First Day of Summer!

It's the first day of summer! As a kid summer was always my favorite season, and understandably so. Now, most of the time my life feels like a summer vacation, so spring is now my favorite season, followed closely by fall.

The weather has fluctuated so much this spring that it's often seemed like winter, spring and summer all in the same week! We tried to take advantage of the hot days by getting outside as much as we could. A few weeks ago we met my sister and her son at Phillip's Park in Aurora. There's a free splash park there, but it's small and gets pretty crowded, especially on really hot days. Jared and Alexa liked the spray gun, but they didn't spend too much time running through the water.

On the not so great days, we've been opening up some art kits the kids received for Christmas and still hadn't opened up yet. I bought this clay kit at Michael's.

After not picking up a camera that much, Alexa has gone back to taking pictures again. She only wants to use my new camera, though, which makes me a bit nervous. I love how she likes to be a photographer, but the camera was so expensive! She likes to open pages of her favorite books and take pictures of the pictures.

Jared still loves to line up his figures, something he does for hours every day.One day he brought in a branch from outside, laid it on its side and pretended his soldiers were marching through the jungle.

Some days I wish the kids would go outside more. Sometimes days go by when they aren't interested at all in going outside. They still love to mix up concoctions, which they call their science experiments.

They HAVE liked going outside at night, though, especially since the fireflies have come out.

We've been taking a lot of family bike rides after dinner and then coming home to catch fireflies. The kids see how many they can catch and put in their bug holder, and then release them before we go inside. The past few months have been a bit stressful for me, but lately I've just been amazed at how much better I feel when I just make myself relax,sit and just be with the kids. I've built up so many great memories in the past few weeks from just the simplest times together. I love travelling with the kids, but these memories are just as special.

The first real memory I have of attending a funeral was when I was 10. It was held in the little Indiana town where my grandparents lived. My grandpa was laid out in the casket, and I remember thinking he just looked like he was sleeping. But then I leaned over to kiss him and felt the coldness and hardness.

I don't know if the kids will remember it when they're older, but they attended their first funeral at the end of May this year. Steve's dad's aunt died at the age of 96. I didn't know her very well since we only saw her about once a year, and the kids met her once last year which they hardly remember, so it was a gentle way to introduce them to the idea of death.

Alexa had many questions before we went to the funeral. Will Aunt Anna look like a mummy? was my favorite. When she saw Aunt Anna in the casket, she wanted to know what they did with her legs. Jared really didn't seem to care that much about the whole affair, but when we paid our final respects, Jared asked to touch her hand.

After the burial and a lunch held at the church, we drove out to the farm Anna had owned. Her husband died about 15 years ago, and Anna had been responsible for the upkeep of the farm. She hired out someone to plow the fields and she lived at the farmhouse. We explored all the old farm buildings, most of which were in a state of disrepair, and petted the horse in the next field.

Jared started this funny thing where he'd whack at the dandelions (only those with the white seeds still intact) with a stick. He told us he was killing the Nazis. I think it's his ongoing fascination with Indiana Jones that started when we were in San Diego. One thing for sure. There's definitely not another kid out there like him.

The highlight of every trip to Missouri for the kids is seeing their cousins. We had a relaxing time hanging out with them for the three days we were there. On Sunday afternoon, we attended Emme's preschool graduation. We really wish they lived closer. It's hard to see them only once a year, but this year we'll also get to see them in November, too.

Some More Random Fall Fun

Alexa is back in ballet again. She took lessons for six months last year and then said, "I don't want to do this anymore," after her first recital. Then in September, she asked me why I took down a picture (that had been hanging on the fridge forever) of the different ballet positions and threw it away. She was very upset with me. I didn't even realize it meant that much to her. She said she wanted to go to dance again. I said to ask me again the next day. She did. I said to ask me again the next day. She did. Then I knew she was serious.

