Less than one month to go....

Me & My Boys on my Birthday

Joshua is so darn excited...he's about ready to start a countdown to the first day of kindergarten. I'm thinking that today we'll make one of those paper chains like I remember doing as a kid in school as a countdown to Christmas. Last week his paperwork came in the mail...telling us if he has AM kindergarten or PM kindergarten and who his teacher is going to be. Well, he didn't care about any of that,he's just thrilled to get to go. Brian & I on the other hand were rather disappointed. We'd been "assured" by the principal (who was a former co-worker of mine) that it would be no problem and he'd be sure to get him in AM, especially since they want more parental involvement, especially from dads and Brian could only help out in the morning. Yeah, well, that didn't really mean a thing...and the principal has resigned and taken a job in another city (which we knew was going to happen several months ago, but had been told that he'd still be doing the class assignments). So Joshua is going to be in PM kindergarten (from 11:45 to 3:05) every day, except for Wednesdays when both the AM and the PM classes go in the AM (because it's a minimum day for everyone else) and one Friday a month he'll go in the AM so that the reading teachers can collaborate with the other teachers. However, that Friday isn't a consistent 1st Friday of the month or anything like that...some months it's the 1st Friday and others the 2nd Friday. My poor kid is going to need a Palm Pilot just to keep track of what days are AM and what days are PM! He's excited because he gets to still go to Storytime at the Library on Tuesdays. He's not excited because his friend, Cara, is in the AM class. I've already marked my calendar with AM for the days that we'll have to have him at school at 8:15 instead of 11:45. I was rather irritated when I read what his assignment was (we are okay with his teacher, at least. It wasn't our first choice teacher and not the one we got to observe...but his teacher wasn't teaching kinder last year, so we wouldn't have observed her anyway. I worked with her some when I taught, so we know she's nice!) and Brian was more than a little irritated. I contemplated calling the school and seeing if we could get it changed, but then, knowing how much fun that is to try and do (from being on the other side of it), and evaluating if it was really something that was going to hurt him or not (going in the PM), I decided that we would just learn from this. 1) not believe everything your told, even if it is a friend who tells you it and 2) find the good aspects of what doesn't seem like the most favorable of situtations. Like the old saying goes, "Choose your battles." This really wasn't something that we needed to get all worked up about...I'm sure that there will be plenty of other things to get me (& Brian) riled up about with the school system as the years go by. And it's not like he's going to have a teacher that we've heard horrible things about or anything. I do wonder why on earth they don't have both Dual Immersion kinder classes in the morning, it's not like they share a classroom or anything. I don't remember if I've mentioned before or not that Joshua is going to be in Dual Immersion. He'll be learning Spanish and English skills. Most of kindergarten will be in Spanish. He's way excited about this and so are we. I'm just grateful that I speak Spanish and Brian does a little bit...that will be helpful to him since some parents who enroll kids in this program don't speak Spanish. We really felt that he needed an additional challenge so that he doesn't get bored in school. He's been reading little basic short vowel books to me for awhile now, can count & recognize his numbers to 100 and a little beyond, knows his alphabet and letter sounds and so much more...I don't want him to get bored.

What else has gone on since my last entry...I gave a talk in church last Sunday - on parenthood & the gospel. What a "simple" topic! I went to my mission friend, Melanie's, website (sugardoodle.net...it's an awesome site!) found a couple of talks on the subject and several quotes. Well, then I went to lds.org to look up the talks & articles the quotes came from and by the time I got done I think I had a 3 inch (at least) stack of paper that I'd printed out. By about midnight last Saturday I felt good about what I had prepared...I had twenty minutes of time, spoke for about 30 and didn't even cover half of my talk! As I prepared for my talk I asked myself several questions that I wanted to answer for myself as I studied and prepared - the answers to most my questions were the basics - pray as a family, study the scriptures as a family and have family home evening. It's amazing the difference that a family prayer in the morning as we start our day makes in my day. I learned a lot as I prepared this talk...hopefully stuff that will make me a better mom, which I so need to be.

