New experiences

Every day something new
Mason experiences new happenings by the day, like feeding himself spaghetti, thus providing the requisite messy spaghetti baby face picture:

and sportin' shades-
and discovering that perhaps his very favorite thing in the whole world is bath time. He loooooves to lay on his back and frog kick so hard it's a veritable rainfall from the sheet amount of water everywhere. I took a video, but Brian think it's inappropriate b/c the washcloth won't stay in the money spot from all the moving he does. So I won't share. The other day he put his face under the water and blew bubbles. Water baby for sure. And he has learned to stand up on his own while holding onto something. I figured a baby bum from the back is OK. And even though he's small - we're talking 5th percent for weight - he does manage to have a few rolls. I'll take it! Yum, yum and yum!

and graduating from army crawling to the real deal! Although this act has not been much repeated since it happened last week, but where there was once crawling so shall there be again.

Numbers
Nothing very new on the Lucas front, but I will share that his favorite number is "a million a thousand one hundred and nine." Said just like that. All the time. No idea where a 3 year old would come up with that number.

She's walking into spiderwebsInternet spider webs, that is. Isabel's favorite new activity is surfing the Web. Connor taught her and Lucas how to do a Web search. They can be found often huddled together over the computer researching the asteroid belt and various other space objects, or a number of other subjects. And Isabel has really taken to it. She's been getting on the computer a lot and searching for any word she can think of to spell: ostrich, zebra, colors, names, and so on. It has gotten interesting.

She'll click from picture to picture and open new windows at every whim, resulting in sometimes 20 or more windows open. I keep teaching her to close windows before opening new ones.

But the bigger issue is the things upon which she has stumbled. Some examples: searching "pink," her fave color, brought her to the singer PINK's web page. A search for "Lucas" brought her to a page about Corey Haim in the movie "Lucas." Sometimes she'll just enter a number multiple times; as you might imagine, "6666666666666" brought up a lot of scary things of a witchcraft and other dark nature.

But here's the best thus far: I checked on her the other day to see what she was doing and found her on a bunch of marijuana pages: cannabis info, legalize marijuana pages, how to grow weed, and other pages of the sort. I'm all like, "what the...???" and then discovered she has searched the word "pot." I hope we are not being watched.

And this is where Brian and I are scrambling to implement parental controls. And this is also a reminder of how amazing and wonderful the Internet can be, and how dangerous and evil as well.

Check Mate
Last week Connor won all three of his matches at Chess Club! First time he's done that. He was beaming.

And his prayer last night: "Please bless daddy that he can have a nice rest of his life without any grandparents on the earth."

Another goodbye

Last week we received word that Brian's Grandma Bonnie Howell (his only living grandparent) had fluid in her stomach, which turned out to be cancer cells, they thought from lesion on her liver where the cancer was originating. She lived in Kansas, and had an appointment in Denver scheduled for today for further testing and a treatment plan. On Saturday we got a call that she was going downhill quickly and was hallucinating and they didn't think she was going to make it until Monday. We were planning for a possible quick trip to Kansas to say goodbye, but within hours, she was gone. We can't believe how quickly she went.

We had last seen her in October when she came for a visit, and seemed to be doing well. You just never know. So we are preparing for yet another funeral; this is the 3rd grandparent we have lost in just over 8 months. Brian now has no living grandparents, and I have my 2 grandmothers yet. 'Tis a sad turning of the tide.

To complicate things, I have been fevered-, chilled-, achy-, fire-in-my-throat-so-bad-I-can't-swallow-or-talk-without-excruciating-pain, headache-so-bad-the-slightest-noise-practically- reduces-me-to-tears sick. Pretty much on the couch since Saturday. It's been a little rough.

Forgive my whining. I will be better soon I'm sure, hopefully in time for Grandma's final goodbye on Friday.

Grandma with Mason in October. Oh how she loved my blog. We e-mailed on a regular basis, and she just adored the children. I know she is rejoicing in seeing her husband who died when Connor was a baby, and her sister Ruth who died recently. Love you Grandma!

