August 15 Our final week

Tuesday:  This is our final Tuesday with FOUR children coming over to my house together. School begins next Monday--which means that I will only have CAL coming over to play. What a drastic difference that will make. I'm not sure how it will go! We will meet up with the other kiddos later in the day in order to get them off their buses--but we will most often just play at their house until the parents come home from work. Every now and then, though, I am going to have to bring all of them over--I will miss them too much otherwise.

Aidan is growing up so fast. He surprises me every week with how apt he is at reading and learning. He is enthusiastic about everything academic. Brendan is too! So is Erin! I'm not sure yet, about Cal, since he is only three. I have three little "games" that come in plastic containers with open-up windows and doors. The object is to guess what is behind the four closed windows based on clues that are given in a mixed-up word. So let's say the picture behind the windows is a giraffe, for example. The mixed up letters might look like this: R F E I F A G. The aim is to unscramble the letters to figure out the secret animal hiding behind the windows. If you need help, one of the windows can be open (which reveals 1/4 of the secret picture at a time) and then you continue guessing until you figure it out. Brendan loves this game, but now Aidan and Erin do too. Aidan has the game of "States and Capitals" in his hand and he is testing my rather bad memory to see which ones I can figure out before the whole picture is revealed.

We did a lot of eating today. Here is Cal jamming his little mouth full so that he can get down and play. I reminded him that he needs to swallow that mouthful before I am setting him loose in my house. He was surprisingly compliant about this--probably because Dylan requires the same thing at their house.

I had the train tracks set up and used blue painters tape to make a roadway for the cars.

Cal loves trains and cars ...

Meanwhile, Aidan decided he would dress Herbie (our "talking" stuffie who mimics voices) up as a shark (dear Sweetie-Pie shark) and then talk and watch what happens. Herbie shakes all over when he is repeating our voices, so Shark-Herbie kept falling over ... which of course caused US to fall over laughing!

Cal decided we needed to make Herbie into Rockie-Herbie, so we did that too.

Brendan was busy at my desk listening to and following a tutorial on how to fold an origami panda bear (for his friend, Joanna, who LOVES pandas). Brendan has always been good at Origami and I have often purchased little instructional books and special papers for him so that he can practice.

Later in our afternoon, we watched some hilarious baby animal videos--which was fun. The kiddos were tired near the end of the afternoon and we had to get Brendan up to his school to meet Dylan by 4:30 for a special event at the school. We did that--however, that's always the hardest time for me--having both Aidan and Cal in the backseat at the same time. Guaranteed to nearly drive me to insanity between their whiny voices and ridiculous fighting--realizing that the space in the backseat is very squashed--and so I do understand how annoying it must be to have no personal space--HOWEVER, yikes!!! I am always thankful to get to our destination without having an emotional and verbal meltdown in front of the kids--which does NO GOOD whatsoever, and really only seems to aggravate an already tense situation. I did pray, out loud, and asked the Lord to help everyone be kind. As always, Jesus answered, and kept us safe. Thank you, Lord. 

We played a little while at their house, but then Dylan, Kelly and Brendan returned home to pick up the other kids for a picnic with Erin's Chinese immersion school. I was truly too exhausted to join them--but they were kind enough to invite me and understand that I was pooped! Until next week ...