So, she's been very, very happily attending dance lessons once a week. She told me yesterday she wished she could go every day. It was such a cool lesson to me that even if your kids drop something and say they never want to have anything to do with it again, that's not always the case. Not that I care if she hadn't ever wanted to dance again, but if say your kid doesn't pick up a book to read in six months, it doesn't mean he won't ever want to read again.

Anyways, at the end of every class, Alexa's dance teacher gives the girls coloring pages. Jared always asks for these too. Now, I've never bought my kids coloring books. I personally feel they hinder a lot of creativity and have always preferred the kids free draw. They've also never wanted to color when grandparents or other people have given them coloring books. So, I was really, really shocked when Alexa walked in the kitchen this week holding up a picture she had colored. To my knowledge this is the first picture she has ever colored.

I remember going with the kids to some story times at the library when they were two, and afterwards they had pages for the kids to color. I remember most of the moms guiding their child's hand to color inside the lines. My kids just wrote on the backs of these sheets, and the mothers gave me a strange, pitying look. It was crazy to me that these women actually thought they needed to teach their children how to color correctly! I'd never, ever care if my kids colored outside the lines, but I thought it very ironic that their first attempts at coloring a picture turned out like this.

Besides our foray at bread making a few weeks ago, the kids haven't been interested in helping me bake or cook. Then yesterday Jared says, "Let's make brownies!" So that's what we did.

While the brownies were cooking, I gave the kids a bag of eight pieces of corn on the cob and asked if they wanted to shuck them. I knew Jared would love doing it, and he did. He is so like me in that he loves to do little, detailed manual things. He's good at doing hands-on, detailed things, whereas Alexa is good at mental, detailed things.

We had an awesome morning today. The kids were sitting on top of the couch in front of the living room picture window, waving goodbye to their dad, when they noticed a few squirrels and called me over. We noticed the squirrels were coming right up to the front stairs. I suddenly remembered a huge bag of walnuts I had bought almost a year ago for a project we never did, and ran downstairs to get it.

We threw one out at the squirrel and giggled with delight when he sat nibbling on it, holding it in his little paws with his tail swishing. Then he ran across the street with it. Soon another squirrel came up to him, and it really looked like they were talking to each other. So, I pretended to be the first squirrel talking to the new squirrel telling him how cool that house was across the street and how he should run across and get a nut, too. To our surprise, as soon as I said this, the second squirrel ran across the street and up to our door. The kids LOVED throwing out walnuts to him, and eventually to the other dozen or so squirrels that came out to beg over the next hour. I told the kids that maybe it was the squirrel's Halloween and they were trick-or-treating to our door. They loved that idea. I love, love, love being able to take the spontaneous things of life and run with them without having to always stress over a tightly scheduled life. Moments like this would have been lost, and that would be a huge shame.

Random Fall Fun

While the above photo isn't quite the picture of jumping up and down fun, I just had to include it here in my blog because I love seeing my two boys cuddled up together. As much as a pain it can be at night sometimes for us to have the kids crawl into bed with us and get kicked and elbowed in the stomach in the middle of the night, I know I will deeply miss smelling the tops of their little heads before drifting off to sleep and watching their chests slowly move up and down.

While digging through their Halloween candy, the kids found this mini War card game. I had never played the game before, so it was a fun new experience for us all. Many times people who are deeply entrenched in school mentality cannot fathom how anything math related can spontaneously occur- they think everything must be pre-planned and thought out. Not that researching cool number and pattern games is bad, in fact I find it a lot of fun browsing through catalogs like Mindware, but even without any extra thought things like this random finding of a card game and exploring how numbers can be more or less than each other happen all the time.

I don't know if you have anything like this at your library, but  our neighboring town's library had these awesome cloth activity bags. The kits usually include a book, a laminated card showing you how to "teach" the material, and some cool toys. How's this for serendipity? It was a week before Halloween and we had been reading online about different Halloween traditions and also how other countries have similar traditions. Around this time the kids had also watched Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico, which plot takes place during the Day of the Dad festivities in Mexico.

