March 20 with the Kids

Wednesday:  I really didn't take many pictures of Cal today. We were too busy racing my new marble cars and playing back in the playroom. I forgot all about my camera until the last 20 minutes or so.

I took painter's tape and enlarged our roadway from last week (in the playroom), adding two parking lots and an exact place to put our garage. Cal was VERY into all of it. We had wrecks like crazy and needed all FOUR of our tow trucks to be out on the road constantly. They were hauling cars over to the garage for repair all afternoon!

The car Cal is holding (above and below) is an old one that Christopher donated to my collection years ago. He had taken the liberty (in his younger days) of "decorating" it with a BLACK sharpie marker to the point where you could barely see any of the details of the paint job on the car. Cal wondered if we could give it a car wash. SO ... we took it over to the kitchen sink, I pulled up a chair so Cal could get in on the fun, and we soaked it in Dawn detergent (!!), got out our scrub brushes and ... scrubbed like crazy! We found out that Sharpie marker is quite permanent ... but I think we improved the look of the car a little bit. Anyway, Cal was very pleased.

Here are the two cars that we played with mostly throughout the day. Cal didn't even know they were here until he had already been here for an hour. He just didn't happen to see them! They were right in the dining room by some of the other toys; but he walked on the other side of the table to the back room and never saw them. He was actually in his chair eating lunch before he noticed them. "Hey! I have one of those cars at MY house ... 'cept it's wheel fell off!" 

We raced these back-up cars for the rest of the afternoon--in every room of my small house! They crashed! They did roll-overs! They spun out! They were great fun. Definitely worth $9.99!

Cal decided they needed to be named, so the blue one has been designated "Water" (this cracked me up) and the red one is "Wavva--you know, gwamma, wavva from a CANO!" Lava! Okay, then! This child kills me. 

I can't really blame Cal for naming things, though. We played a little bit with the puppets. My Sunny puppet was having a "fit" about something Cal was doing and I brought the puppet up to Cal's little face and said a bunch of things (using Sunny's voice of course) and then Cal looked up at me and said: "He's just your hand, right gwamma?" Like he wasn't quite sure. Yikes. I need to be more careful about this pretending stuff.

Pretty soon, it was time to drive back to Cal's house to meet the kids from their bus. The two neighbor boys, Benson and Abbott asked if they could play; and rather than freeze myself by playing outside (it was super cold today), I invited the boys in to play. They checked with their mom, and it was okay. We proceeded to fold paper airplanes for the next hour or so. It was a lot of fun.

Benson is on the left--he is looking up to see how his plane did after he launched it. I think Benson is on the spectrum somewhat (aren't we all?) ... but there is such a sweetness to this child. I love to sit with him and just enjoy who he is. I don't know his younger brother very well (Abbott). Sadly, these two are moving away from the neighborhood at the end of the month. I know Aidan and Erin will miss them terribly.

And Cal too! This little guy really loves paper airplanes. He does a great job flying them too. I likes BIG paper airplanes, not little ones. Aidan brought us out a piece of blue paper that was double letter-size, and I folded an airplane out of that. Cal was very pleased.

Aidan is a very resourceful little person. Look at his dear face. I love him so.

And ERIN was into drawing a figure from Pokemon--she's becoming quite the little artist.

Aidan took some of his recently folded airplanes to the top of the 2nd floor and launched them into the main room below ...

It sure was nice to be with these little children today. I am truly thankful for them. I missed out getting a photo of Brendan again today. He is quite elusive--but he is TWELVE, so that explains it. I love you too, Brendan!