beep beep!

A little Sunday night grocery shopping with the Ps.

Dude, hug me back. I'm sorry I pushed you earlier.

Forgiveness at its finest.

And......
forgotten.

Sullivan Sunday

Last week, Sullivan completed his last round of chemo!

Brain surgery in January followed by weeks of radiation and over 6 months of chemo and his treatment is finished except for accutane that will continue a bit longer.  We pray the intense treatment is truly finished and this sweet boy is cured! 

Right now, he is experiencing the typical low blood count phase where he is very weak and his immune system is compromised. Tonight he had a low grade fever and that is enough to send him into the hospital for antibiotics, fluids and a possible blood transfusion.  Ugh!!!!

Let this be it, please! So he can get home, get well, eat more, gain weight and start his journey back to becoming the silly, active little boy he truly is!

Please, please, please, please, please!

You can read more about his journey at his Caring Bridge site: http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/sullivanjones

activity time

I spent the whole summer trying to get the kids out of the house, on fun adventures, exploring. It didn't even cross my mind that there are some nifty little things they can do at home!

This post also comes after a weekend of feeling tired and hoping my kids would either play happily with their toys or take a nap. 

And it comes while I'm recently back to work and don't get to see my kids nearly enough!

I was feeling guilty. I google searched something like, "things to do with 18-month-olds,"

Somehow I ended up on one of those sites where someone posts a question (similar to my search) and a bunch of people answer.  I don't think I could find it again to link up to it right now.  But someone responded with this suggestion among many others:

~Give them large beads with large holes. Have them thread the beads onto a chopstick, then onto a pipe cleaner, then onto a shoe string.~

That didn't seem too difficult and what a neat way of working on fine motor skills using different levels of difficulty.

Here are the supplies I used for my modified version:
- wooden skewers. Cut the sharp tip off and place/glue a very tight fitting bead on one end.
- wooden beads
- pipe cleaners
- shoe strings

Tuesday after picking up the boys late again. 5:30. We headed straight to walmart to get our supplies. We had wooden skewers at home so I spent about $6 for the rest.

I set up shop at the kiddie table in the playroom while the boys turned on the DVD player in the living room and were busy dancing to their second cousin's band video. They get a little irritated if you try to stop them from doing something they are enjoying so I energetically told the kids to, "Come on!  Come help momma! Come look at this!" 

They joined me in the playroom and enthusiastically climbed into their chairs to see what was in store.

I gave each boy his own bowl of beads and his own stick.  They just started exploring the items so I demonstrated putting the bead on the stick. Then I helped each boy put a bead in one hand and the stick in the other and encouraged him to try. 

They got the idea. They really concentrated! But I thought for sure, this would be easy for them so I wanted to have the pipe cleaner and shoe string ready for levels 2 and 3.

Yeah.

I think my kids have been too busy running and jumping to bother with any fine motor skills.

Don't be fooled by the number of beads on the stick below.  They did some, but momma did some, too.

I loved seeing them so focused on something.  I traded them the pipe cleaners for the sticks but by this point they were no longer interested in threading the beads.  Of course their attention spans only last so long so after concentrating as long as they possibly could, they just had to start experimenting.

Take the beads off the stick.
Dump the beads on the table.
Put the beads back in the bowls.

Stir the bowl of beads with the stick.

Stand all the beads up on their sides.

Throw the beads.
Lick the beads.
(Please monitor this activity carefully so beads don't end up in their mouths!)

So I suddenly had a great idea!  We moved to the floor and I dumped all the beads in a pile.  I put a few beads of one color in one bowl and a few of the other color in the other bowl.  I showed them how to pick up a bead and put it in the bowl with the matching beads.  Totally thought I was so clever with my bead-matching idea. Yeah. No. They aren't quite ready for that one yet. They paid zero attention to colors! But they loved rushing to put all the beads back into the bowls!

My search also lead me to the Chasing Cheerios blog. This mom has so many awesome ideas for quick, easy, learning activities for a variety of ages. They are very montessori school inspired. She has a 1 year old and a 5 year old. 

My personality type makes me want to get all these ideas down, buy all the supplies immediately, do several of them in one sitting with the kids, you know, crazy talk.  And this would definitely lead to disappointment. So I'm going to try one a week.  That's my plan anyway!

don't drink the water!

In July, during our beach vacation, the strangest thing happened.....

and I totally forgot about it until right now.

We were letting the boys play around in the zero entry pool.  The entrance is beach-like and there is a mushroom fountain for kids to splash around in.

So I'm on Carter duty. Brad's on Nolan duty. Ginger is on Ronan duty. Aaron is filling the gaps.

So this kid... I mean he had to be 7 years old... starts heading over to the entrance where our kids are playing and we are monitoring.   He lifts his shirt and starts to pull his swim trunks down.  I'm thinking in my head, "oh his mom must have told him to go get dressed and he must be showing her that he was following her request or something"  Later, when talking to Ginger, she was thinking something similar.

Well, the trunks go to the ground, out comes the wee wee and this kid (yes I kind of want to use mean names here) starts pissing the most perfectly arched fountain right into the pool where our  kids splash..AND get quite a few accidental gulps of the pool filth than I'd like to admit.

Are you f-ing kidding me?!?!  Ginger and I totally crossed right into mom-squad mode and practically made the kid cut the stream off. "Excuse me. DO NOT pee in the pool. People are swimming in here!  STOP IT RIGHT NOW!"  Yes, I stood up and was leaning over and shaking my pointing finger at him.  Got the visual?  Oh I had my mom-voice, teacher-really-not-happy-with-student voice, angry-wife voice all out.  Ginger was all over it, too.  The poor kid was pretty shocked! 

But his shock seemed it was as if he had never been told not to pee in a pool....not that two random women were yelling at him.

Someone came running over....grandma we think. She grabbed him and quietly told him not to do that. She was embarrassed. I would've been!

I will try not to discipline someone else's child but COME ON!  I could care less for this instance.  If his mom was there I would have let her have it, too!

All that said, I do realize swimming pools have a pretty high percentage of urine in them anyway. But I'd rather ignore that lovely fact and a child pissing in a pool for all to see does not help me do that very well!

GROSS!