Then Alexa picks this bag out at the library without even looking inside it, and when we get home we realize that it's all about the Day of the Dead. We read the book and played with the toys. The family in the book talked about making Pan de Muertes. I asked the kids if they wanted to make the bread with me, and they did. It was the first time I had made bread before by scratch, and to my surprise it turned out great! It was like this perfectly planned out unit study, but of course much better because I couldn't have planned it out so perfectly.

I've mentioned before how Jared is our late-night boy, sometimes not falling asleep until 11:00, yet still up by 7:00 the next day. He gets into the most wonderfully creative moods late at night. Here's one of his late night Lego creations.

Jared's the type of kid who wants everything. Right now one of his favorite activities it to take all the ads out of the Sunday paper and point out the hundreds of things he wants for Christmas. Alexa, on the other hand, is much different. We gave her $20 this vacation to buy whatever she wanted, and she would always leave stores, aquariums and other attractions empty-handed because she didn't find anything worth spending her money on. So, when she saw a commercial for the Glo-Doodle and was jumping up and down saying she wanted one, we took her right out the next day to get one. (She had so much allowance built up by then it was crazy).

Street Resurface

We had our entire street, including the apron of the driveway, redone a few weeks ago, complimentary of the village. The downside was not parking in our driveway for close to a week (we parked around the corner), but it naturally increased my daily exercise and made me much more appreciative of the convenience of a driveway.

It was really interesting to watch the whole process right from the living room window. We had some great discussions about concrete, construction equipment, asphalt, curbs and sewers.

By the way, Jared took these pictures. Alexa has always loved photography since she was 2, but Jared has just recently taken an interest. He asks to take the camera around the house, and his photos are now becoming quite good. He took all the pictures in this post.

Missing Fingertip

We will forever remember September 29th. That was the night Alexa lost one of her fingertips.

I had been on the phone talking with Steve who was on his way home from work. I was already in a stressed-out mood. Shopping hadn't gone well that day with the kids, what with them taking arm fulls of cheese and running around the store to doing flips over the bar in the checkout lane while I was trying to pay. Then they kept bickering and fighting with each other outside. As I'm complaining to Steve about this, they both tried to run into the bedroom where I was at the same time. Lately, they've been playing to age-old game of being the first person through the door and then slamming it behind themselves to block the other person from coming in.

Well, Alexa happened to have her hand in the hinge of the door, so when Jared ran in first and slammed the door behind him, it crushed her finger between the hinge and the door jam. She didn't even cry when it happened; her eyes just got really wide and she said a loud, "Ouch1" I though I saw a little bit of blood, so I threw a towel over her hand, but I still wasn't really worried. But when I pulled her in my lap, and pulled my hand away from the towel, it was saturated with blood. That's when I knew it was going to be bad.

When I pulled the towel away, all I saw was the bone sticking out of her left middle finger. The entire tip around the bone, down the the bottom of the cuticle was missing. That's when I screamed for Steve to get home right way. For some reason I just happened to glance at the door hinge at that moment and saw the fingertip stuck to the door. I raced to the kitchen for some ice and a baggie, put the fingertip on the ice (yes, it was very, very gross!) and tried to get both kids ready as fast as I could. Alexa still was not crying this entire time.

She is the bravest, toughest kid I've ever met. If this had happened to Jared, I'd be telling a whole other story. She was calm during the X-rays and even when I was explaining how they were going to reattach the fingertip and that it was going to hurt. She had to get eight shots in her hand, and she still didn't cry. She'd just say a loud "Ouch" after each shot. Then we tried to keep her from watching the doctor sew the tip back on, but she insisted on watching. It was only in the last ten minutes of the forty-five minutes procedure took that she broke down. I think it was a combination of it being 9:30 at night, she hadn't eaten anything since 1:00 and she usually asks to go to bed around 9:00. She asked to go home, and when we tried to explain that we couldn't until everything was done, she freaked out and we had to hold her down for the rest of the time. Sewing the nail back on was the most difficult part.

