On Saturday morning, after breakfast and time on the in-house obstacle course, I took the kids to Jack Smith park. Simon does a great job playing now, and it quite happy climbing on things, but especially things that look like a spider's web. He also loved jumping around the rocks, and I regret not getting a video of that.
A friend of mind at work invited us to the North Carolina Symphony's Young People's Concert (her husband is in the symphony and gets free tickets to hand out occasionally). Alice squirmed and whined about being thirsty and needing to go potty (even although we took care of both right before sitting down) for most of the concert. I guess for someone as hands-on as Alice, just watching music must have been strange, and based on her behavior, it certainly was difficult. But when the youth ballet came out to dance and act out Peter and the Wolf, she perked up and became interested. She enjoyed the Peter and the Wolf part so much, it inspired me to show her Fantasia, which is conveniently on Netflix right now. She loves it.
Alice poses with the dancer who played the cat in Peter and the Wolf
Raleigh is the "City of Oaks" so our mascot is a giant acorn. Coming from the Buckeye State, it makes total sense to me to have giant nuts as part of the culture here.
Zac went to the trick-or-treating at Simon's daycare (it's always on the community workday at my school so I can never go). The parents who can come line up on the playground and the kids come out and the parents pass out candy.
Simon said he wanted to be a cicada again this year, so we found the hat and wings from last year in with the toys in the basement. The hat was missing an eyeball, but we eventually found it (shoved in a purse in Alice's bedroom) and Zac sewed it back on. We failed to really think about the outfit more than that, because we are excelling at being slacker parents. But Simon felt like he was a cicada, and that's all that really matters. Right?
The bottom two pictures were taken by our friend (and former real-estate agent Elizabeth).
The school I teach at does Community Work Days, where twice a year, under a teacher's leadership, students participate in a variety of community service projects on campus and in the community. The health teacher at my school, Katie Kritzer, takes her community workday group to Ms. Jones's class (Alice's class!) every year to do health-related activities with the first graders. So just by coincidence, some of my students spent the day with Alice's class. Alice didn't say much about it, other than that she made a stoplight cookie (that must have been the most exciting part).
Katie, the health teacher at my school, texted me this picture of Alice's class with RCHS students.
On Thursday night, the kids used the time betwixt supper and bedtime snack to build things. Simon loves to work in the garage, putting together things with random scraps of wood and boxes. Meanwhile, Alice and Parker constructed a fort in the living room.
Ms. Georgiana sent me this picture of Simon from daycare today:
She said he had a blast playing with the pumpkin seed goop.
Parents were supposed to sign up to come carve pumpkins with their kids. Zac and I think this is absurd, because why take off work to do stuff with our kids at daycare that we are going to do with them at home anyway? So we don't feel very guilty about skipping events like this, except when Ms. Georgiana texts us pictures of our cute kid, parentless with his pumpkin seeds.
One thing that drives me nuts about elementary school is the constant fundraising. And they do such a good job getting the kids on board. All week Alice has been talking about teacher's night at McDonalds (we buy food and McDonalds donates proceeds to the school) and how much she wanted to go. I hemmed and hawed and refused to commit to anything. "But I want to see Dr. Douglass go down the slide!" she would keep saying. Dr. Douglass is the principal and apparently he promoted the event by promising the students they'd see him go down the slide at the play place in the McDonald's.
Finally, on the way home that evening, I relented and told Alice and Simon if they ate their supper really fast we could go to McDonald's for dessert. It was fish night, so they unfortunately succeeded in eating quickly enough that we had time to go. So we all piled into the car and drove up the road to McD's.
It was even worse than I imagined. The play area was a madhouse, of course, but what I had failed to imagine was that they would all be screaming. Zac used some app on his phone and the sound levels were declared unsafe without ear protection.
The good news was Alice had a blast. She found a few friends and played like a maniac. She seemed to forget all about seeing Dr. Douglass go down the slide.
We let the kids play for a bit, then got them ice cream cones, then let them play for a bit more, then left. If I'm deaf in old age (more than I am already) this will be the cause.
One morning, Simon was so proud to show us all of his decorating. He had ripped a gazillion plastic ribbons off of a pom-pom and hung them over everything.
(The next day he did the same thing, except all over the house.)
