May 29 with the Kiddos

Thursday:  I picked little Cal up from his house at 9am this morning. We spent a few hours over at my house, playing together with a bunch of different toys. We had such a nice time.

I have always been fascinated with magnets ... I am not sure when this started with me; but I have passed it on to my grandchildren. Magnets are so much fun to play with. Here are a bunch of pictures of Cal exploring what magnets will do:

Cal is a pretty intense little guy, and he is quite easy to entertain. He has a long attention span and doesn't become easily bored. I fixed our lunch while he was playing with my new Stone magnets.

Look at his adorable little face--gah! This kid kills me.

Since Cal is no longer in a booster seat for eating meals, I have "resurrected" some old placemats to try to steer the food onto one surface instead of .... everywhere. The biggest drawback from NOT having Cal in a booster seat with a tray is that he jumps in and out of his chair pretty consistently and decides he is finished eating when he has only taken two bites. SO ... I have been reading interesting stories to him while he eats--this helps keep him in his chair a bit longer at one stretch. We read two good books today: one about a little badger's "almost birthday", and the other one was about Amanda Pig going to kindergarten and her adventures on the first day. Cal was very absorbed in both stories, smiling and really anticipating the next page, etc. I love it when kids respond to books this way.

We did a considerable amount of building with our magna blocks. Here are two separate cars we built. A little turtle toy was driving MY car. I forget which animal was driving Cal's; but naturally, the cars had to have a race. I did warn Cal that any race these cars would undertake would inevitably end up with them in pieces, i.e. no longer looking like the cars we had built. However, this information only seemed to DELIGHT little Cal ...

Cal also remembered that I said he could play foosball once he turned FIVE. I keep a small foosball game under the spare bedroom bed (it's a good place to store it). The reason Cal wasn't allowed to play it until he turned FIVE was because at age FOUR, he just wanted to throw the balls around--which are NOT soft harmless balls--they are weighed and Cal's got a pretty good arm on him! I had tried it a few times with him when he was four but finally announced that we would have to wait until he was FIVE. He never fought against that mandate!

Anyway--all that to say that we celebrated that Cal was indeed FIVE now and we could officially play foosball. We played NINE games! Cal was absolutely thrilled. We laughed and laughed together, which was the very best part!