The tip did turn black, but we've been seeing a hand specialist every few weeks, and he assures us that her finger will eventually heal very well, and we'll hardly be able to tell that anything happened. We're praying for the best.

Art Institue and Picnic by the lake

This is the third year we've visited the Art Institute for its free Family Day, and we were definitely not disappointed. Last year we saw a dance performance by a local ballet company, and this year we heard  African jazz music by an awesome band. Jared especially was drawn to the drums. I hadn't ever heard music quite like that before, so I was excited to be introduced to new music.

After the performance we went to check out our usual rooms: the miniature room, the touch room and some of the Impressionist paintings. Unfortunately, Jared was not content to stay near us and started dashing off through the museum. He was pretty upset we made him hold Steve's hand. It's not easy staying sane when your kid is having a mini temper tantrum while people are trying to quietly check out great masterpieces. This is a bit embarrassing to admit, but the one thing that got him to settle down was to point out the butts of the sculptures we passed. What can I say? He's really into talking about butts, and it did get him interested in the art.

Then we walked down a few blocks to have a picnic right on the lake.

It was a hot day (this was at the end of August), so we moved to a shady spot under a tree. Here's a picture Alexa took of the sailboats on Lake Michigan.

It was a wonderful, wonderful afternoon. Not stressful, not exhausting......just right. I wish we had done this more during the summer.

Bristol Renaissance Fair

Early in September we went to the Bristol Renaissance Fair in Wisconsin for the first time. I was so excited to take the kids. We had wanted to go last year, but the timing didn't work out since we were going to Grand Cayman, but this year I made sure we'd go.

Jared had been into a big knights and castles phase awhile ago, so I really played up the jousting tournaments. We watched the YouTube videos of the fair, and both kids seemed pretty excited about going.

The actual day, however, didn't go at all as I'd imagined. Jared was in a negative mood almost the entire day. Lately I've been reading Raising Your Spirited Child, and the book describes my son so accurately it's almost scary. He's the most intense, vivacious, moody, energetic, opinionated, clever, and creative child I've met. Usually, though, it means I'm wiped out at the end of every day. Alexa is definitely spunky, too, but he takes way, way more energy out of me than she does, even with her endless questions and talking.

After a lot of whining, we did make it to the jousting area. Unfortunately, we only saw about five minutes of the performance before it ended. So, we walked back through the fair, checking out the stalls and taking in the sights. We paid for the kids to go on one ride, although we hated shelling out six dollars when we had already paid so much to get into the fair in the first place. The fair is such a money trap, especially if you have children. I do love the shows, but it's hard to go through the place and say no to most of what the kids want to do.

We saw the Falconer's show, which Steve and I thought was pretty awesome. A man presented several hawks and falcons, showed us how they are trained to hunt, and gave many demonstrations. Were the kids impressed? Apparently not. This is what Jared did instead.

They did perk up, though, when we said we'd get a treat.

They were so into that ice cream cone they didn't even care when this was taking place right behind them.

After the treat, they both started getting pretty whiny and said they wanted to go home, but I pretty much insisted we go see another jousting match. It started with the queen's parade, and I really wanted to see it, especially since we'd paid so much to get in the place. We had to stop at the privies on the way, so the place was crowded when we go there. We had to stand back a good fifty feet from the ring, so we couldn't see that well. Still, the queens procession passed right in front of us. And what were the kids doing when the queen and her entourage passed by?

At least they were having fun. But I had to remind myself that they got out of the day what they needed. Just like we learn without prescribed curriculum, how we learn from each moment and expand and enlarge our present interests, we each took what we needed from the day. And I know that when we come back again to the same fair, they will take new ideas and images away.

It was a perfect day to remind me that we can't come up with brilliant (in our minds) experiences, lessons, or ideas and expect kids to enthusiastically come on board no matter how much fun we've made it. We need to look closely at our kids to see what captures their attention in the moment and meet them where they are. And just because they aren't excited by what excites us now doesn't mean they'll never be curious to find out what we'd like to show them.