Holiday Concert

Friday morning Guy and I went to Nico's Holiday Concert performance at the school. 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. I honestly wasn't planning to record any of it, and make it just an "enjoy" moment, but as Nico was walking out onto the risers with his class, he found us, waved really big, and then made a rectangle with his hands and pointed at me, then did the sign for "video", rotating his index fingers around each other. He wanted me to video it. So, I did! We had the perfect shot of him from where we were sitting and I was able to video him and watch him at the same time (not through the video). I turned off the video while they were standing up there waiting for the concert to start, and Nico looked at me again and made the same symbols with his hands, so I pulled it out again. Guy and I couldn't stop laughing.

 This hand signal means "Come closer to take the picture, MOM"

Watch the video at the end of the blog to catch a peek at Nico singing with his class. At one point he looks at me and makes a rectangle with his hands again to make sure I had my phone out and was recording. I caught that part on video so go watch it and have a chuckle. The video just includes about 10-second snippets from each of the songs they did. Also in the video are snippets of Nico dancing: the moonwalk, and at the church Christmas Party.

Saturday was the Church Christmas Party for the kiddos. Every year our church buys gifts for kids on behalf of their parent or parents in prison. We invite them to a party at the church and hand out gifts. It's called the Angel Tree Ministry. All the kids at our church are invited, too, so Nico went and had a blast.

They dressed him up as Olaf from Frozen.

Saturday night was a chess tournament at Smokey Mountain Pizza. Guy and I watched Perry Mason and ate our pizza.

Sunday Nico wasn't feeling well at church so I took him home early. He had a fever of 100.4, looks like he caught whatever it was that I had, except he threw up once on Sunday evening. He stayed home from school on Monday and Tuesday, and I sent him back on Wednesday. He still has a slight sore throat and a cough, but his tummy seems to be better.

Today we went to his doctor and had the gluten test done. I am happy and surprised to say that he is not as sensitive to gluten as he was the last time we were there! She said it had improved. Woah baby! And thank you God! But she did point out a few things to watch out for, because he may have a gluten limit. Bumps on the back of his arms was one of them (which he has some already), and she encouraged us to not let him eat it every day. Sometimes a reaction can be delayed and she was concerned about it building up in his system with continued exposure. We will take it easy. I hope.

Enjoy the video!

Gluten Week! And Thanksgiving!

On Friday Nico woke up with a sore throat. He wanted to stay home from school but I sent him to school anyway. An hour later, the nurse called me and told me Nico had been to see her twice, she said, "You know how determined he is when he wants to go home, do you just want to come pick him up? Or do you want to talk to him?" I said I would come pick him up. I couldn't help laughing and giggling when I went to meet him at the school. It cracked me up. He was fine. We ran to Whole Foods to return an Amazon package and pick up some strawberries, and then visited Allicia and Avery and Ivy that afternoon to play video games.

He had the sniffles over the weekend but nothing much came of it.

Saturday started Gluten Week. We told him he could choose one meal and one dessert a day with gluten. We didn't want to overwhelm his system with 3 meals a day. Saturday he chose Pizza Hut. It was also Odd Saturday at Jeff & Allicia's that Guy and Nico attended. They came home in time for Swiss Family Robinson (my choice) and Pizza Hut! Nico loved it. And he didn't appear to have any negative reaction to the gluten. 

Sunday he chose to eat a cheese quesadilla from Taco Bell where I dropped him off after church so he could eat with cousins and the Grandparents Salisbury. Afterward, they went roller skating.

Monday I took him to Blue Sky Bagels for breakfast. The place smelled sooo good. And he was soooo excited. After his first bite he said, "Why does this taste so good?" He chose a cinnamon and sugar bagel with berry cream cheese. He said next time he would get the same kind of bagel but different cream cheese. He couldn't finish it so we wrapped up the rest for later. He ate the leftovers as his chosen "dessert" for Monday.

Monday afternoon and evening was Grandma Camp. Guy picked up dinner for me and him from Thai Basil and we watched a few episodes of Dr Who while we ate.

Tuesday's chosen meal was Jimmy John's. He got a sandwich with cheese and guacamole on it (that's it). I also got him a Jimmy John's cookie and a bag of their salt & vinegar chips (which also have gluten so he hasn't been able to eat them.)

We were going to meet Guy there, but Guy wasn't able to get out of his meeting in time, so we took Guy his sandwich after we were done.

