO idea how to play, and they got in the way of my pictures!)
Owen got a double green and jumped almost to the end (though, honestly, he went three greens but it was too much of a hassle to correct it and no one else seemed to notice or care).
Then someone else joined him!
Then another! How exciting! A three-way tie right at the very end!
Then Owen and another girl were tied on the very last square…
Then Owen won! No picture because they hurriedly called out the rest of the numbers to finish the game so everyone was crowded around getting their bags of candy. Then we were shuffled off to take a survey and that was it!
They had a very nice playground outside and it was a gorgeous day so we let the kids play for awhile.
Katie was SO proud she learned how to get down this way:
The best pics from the video:
And then I looked over and Katie was going down a big slide all by herself! No hesitation, no screeching, nothing. And loving it!
The people from Special Needs Baseball planned a bowling outing so Owen picked Tom to take him. I got this text from Tom:
Your son is a ham.
And then Tom posted on Facebook that Owen got a strike! Tom had taken a succession of pictures and while you can see the pins being knocked down, Owen’s stance NEVER changes. 🙂
Happy boys!
Owen’s bowling style:
And his final score! He did better than I ever did at that age!
Tom said Owen had a blast! I guess bowling may soon be a family event! 🙂
From school recently…
I found this while cleaning today. I love the big eyes and little legs.
I’m not exactly sure what this one is.
It was that kind of night. :/
If Owen puts a washcloth on his head…
He’s so creative with Legos… Usually it’s panels from his Star Wars Lego video game, but today it was a fish!