C.A.M.P night

Earlier this week was 2nd and 3rd grade C.A.M.P. (Classroom Art Music PE) night at Connor's school. C.A.M.P. night is like a curriculum night where families experience a day in the life of a 2nd or 3rd grader.

Since social studies has been introduced this year, a lot of the activities centered around that. The 2nd graders have been studying Asia.

For the Classroom part, we were able to see the Chinese dragon Connor made:
taste a sampling of Asian snacks-

"Here, you try it!"

We did some math and writing projects-

We saw the heritage doll display that the students worked on over Christmas break, representing one of their ancestry lines. Connor's is the Irish leprechaun in the back, which he and my mom worked on together-

The Art portion included making origami bunnies-

Connor and his art teacher, who is free-spirited, extra kind and adores Connor-

The Music portion was a performance, including a Chinese song and ribbon dance (video at the end of the post)-

They've been doing a golf unit in PE, so there were putt-putt stations set up around the school-

And there were telescopes set up outside to view some of the space objects they had studied earlier in the year. We saw great images of the moon and some star clusters, including a gas cloud in Orion.

This is the video of his music performance-


I love to see education in action!

Valentine's festivities

Valentine's is fun, fun, fun. And I realized how my kids are at such fun ages for all these things right now. My mind did a quick flash-forward to 10 years from now, and I wondered if my kids will appreciate chocolate waffles with berries served on cute heart-shaped plates. I'm thinking no. But for now, they think these holidays and all that go with them are the bomb, so I try to make them memorable.

The aforementioned breakfast:

and dessert was molten lava cakes-

we had a fun family night with dinner, that dessert, singing, taking turns telling each family members things we love about him or her (made my heart glad hearing what everyone had to say about their family members), and playing a bean bag toss game that I made; it was so simple, but the kids loved it and spent a lot of time playing in the days leading up to V-day, and I also used it for a couple of their parties. I made 3 heart-shaped bean bags, painted a cupcake on some foam board, and cut out a circle:
And of course, there were parties. I hosted Lucas' playgroup party; we played the bean bag toss game, had gummy berry hearts that I made with pureed strawberries (double yum!), did a craft and exchanged Valentine's. I adore Lucas' playgroup; they are an awesome group of boys. Seriously never any fighting, great imaginations, super well-behaved, just awesome boys.

Connor's 2nd grade party was a very low-key event, as they have been super busy preparing for a big event at school tonight. Just cupcake decorating and a Valentine exchange, perfect. One of the things that makes Connor's heart the happiest is his teacher this year, Mrs. R. Mine too. I fear we may go the rest of his academic life and never again encounter a teacher as amazing as her.

Isabel's preschool party included playing the bean bag toss, cookie decorating, and a Valentine's exchange-

I'm sad I never got a picture of Valentine's Mason, or of all the kids together. And I'm pretty sure we're going to need to eat broccoli for a week straight to cleanse our systems from all the sugar.

Basketball

Connor wanted to play basketball this year. Practices started a couple of weeks ago, and he had his first game on Saturday. He was excited, and had a fun time.

With his autism, he sometimes has a difficult time with team sports; the noise and constant action can be overstimulating and at times a bit overwhelming, which causes him to sort of check out a bit from time to time. When I mentioned this to his coach, he told me that he is a school counselor and works with autistic kiddos all the time, and has some ideas to implement with Connor to better help him participate and be even greater than he already is. Yep, so that worked out fabulously; it's pretty much awesome and made us very happy.

It is not easy to get good shots inside a gym. But here are some. And his fan club enjoyed it much more than depicted. We are just so very, very proud of Connor and all that he has accomplished, and continues to accomplish. That is one awesome kid. He's wearing No. 7.

And here we are

Brian and I went on a date. Alone.

What, you think there's more to the story? The only story is that with a nursing baby, there really haven't been any dates without Mason tagging along, because the child will not take a bottle. But solids have been a welcome addition. Thanks to Brian's mom for spending an entire evening with the children so we could go to dinner, furniture shopping and to a movie (The King's Speech, oh love love love!).

And we even took a picture. It's nothing exciting. But it's us. And I sure do have fun with this guy.