Wednesday we had Evelyn, Ivy, and Avery over for a few hours in the morning. Then in the afternoon, Nico went over to their house for a few hours. A good way to spend a day off. They took turns playing Mario Kart on our Wii.

Nico's chosen meal for Wednesday was Papa John's pizza. He loved it. He couldn't tell a difference between Pizza Hut and Papa John's, he says he loves them both. He had some snickerdoodles for his dessert.

And then today.. Thanksgiving! Nico could eat anything he wanted. He loved the rolls. He ate chocolate cream pie for dessert.

After the food, we had the lego challenge. Grandma Salisbury planned this one well! It was a family challenge so we all worked together to put together our car. Bruce, Rory, and David won that challenge. The next challenge was to see whose car could go the farthest and the fastest. Each car could be pulled back and released. Lexie won both of those challenges; way to go!

Ornament exchange.

Unwrapping the box! This box Nico is working on is covered in duct tape. An entire roll. It took the kiddos quite a while to unravel it. Each kid had about 15 seconds to get what they could from it. The initial box was a large box, and this smaller one was just one box inside of bigger and bigger boxes.

After the box, it was time for dessert. Pie pie pie pie!

It was a wonderful Thanksgiving!

I have a video with Thanksgiving snippets and some snippets of gluten week which I will post next week.

Friends, Wreaths, Gluten

I just read the title from my last post, "Assembling Furniture, Friends", sounds like we also assembled friends.

We received a big order of ribbon on Friday to process and ship to Amazon, which we did on Saturday (check out video at end of blog). On Saturday, Nico also dressed up in his Cub Scouts uniform and went door to door with Guy to sell wreaths. The Cub Scouts are doing a wreath fundraiser. He made 2 sales on his adventure. I think they plan to go again soon.

For pizza night on Saturday, it was Nico's movie choice, and he chose to watch a show called Oggy and the Cockroaches. It's a silly cartoon.

I got only ONE picture of Nico this week. Him and Grace are playing a game in this picture. Her and William came over on Sunday afternoon.

When Nico didn't want to play anymore he said, "Ok I'm done playing, you guys can go home now." Grace asked him why and he said, "I just want some alone time."

I have a sneaking suspicion that he was done playing because he was done taking turns on the Switch and wanted to play it all by himself. We all squeezed onto the couch after that (I say squeezed, because even though we have a big couch now, in this instance we all squished together just like old times in the Clubhouse), and we each did our own thing on our own devices.

Nico is enjoying Drama Club, he came home with this the other day:

Then I got an email from Nico's drama teacher telling us who got which roles in the play. They are doing an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. Nico had requested to be the Wizard, and he got the part! He also plays Uncle Henry and one of the Munchkins. Evelyn's role is the witch. Can't wait to see them in the same play together.

Also, some interesting tidbits about Nico:

And in this one he mentions Clams as the best food. He had them for the first time in Portland this past summer. He has also been asking me to let him try sushi.

OH, speaking of food. A few weeks ago Nico told us that he asked God if he could have gluten, and God said Yes. So we're going through an investigative time that will be educational either way. We believe that God can speak even to kids (there's no junior Holy Spirit amiright), but we also know that our own desires can sound like God sometimes. So, we're going to try gluten. We've never been through a definitive gluten-reaction test with Nico before. In fact, we are not entirely sure WHAT his reaction is exactly. We just know that the tests show that he is very sensitive. The plan is to allow him to eat gluten for a week, Thanksgiving week, when he will be home. One gluten meal a day. Then we'll stop the gluten, and wait until his next doctor appointment in December to officially test him.

The night we told him this, he got so excited he had trouble sleeping. We spent a while listing restaurants and foods that he could try and he went bonkers after each one, especially when I told him we could go to Blue Sky Bagels. A few other ones we came up with - Pizza Hut, waffle cones from Baskin Robbins, Chick-Fil-A chicken nuggets, hot lunch at school (we may do this the following Monday when he goes back to school), pretzels from the mall, Olive Garden, biscuits and gravy, Belgian waffles, pancakes, and of course Thanksgiving things!

If anyone has other suggestions on what he should try, let us know! He woke up the next morning and asked, "What other restaurants can we go to that have gluten?" After school he asked the same thing. He is excited.

Okie dokie, I think that's it for this week! Next week we'll have a fun update about this upcoming weekend, tomorrow we venture to Ketchum, ID for the Trailing of the Sheep Festival to celebrate Guy's birthday!

So I'll leave you with a short video for now.