Thanksgiving with Simon

On Friday, Zac and I went to Simon's preschool for their annual Thanksgiving lunch with the parents. Luckily, Simon didn't totally freak out (although he did close his eyes when all the parents entered the room). They sang a few songs (Simon just clung to me) and then we had lunch.

Fishing at the pond!

Alice spends her allowance

I took the kids to the Durham Museum of Life and Science. We played inside and outside, visited the butterfly house and farm animals, and finally, finally, went to the gift shop so Alice could spend her allowance (with a little boost from Grandma Cam's Halloween money).

She bought a "bubble timer", a container of slime, and a butterfly key chain. (It all cost about $15, so she had some money left over.) I didn't intervene too much, but I did talk her out of buying gemstones and stuff that would just lay around and get lost.

With his money from Grandma Cam, Simon picked out an airplane and some chocolate covered bugs.

He ate the bugs as soon as we got to the car. He kept asking, "Where are their legs?"

The slime was a big hit. For some reason, Simon calls it his royal chicken.

Simon's conference

We had Simon's fall conference. They always talk about how sweet and easy he is, especially compared to Alice. The commented on his friendship with Donovan and good they are together.

One thing we were concerned about was if Simon's lack of sleep at night was causing any problems at school, but they said he was fine there. They said (after much questioning by me) that Simon did seem to maybe have some anxiety or resistance to change. It sounds like he does the same to them that he does to us where he will ask the same question over and over again. The example they gave was him asking if they were going to go outside to play that day.

Simon said the item below is a "circle calendar."

Simon loves boiled eggs (but not the yolk)

Playdate with Julia and Brantley

On Saturday, I arranged a playdate with Alice's friends (Brantley & Julia) from kindergarten at her old school. We went to Crowder District Park and they had a great time playing on the playground, picnicking by the pond, and then building "bug houses" out of mud on the picnic table.  They really spend the most time with the mud, and sometimes threw the grubs they found to the fish in the pond. I had a great time visiting with the moms.

When we were walking back to the cars, Simon found a stink bug and kept talking about the stink bug he found. Until he screamed, "Owww!" and dropped the stink bug. Turns out his little stinker was actually an assassin bug. The kid is lucky to be alive. (It kills bugs, not humans, but the internet says the bite is worse than wasps. It must not have really got Simon good, because he would have at least cried, probably.)

Simon's long goodbye

Simon seems to be experiencing some anxiety lately. He makes us repeat promises a gazillion times before bed, and now he also does it during the goodbyes in the morning. It's just a phase, we tell ourselves.

Alice's art

Translation:

AVA Arcaro

Alice Vivian Sera

Arcaro Zac Arcaro

Simon Arcaro

I love mom I love Dad I love my

brother and all my

friends very very much

Emre Emre

???????  Eeeek!

numbers

Alices 1st first grade report card

Simon's House

Simon loves to build things out of the scrap wood in the garage. Here's a tour of his latest creation.

Simon's sleep issues

We don't remember exactly when it started or how long it's been going on (years? months?) but Simon has trouble falling asleep at night. I can remember when he was a baby and I could easily rock him to sleep at naptime, but usually gave up at nighttime and just put him in his crib awake. He rarely cried about it, so it wasn't a problem.

If I had to pick a time that it started becoming a problem, maybe it was when Simon finally stopped wearing night diapers. He would use "I'm going potty" as an excuse to leave his room multiple times before finally falling asleep.

But again, it wasn't really a problem because he didn't bother us and eventually fell asleep.

But then, one time we woke up to him screaming at 4am because he had fallen out of the bathtub. Why was he in the bathtub? He found a cockroach in there.

That was when we realized he must be getting up in the middle of the night too.  But, he always put himself back to bed, so not a problem.

Then there was the time Alice woke up in the morning and found him asleep on her couch. Another time we found him asleep in the basement. Sometimes in the living room.

One time, he screamed in the middle of the night (because the cat scratched him) and when I got up, I discovered he had turned every light in the house on.

So we came up with a new plan. We put toys in his room so he would stay in there and play when he woke up. It sort of worked, except he would play far more than sleep. Sometimes he would play in his room and then fall asleep in the hallway.

The problem with Simon is that we don't have much leverage with him. He doesn't care about bribes. He doesn't care if we take away stuff.  We bribed him with candy. He loves candy. We took away all the toys in his room. Nothing worked.

The current pattern (as of 11/25/17) is that we sit on the couch in his room until he falls asleep. This seems to keep him in his bed, and he soon falls asleep. Then he wakes up at 3 every morning crying for Zac. Zac goes in and resettles him. We don't know what time he wakes up in the morning, but we think it's pretty early.

