Friday was the 4th of July! We went to the zoo. We got to the park a little early so we wandered a bit and went over to the huge Abraham Lincoln statue. There was an American flag sitting on the bench next to him, so we used it as a prop.
Then to the zoo. I brought some of Nico's summer birthday money with us and he chose to rent a jeep cart and then buy a truck at the gift shop on the way out. He let me push him in the cart for a while but he mostly preferred to push it himself. He still is very wary about going to any part of the zoo, though we did find out that the whole left side of the zoo is devoid of dinosaurs. I'm sure they found that there were a lot of kids afraid of them, so they opened up half the zoo as dinosaur-free. You can still see the spots where they used to be, and Nico remembers from last year where they all were. It has taken a while to warm him up to going even to those parts that don't have dinosaurs anymore.
Guy was able to go to work a few hours later that night so we could set off fireworks. We just bought sparklers, snakes, pop-its, and ground flowers. Nico had a lot of fun until we did the ground flowers, then he asked us to not do anymore. Those are louder than he prefers. We did one more ground flower and then stopped.
Playing with pop-its.
Watching the snakes grow.
On Saturday we packed a lot into the morning. I had to go to the Saturday market, so we did. We couldn't find parking right away so we decided to go through the carwash that was right there. We had tried to do the carwash on July 4th, but it was closed. And this seemed like a good opportunity. We imitated Curious George going through a carwash as each of the things happened. Blub blub blub. Fwap fwap. Swish swish swish. It was loud so we plugged our ears some of the time.
After the carwash, we found parking and made it to the market. Unfortunately both vendors we went there for were not there. We left, and were headed to a sensory-friendly movie in the theater, but I noticed we had a few minutes, so we jetted into a parking garage and raced down to the OTHER Saturday market, and got a balloon in the shape of an elephant! We raced back to the car and headed to the movie.
The movie that was playing was Rio 2. It is an animated movie about blue parrots. Nico was talking about "blue parrots" all morning, knowing that we were going to this movie. I thought he might be a bit more interested in this than the muppet one we saw last month, but he lost interest again after 30 minutes and asked to go home.
He won his monster truck by going #2 on the potty and filling out all the spots on his potty chart with stickers. The chart seems to have helped him remember how to go, and he hasn't had an accident in a while.
On Tuesday night we pulled out a puzzle and Guy and I worked on it for a few hours. The next morning, Nico found it and wanted to work on it a little bit, so we did. We moved it to a card table and it's now in our living room, almost put together. While we still had it on the kitchen table, we ate our meals on a blanket in the living room as a picnic. That was fun, but I soon realized how much I appreciate having a table.
Wednesday we went to a park that has a splash pad. After watching the water for a while, Nico started playing in it. The park has no shade, so it was perfect that there was cloud cover so the sun wasn't shining right on us. Otherwise I know I wouldn't have lasted more than 5 minutes! Nico got soaked. Then he played on the playground for a while, lots of different playground toys that he enjoyed.
We've been playing word bingo, which is one of the games Miss Susie sent home with him for the summer. Nico likes that. He also loves tracing the alphabet on papers his teacher sent home with him. He uses dry erase markers and the papers are in sheet protectors! I put all of his summer work in a binder that I pull out twice a week. I figured since he used to get speech therapy every Tuesday and Thursday, we could follow that same schedule during the summer. I sure thrive on schedule! I think Nico does too.
That's it for today.
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