Simon had his first ever playdate today with Donovan, his friend from preschool. We totally failed to document the cuteness adequately, but they had a blast playing at Dragon Park together. Then we came back to the house and had Chinese take-out for lunch and popsicles for dessert. We waited so long to have a playdate for Simon because he was always so content going along on Alice-centered outings, and he is so good at playing by himself that it seemed like a playdate would be pointless (especially during the peak of his bug phase). But he was ripe for a playdate. He was so happy the whole time and the next day asked if he could have another playdate with Donovan.
Alice came along on the playdate too, and luckily Parker was able to join us, so they kept each other occupied, while we watched Donovan and Simon and visited with Donovan's parents.
On Sunday, I had planned to take the kids to check out a new park, but Parker came over to play, so then it just seemed easier to stay parked and have someone else keep Alice occupied. The heavens were certainly smiling on us when we ended up with Parker for our neighbor!
After they got tired of playing in the back yard, I took all three kids to the Dragon Park, where they found a rock in the weeds and pretended it was their dragon egg they had to take care of.
Zac's office ordered some furniture so Zac came in to a lot of foam sheets. He brought some home for the kids to play with. Among other things, Alice made an airplane held together with toothpicks and two boots.
Some of Alice's doodles from school (I think she did them in after-school care).
I forget how it got started, but somehow Alice learned that Zac had his old boy scout uniform and badges up in the attic. Whenever we would mention the attic for some other reason, Alice would ask if Zac would get out his boy scout badges to show her. But whenever she asked, we'd always be in the middle of something, or needing to rush off. Finally, she asked at the right time, and I told Zac, "You know, you probably have a fairly short window in life here where your daughter is interested in your old boy scout badges. You should probably seize this opportunity." So he did.
Our usual routine this year is as follows:
Morning: Sera waits with Alice at the bus stop and Zac takes Simon to school.
Evening: Zac picks up Simon and Alice; Sera makes supper.
But once a week, we have salmon, so I pick up both kids and Zac comes home and makes supper (we grill the fish and we all know that only men can grill, so that's why Zac always has to make that supper).
Simon loves salmon, so he is always happy when I pick him up from school because he knows we're having fish for supper.
(We were at a stoplight when I took this photo, don't worry.)
On weekend mornings, the kids wake up at 6am or some ungodly time like that, and we are generally able to sleep in until someone starts screaming or crying. However, what the kids do in the morning for two hours unsupervised can sometimes be problematic. Like this morning when I came down and noticed the kids had gotten in to the Sharpie markers, and Simon had taken to drawing on the kitchen floor. (Thankfully, we have linoleum and the marker came off with rubbing alcohol.)
I remember, long ago, when Zac and I would look forward to weekends as a time to relax and recover from a week of work. We used to even read books, cook things for fun, pursue hobbies and interests, hang out with adults without any kids around (and without even discussing kids!)... But for many years now, say about four to six years, weekends are just a different type of work. We look forward to Saturdays and then we look forward to Mondays. Or we just stop looking forward to anything, and careen through the days where it seems like it's always a Monday or Saturday again.
So it was that we found ourselves at another Saturday. I know we'll miss these days when they're gone, and this blog will contribute to the nostalgia because it just captures all the fun of parenting with none of the agony. I mean, look at these adorable kids painting!
Look at how much fun we had building bridges over creeks in the woods at the park!
Look at how happily the kids entertained themselves with mud by the river!
Look at the giant mess of the house!
Look at how much fun the kids had playing with scrap wood in the garage with dad!
Alice always used to spend lots of time just looking at books. Simon almost never does. So I was quite happy when I passed by his room and spotted him paging through his recent favorite book: Llama, Llama, Red Pajama.
I took the kids to the airport park to play this morning. The park is fairly minimal: a raised viewing deck, a grassy lawn, a few child-sized runways, a sand pit with a large metal spider to climb on...but the few times I've brought the kids here, they've managed to entertain themselves for a remarkably long time. Maybe less really is more.
Today, they crawled in a hole in the bushes and found two glass wine bottles. Those bottles kept them busy for two hours. It's not shown in this picture, but the park was full of fashionable middle-class families picnicking in the park, and my two kids, wearing play clothes, dirty, running around with wine bottles...
