vacation days

We're on vacation! OK, I wish it was somewhere warm or exotic, but I'll take just not being at work or in school. Tomorrow Stevie & I will go visit Grandma and hang out with family. I'm hoping to visit The Little Farmer for apples & pumpkins. Maybe we'll even carve another pumpkin. Friday night, Stevie is graduating to a gold belt, and Saturday, of course, is Halloween! Last night, the boy & Fundad carved the boy's first pumpkin. It turned out quite well. Stevie helped pick out the kind of face, but Fundad did the carving. We have an excellent pumpkin carving kit that makes it so easy to carve good designs. Before the boy came along, we would carve cool designs from templates... now we're happy to just have pumpkins.

On Monday, we (Fundad and I) went to our first parent-teacher conference. It went just fine. Stevie is "all boy" but listens well and works hard. What more could one ask? He's doing well at school, and his teacher thinks that he is grasping math quickly.

Today was the Halloween party - here's a picture of the boy's class. Although he's going to be Darth Vader for Halloween, we decided to go with the Prince Peter of Narnia for school.

our army base

The boy has been very excited about school, and in particular, about projects and art. His coloring has improved immensely. He stays in the lines and is creative with color. I've been amazed, because generally we're not terribly artistic in our house. He's also done any number of projects. We've made treasure maps following instructions in a pirate craft book. And tonight we made a girl and boy project, and a boy project. Tomorrow, he told me, we'll make a girl project.

The girl and boy project was a jack o'lantern. I made the pumpkin and the stem. Stevie made the eyes, nose and mouth. First we had to cut a shape out of a piece of paper and put our name on it, along with whatever we were making. Then we cut out the pieces and glued everything together.

The boy project was an army base. I had trepidations about this. We started out with trees and clouds in the sky. Then we made tents (even I can draw tents). Some were triangle tents and some were flat topped tents. From tents we went to flags - Stevie was the United States and I was... someone else. Then I drew a river and we both made a bunch of canoes. Finally, I laughingly made a porta-potty. The boy thought that was great, and went on to make about 30 more. We figured that at 10 people per tent, he had about 180 people. He needed lots of porta-potties. We finished up with some stick people in the trees and lookng out of the tents, a fence around his base, and some barrels and crates.

We were very proud.

naptime - NOT!

The boy has been napping after kindergarten. Yesterday it was on the way to karate. Today it was on our way home from the doctor.

It's not a good thing.

When the boy falls asleep, he's extremely difficult to wake. He has a hard time breaking out of his dreams, and is grumpy to the point of taking a swing at the individual that dares to disturb his rest. Sometimes it's funny. But when it's 7:30 pm and your child has been sleeping for two or three hours, it's not so much. I'm falling asleep, and the boy is jumping and laughing and feeling hugely mischievous. Fundad generally has more energy than I do, and finds the entire situation amusing.

Tonight I managed to get into my bed, leaving Fundad and the boy reading books. Stevie refused to say good night to me. He left giggling and (no doubt) picturing me lonely and sad in bed, while he and Fundad enjoyed guy time. Ha!

my boys

Every Father's Day, I get Fundad and the boy matching gifts. This year it was binoculars, but most years I get them matching t-shirts. It started with my mom - she found "Big Guy" and "Little Guy" shirts when Stevie was young. Two years ago I found Nasa Rocket Scientist shirts, which we all loved (The Spacestore). So this morning when Fundad got dressed in his t-shirt, Stevie decided he had to match... they were both SO cute.

From Fun Fall, 2009

From Fun Fall, 2009

.coms

The boy and I just wrapped a beautiful birthday present. One part is pink with white daisies, the other part is pink with purple polka pots. Stevie picked out the paper. It has lime green, yellow and purple ribbon. The recipient is a little girl up the street. She's very fun, and she likes horses a lot. We're going to her birthday party this afternoon.

Right now the boy is playing with scissors and tape, and lots and lots of leftover oddly shaped pieces of wrapping paper. I can see superman, scooby-doo, flowers, robots, and various types of birthday paper. He's making "something beautiful", he told me.

