Don’t Buy My Kids More Toys. Try This Instead.

Don’t Buy My Kids More Toys. Try This Instead. From ScaryMommy.

Hallelujah and Amen.

Let me give you some advice of what you can do instead: Just spend time with them. Take them out for ice cream, or a date to the zoo, or even to the park down the street. They will love that more than any toy, I promise. They will remember it longer too.

Our kids just had a birthday party and got lots of gift cards. The plan is to let them but one thing and then trade them experiences for their cards. Would you rather go to Target and get a Barbie or would you rather go to the zoo? A new Lego set or a baseball game? Fingers crossed my plan works.

The kids went to a new pool!

Heather and Eric invited us over to their pool today, but I had a LipSense party scheduled and Tom really needed to work in the garage…so they offered to take the kids for us!! And they had A BLAST! The pool is much bigger than our AND has a real deep end with a diving board so Owen was THRILLED—he’d never been on a diving board before! Heather said he was so cute—he must have gone on it 30 times!

These are some of the friends we are REALLY going to miss…

We got rained out at the pool!

It was so hot and humid at Owen’s Field Day that we had decided to take the kids to the pool when Owen got home. Tom was home as well, so we all went down…and it started sprinkling almost immediately. It was fine for a bit and then it started raining harder. Tom stayed with the kids as they were already in the pool while I went to sit and wait in the car (it was chilly in the rain). They didn’t last too much longer. These are the pics (and video) I snapped before the rain started.

Last day of school: Field Day surprise!

After Owen gave me the yes/no business about his end-of-year grade party, I decided to surprise him and just show up at the whole-school field day event. (I had asked if he wanted me to go and he said no again.) He was happy to see me and eagerly let me take pictures of him with his friends. 🙂

The school as I approached.

Mohammed, the kid Owen ran around with the whole time.

Every kid wore one of these. They got a sticker each time they completed an event/game/activity.

I get kind of choked up when I see this. I don’t want to leave.

Racing off to the next thing.

I was surprised when Owen wanted to do cup stacking—I wondered how he knew how to do it because he’d never mentioned it.

And then I watched him do it—ahhhh, he has NO idea how to do it. (I later showed it to him on YouTube and of course he loved it.) You can watch it in the video compilation at the bottom of this post.

We saw our friend Gavin and he wanted to give Katie a hug but she started to be shy.

Miss Christina, Katie’s teacher.

Showing me he can now climb to the top. When we were there for back to school night, he refused because he was scared. We told him he’d be able to do it by the end of the year.

He mastered the rock wall, too!

This is about as high as Katie gets. They don’t play on this playground in her class—the pre-k kids have their own smaller playground.

Waiting for face (or arm) painting.

Finally getting over her shyness with Gavin.

Katie wanted to get her face painted but the lines were pretty long and I wanted to be able to follow Owen around, so I told her not unless the lines went down. I turned around to talk to someone for a minute and when I turned back, she was getting her face painted by Miss Anne (our friend and Katie’s teaching assistant). I asked Mrs. Stuhlman (Owen’s kindergarten assistant who I had been talking to) how that happened and she said she just took her over and sat her down—the privilege of being a teacher! So Katie got to cut ahead of like five kids!! Mrs. Stuhlman asked if she might get Katie in her class next year…and I had to give her the bad news that we were moving. 🙁

Owen getting an alien on his arm.

I let Katie do some of the games that didn’t have big lines. She was waiting to throw baskets (video below).

Katie with AJ, a neighbor girl who is in first grade. She’s a tiny thing.

I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten my face painted (that wasn’t a thing back in the day) so when the grades were switching areas and there wasn’t a line, I sat down to get a quick flower to match Katie’s. Gorgeous work as usual by Anne and her daughter!

Lining up getting ready to switch to the fields for flag games and kickball.

I may have to redo this photo, but you can see three tiny black dots in the sky. They were dragonflies! The field was swarming with hundreds of them! It was the strangest thing!!

After flag games were done, Katie and I left. It was HOT and we hadn’t planned for it (I was in jeans and a black tee shirt and we hadn’t brought water—and we hadn’t thought it was going to be so hot and humid). Thankfully our neighbors stayed and got a few pics and videos (see below).

Owen waiting for kickball.

Having a BLAST in the water!