I don't want a dog!

At supper out on the deck one evening, Zac was talking about getting one of the lights with lasers for Christmas to light up the tree leaves in the back yard.

Alice interjected, "No! I don't want to get a dog."

"What?"

"I don't want to have lasers in our back yard because then I might look at them and go blind and we'll have to get a dog."

Cockroaches on the deck in the dark

One of Simon's more unsavory enjoyments in life is to go out on the deck in the dark and catch cockroaches. He then holds them up to the kitchen window to show us in the light. He absolutely loves it. We make him flush them down the toilet.

Halloween at Wellington Park

Tuesday was Halloween, and the county schools and daycare were closed, allegedly for a teacher workday, but probably to avoid any costume controversies. If they had any sense, they'd take the day after Halloween to close schools.

At any rate, I took the day off and stayed home with the kids. We went to Dragon Park, and Simon rode on the tire swing for the first time ever. He didn't want pushed too hard or crazy (he really is the opposite of Alice), but he did pretty well.

That evening, we went to our friend Andrea's house for pizza. We know her from daycare and she lives in a different part of our neighborhood. She has two boys, a year older than Alice and a year younger. They invited Genevieve and her parents over too (also from daycare).  So the kids ate pizza at one table and the adults at another (plus Simon because he was too terrified of their dog to be left alone.  Their dog is the size of a cat.)

(clockwise) Alice, Murphy, Genevieve, Glenn

Then, at 6:30, we headed out to trick-or-treat, joined by Emry, Alice's friend from after-school-care who is a year younger than her, and whose mom works with Zac. We quickly realized why Alice liked Emry so much: he is boisterous and energetic just like her. They ran from house-to-house. Simon did a great job and didn't want us to come up to the houses with him, so we just loitered on the road while the kids ran up to the doors.

(Glenn, Genevieve, Simon, Murphy, Alice, Emry)

Our cul-de-sac is kind of in the middle of nowhere in the neighborhood as a whole, so we'd heard that most people go to one of the more populated ends of the neighborhood to trick-or-treat (which is what we did with Andrea and the kids).

Back at our house, we trick-or-treated in our own cul-de-sac (everyone still had bowls filled to the brim with candy since so few kids had come out here), then turned all of our lights on in case anybody came by, since it was only about 8pm. We had exactly one person come: Parker!

The kids made out pretty good for just an hour of trick-or-treating!  We live in a generous neighborhood: lots of chocolate, even a few full-sized bars.

Pumpkin Carving

Carving a jack-o-lantern is an important holiday tradition.  This year, Zac let both kids draw their own design on the pumpkin.  Alice did fine, but Simon kept drawing really tiny little faces. Finally, we were able to adequately convey what he needed to do and he drew a larger face.

Steering wheels

Sunday morning was rainy, so Zac took the kids to Marbles while I did school work and laundry. Zac said it was the first time ever that Simon didn't play with the trains at Marbles. Instead, he was focused on any vehicle with a steering wheel.

Simon's airplane

Simon loves to go out on the garage in the evenings while Zac is puttering around out there and put stuff together with the scrap wood. He'll build walls, and houses, and towers (all of which Zac failed to take a picture of). One night he excitedly came in the house to get Alice, saying he had built a two-seat airplane for them the ride on. (Unfortunately, Alice was playing with Parker and wasn't available to ride on the plane then.)

Money!

Alice has a new found understanding of money since we started her on an allowance over the summer. So she was thrilled beyond belief to receive $10 in the mail from Grandma Cam and Don. I held the money hostage until she wrote the thank-you card, and then made her put half of it in her savings.  But, the good news is, thanks to this windfall, she now has $20 in her "spending" envelope and is finally at her goal of saving $19 to spend at the gift shop at the Durham Museum of Life and Science. The story there is that one of the times I took her there over the summer, she picked out everything she wanted in the shop and it came to $19 total. So she has been very diligent in not spending her money and saving it for that. It's funny, of course, because she could have bought some of the things before reaching her goal, but for some reason she wants to buy everything all at once. The other funny thing is I don't think she remembers what she picked out, so when we go there again, whatever she chooses will probably end up being more or less than $19. But it seems like a good experience to just go through the discipline of not spending any money for 15 weeks.

Simon, meanwhile, has no concept of what money even is, so we had to quickly wrest his money from him and put it in a safe place, since he is in a phase where he likes to tear and shred paper, or crumple it up and claim it's a rocket ship, or write his name all over it in purple marker....  Further proof of how clueless he is is that a week later, I put the Halloween card in his room and he asked if the card was money.

Playground

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.