His next adventure is to go to "plastic army guys.com". He has a habit of looking for "anythingdescriptive.com". Plastic army guys really is a website, believe it or not. We've also explored vikings.com (guess where that goes), knights.com (boring), indians.com (baseball), and - my idea - nativeamericans.com, which oddly enough doesn't exist. It's fun to see how his mind works.

christmas lists

The Young Explorers Christmas catalog came in the mail yesterday. So today the boy, armed with a nice black marker, is starting his Christmas list. So far he's very interested in building toys, sports games, and gadgets... to the tune of two or three items per page. It's a bit much. I suppose that I'll weed out anything not age-appropriate and then look at what's left. It's always interesting to see what appeals to him. Right now he's circling Rock'em Sock'em Robots, and a remote control landspeeder. He also circled a guitar, metal detector, and at least two different banks (the kind that do cool things when you insert the coin). My personal favorite is the "Build your own V8 Engine" toy. I know that Fundad will be very supportive of that one.

The boy has a tendency to overestimate his abilities at this point. I did see interesting toys though. Toys for Funmom, not for the boy. :-)

books, books, and more books...

I realized recently that my sister writes a blog about books she's read. My sister is a librarian, so this shouldn't surprise me. But I was surprised that I didn't know. She and I have always had very different reading habits, despite our similar degrees. That's probably because of the different career paths we've taken. She has been a middle school librarian for many years, and much of her reading was for work. Now, due to district and budgetary changes, she's starting her first year as a high school librarian.

She seems to like it, and I think she's surprised by that.

As I said, we've never had similar reading habits. I don't read much reality fiction - I get enough of that in everyday life, thank you very much. I read lots of science-fiction, fantasy, alternative reality, adventure, and mystery. The paranormal genre so popular in young adult (and adult) fiction today dovetails nicely with my interests. So I've been reading lots of young adult fiction... and so has my sister. It started with Twilight, then the Uglies - which we both loved. I've gone through the Charlie Bone books - all except the very newest- which are really more middle-school than high, but still very good. I, of course, loved Harry Potter, which I think she also enjoyed.

It's a nice change, to be able to talk about books with my sister. I like to talk about books with anyone that will listen, honestly. I'm lucky that I have a neighbor who also enjoys reading as much as I do. (She was the one that told me about the Uglies.) Stevie likes reading a lot, so far. I realize that he might lose some of that interest as he grows up, but I hope now. Tonight we stopped at the library and found Scooby Doo and the Werewolf, a new Mercer Mayer called The Best Teacher Ever, and some older books that we've had home several times. Just before we left the library we spotted a new Clone Wars graphic novel on the shelf that I'll try to get next time. It looked like it might be simple enough for the boy... or else just for me!

super new car smell

Last week we had the ducts cleaned in our home. The air ducts - both cold and hot. Our reasoning was that we'd never had it done, and since we're constantly sick... well, we're grasping at straws. Maybe our immune systems are just too old to adjust to having a five-year old's germ pool around. Except that the boy is sick as often as us.

So the ducts weren't terribly dirty, but the guy cleaned them and added an antiseptic to keep theem clean. It smelled like new-car smell - the kind that you get when you have the full-service carwash. Only it wasn't just new car smell - it was SUPER new car smell. Like they dumped the entire bottle into your car vents. It was a little nauseating. Sleeping in the house was not an option for me. Fundad and the boy didn't seem too mind, but my stomach is always a little more sensitive than theirs.

Luckily, it was a nice weekend so we took the opportunity to sleep in the camper. We popped it up in the backyard and closed the fence. As Fundad says, it was almost like camping but without all the work. We had a fire outside and watched the Witch Mountain movie that came out recently. It was pretty cool late, so the boy and I snuggled all night under my extremely warm sleeping bag. (Normally he isn't a cuddler, but the cold air must have encouraged it.) It went so well - and the house took a long time to air out - so we did it again on Saturday night. I was exhausted from the Badger game so we had another good night's sleeep.

I can still catch a whiff of the scent tonight, but just a whiff. I'm watching the Packer game (they're winning), and the boy is in bed. We read "The Runaway Mummy", which is a hilarious parody of "The Runaway Bunny". (We also have "Goodnight Goon", a parody of "Goodnight Moon"). And then the boy conked, as I probably will shortly.