Me and Katie back at home…

I am SO glad I went and was able to take lots of pictures. We are going to miss this school so very much…

Owen’s second grade party

So, Owen’s second grade party was today and I had asked if he wanted me to go and at first he said yes—which I was excited about because he never wants us to come to anything (when did he turn 14 by the way?)—but then the night before he changed his mind and said no. 🙁 I should have just showed up anyway because I really wanted to get some pictures, but I thought I would do as he wanted. But, I saw some friends walking in as I was walking out (I was there picking up Owen’s end-of-year book signed by his teacher) and asked them to take pics if they could. These are what she sent:

We have our own little Rainman.

Tom brought home his whiteboard from work and left it in the living by room. He walked by later to see this—Owen had completed a bunch of addition problems:

2 + 2 = 4 + 4 = 8 + 8 = 16 + 16 = 42 (his first error) + 42 = 84 + 84 = 168 and on and on.

By the time I got home, he had done more:

He kept adding sums…and did them all in his head. Once I started going through them (which I told him I had to do for it count as his nightly math homework), there were a few errors, but really still impressive. I’m not sure if you can see it, but he went all the way up to 16001664 + 16001664 = 32003128 + 32003128 (which wasn’t the right answer but it was close).

Sometimes he just blows our minds.

I’m going to miss running into friends at the playground!

We hadn’t been to the library playground in forever so we went today. We were the only ones there for quite some time and then two ladies showed up with two small kids. I didn’t pay much attention to them but Katie was playing with them and then I heard the boy call her Katie. In a tone like he knew her. And it turns out he did! It was the kids of an old neighbor (who is also a first grade teacher) who were there with their sitter (their aunt) and a friend. 

This is the stuff I am really going to miss.

They wanted to run so off they went!

Katie was ahead the whole time but then stopped for some reason so he passed her and “won.” 🙂

 

Owen and his bedtime issues

I was in Owen’s room this morning and commented that I was impressed that he had made his bed. Oh…no, he says, he sleeps on top of the covers! Why? Because 1) he’s warm and 2) he doesn’t want to deal with pulling the sheet up (because it’s always totally kicked down to the bottom of the bed and he apparently has a huge problem fixing it). So I went to check on him tonight…and yep, on top of the covers, NOT in PJs (another thing he does even though we ask him not to), ab FD sucking his thumb!!!

  

Dual Birthday Pool Party

After watching the forecasts and worrying about the weather all week (the forecast varied from thunderstorms to 60% chance of rain to light rain all day)…we decided to go ahead with the party and it ended up absolutely perfect!! It was overcast at the start and gradually got sunnier and warmer throughout the party—enough so that I had Tom grab my suit when he went back to get the cake!

We had 60 guests (kids and adults!!) and the pool was probably the busiest it will be all season (aside from the days they have cookouts with free food or night swims with free ice cream). But it all went smoothly, everyone had a blast, and there was plenty of pizza and cake for multiple helpings (once I started cutting the serves 48 cake and realized my small pieces were still not small enough to get me close to 60 pieces, I started halving those…and then ended up having half the cake left so kids got seconds and thirds).

The gaggle of dads. They didn’t move from this spot the whole time. 😂

Us moms:

;

The kids were fairly patient about opening gifts once we got home…and they LOVED everything. They got Bop It (thank heavens I found the volume control!) and Owen picked up on it right away, Katie dug right into the glitter glue and construction paper, Owen picked out his favorite baseball cards from a new pack, Katie put together her Disney Lego, we’ve been shot multiple times by Owen’s new nerf gun, and both kids were OVER THE MOON about all the gift cards and getting to go shopping once we move! They both said it was a great birthday!

Surprise! Today was Katie’s last day of Pre-K!

Yes, I said surprise. I had NO idea whatsoever—I just assumed they finished next week along with the rest of the school.

So, I dropped her off and a short while after I got home, I got a text from the class assistant (our friend) saying Whoops, they must have dropped the ball and forgot to send home the sheet about today being water day and could I bring a suit and towel for her. So I ran back to the school and dropped the stuff off and put her sunscreen on (they are not allowed to do it). Water day should have been my big clue since we also did it last year, but my brain is going in so many different directions that it didn’t even occur to me that water day was the last day of school. So I went to pick her up and saw her walking out with her art folder AND IT STILL DIDN’T HIT ME until the teacher said something about it being the last day and they enjoyed having Katie… Huh? What? Ahhhh, then it all became clear. Of course I was thinking WHAT THE HELL?!?! How could I not have known that today was the last day? Well, it wasn’t on the school calendar (and I live by my calendar). So I was bummed I didn’t have teacher gifts ready…so I will take them in Monday when I drop off some educational stuff for the classroom (donations as we purge).