Which makes me think of an incident from last night. Brian and Joshua ate dinner a little later than Nathaniel and I because they were mowing the lawn. Joshua came in and was thirsty and downed a glass of water while I fixed his plate. Then he didn't want to eat...he said his waist hurt (that should've been my clue since when he's trying to get out of something he usually says his tummy hurts). Told him he'd just drank too much water and probably needed to go to the bathroom. So he did that, still his waist hurt, he ate a few bites and kept whining...which he does a lot lately. I was getting more and more irritated with him, but was nursing Nahtaniel so I couldn't go get him more water (which was one of the things that he was whining about)...finally it got to the point where Brian blew up at him because he wouldn't stop whining about not liking this for dinner and not wanting to eat all of his food and he was tired and all (which is another usual excuse for not doing something). We got him to go to the bathroom again and do #2 - which he did. He finally finished his dinner, but because of the never-ending whining and wasting time, he didn't get any dessert or bedtime story. He went to bed (with his coldpack - he almost always needs that) and was asleep in about fifteen minutes. Nathaniel was asleep and in bed by 930 (and actually slept for a few hours and didn't wake me up at 1130). About fifteen minutes later, I heard Joshua crying "Mommy, help." from the back of the house. I ran back there and saw that he wasn't in the main bathroom or his bed and realized I was hearing his voice from the bathroom in our bedroom. And I could smell something. Poor baby! Something had really been making his waist area hurt I guess! He was sitting on the toilet crying. He'd barely made it to the bathroom. We got him to quit crying, got his shorts off and cleaned him up some and then Brian took him in to shower while I cleaned up everything. After another time on the potty, a shower, clean jammies, hugs from Mommy and Daddy and a new cold pack, he was back asleep by about 1030. Brian and I both felt pretty awful with how we'd reacted to him earlier. He whines so much lately that we couldn't tell the difference between whining because he didn't feel well to whining because he's five. Luckily he feels better today (& is happy because everything washed out of his jammies and there were no stains).

We have a new cousin...my cousin Brandy had a little girl yesterday evening. She's in Nashville, so it'll be some time before we see little Addison Michelle in person, but hopefully we'll get pictures soon. She weighed in the same as Nathaniel (not a small baby) and was half an inch longer than he was, which is half an inch shorter than Joshua was. So now my grandma has a great-granddaughter to go along with her 3 great-grandsons.

Last Saturday I went to the baby shower for Brian's niece, Elisha. She's expecting a boy at the end of August or first part of September - if little Zachary waits that long! She's been on bed rest since the end of June. I crocheted a baby blanket for him...it's the same pattern I used for one for Nathaniel last year...it's easy and fun. I've got to get going and finish Addison's.

Brian's brother, Eric, and his family are out for a couple of days from Utah. Sounds like we'll be seeing them tomorrow at their brother, Terry's. (Which is where we've gone the past two Sundays for dinner and swimming) Joshua will be excited to see his cousins, Maddie and Ashlyn. He hasn't seen them since last year at Memorial Day...they haven't seen Nathaniel yet.

My sister, Sarah, came over yesterday...we're working on a couple of projects for upcoming birthdays in the family. Haven't seen her for awhile, so it was fun. Last time she saw Nathaniel he wasn't walking...now he's practically running. He likes to talk to the birds outside the window (we have three hummingbird feeders and a regular birdfeeder). He says, "Birrrr, Birrr" and gets pretty excited when he sees them and tries to squawk back at the scrub jays. He was so cute yesterday, flipping through a scrapbook. It was one from several years ago, so there were no pictures of him...he kept pointing to pictures of Joshua and saying "Da.da." it sounded similar to what he says for Daddy, but the "a" sound was slightly different, so I think it's his way of saying Joshua.

Joshua's getting dressed right now - he is so OCD when it comes to certain things. He always wants to wear the shirt that is next in line, or the shorts or pants. Just now he was going to put on jeans because "They're next in line, Mom." Sometimes he freaks out if we bring him a shirt and he knows it wasn't on top of the stack in his drawer. So somedays we tell him he has to pick a shirt from the bottom of the stack or from the middle or something. Just now I told him he had to mix things up a bit, so he found one of his favorite pairs of shorts instead. He always tells us to make sure we get the washcloth from the top of the stack and if we don't he gets irritated. He sure can be funny sometimes.

Well, I'm going to end this really long entry with something fun that happened last week. We were getting ready to go visiting teaching and we were walking around the block to the house we were going to. Joshua had his scooter and Nathaniel was in his stroller. I was scooping some water out of the wading pool to water the plants with and found a dragonfly that was pretty waterlogged. I figured it had drowned, Joshua said it was moving a little bit. Well, he was right, I flipped it out on to the sidewalk and saw its little legs move. I told Joshua to leave it alone because it needed to dry out it's wings a little bit.
I went to flip it over onto its legs from its back and its little feet clung to my finger and it walked up my finger and on the back of my hand. Joshua thought it was pretty cool. So we got the dragonfly to walk on his hand and arm. He wanted to keep it on him as we walked, but I told him that wouldn't work...he tried anyway and it kind of flew off and landed on the ground. We got it situated in a safe place on the grass and said good-bye to it and by the time we got home an hour or so later it was gone...its wings had dried and it had flown away.