Mother's Day, and Pokemon

On Friday after school, Nico's teacher texted me this picture and said Happy Mother's Day, she also said "I love this boy!" I sure do, to!

Saturday was a laid back day. We labeled some more product to ship to Amazon, and the main house had "Odd Saturday" again, where they invite friends over for games and food. Nico and Guy have been participating in that when it happens. Then they cut out early so we can make pizza. My movie choice was "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day". It reminded me a lot of the Wimpy Kid movies, funny. It has Steve Carell in it.

Sunday Nico let me open the gift he had brought home from school on Friday. He joked that I had to wait until after church, but I convinced him to let me open it before church. It was a clay plate in the shape of his hand. I love it! I put it on the kitchen windowsill.

At church they had a photo booth for mothers and children for Mother's Day. Here's ours.

Swimming lessons on Monday. His class is much bigger this time.

On Tuesday we tried something new. We went to the Pokemon League at the library after school. They had a bunch of tables set up with mats to play Pokemon on and a bunch of Pokemon decks available to play with if you don't have your own. In the picture, Nico is playing with one of the facilitators. The rest of the kids you can see off to the right on the floor, they're going through their binders of Pokemon cards and trading them with each other. Nico didn't bring his binder, so he didn't participate. He will next time! If Nico signs up to be a "Pokemon Trainer" online, then he'll get free prizes for coming to the club at the library. We will do that! Nico and I, and Nico and Guy have been playing Pokemon at home this past week. He also brings his Pokemon bin (which holds all his decks for playing) over to Merek's house sometimes when he visits.

That evening, Nico didn't have Cub Scouts, so Guy and Nico were able to come with me to Liz's graduation (Bruce & Rory's mom). She graduated from U of I with her Bachelors. It was exciting to see!! We sat next to Papa and Grandma Salisbury, and Bruce and Rory.

Walking back from the graduation to the parking garage. Guy found some coffee at the reception so he grabbed some. Nico went for some chamomile tea.

On Wednesday I sent Nico to swimming lessons with... a bath mat. It did not do a very good job of drying him off. It was way too small. Oops. At least he's smiling. Guy sent me this picture and "Towel too small".

Today Nico had a field trip. His whole class rode the city bus downtown. Nico has been researching the US Bank building, and his classmates are all researching downtown buildings too, so they took a walking tour of downtown Boise all day today. They stopped at the Grove plaza to eat lunch. It was a mix of rain and sun, so I sent a hat and an umbrella with him. They were supposed to catch the bus back to school, but they MISSED it! The class walked all the way back to Adams from downtown. Wowza! Lots of exercise today.

I asked him to tell me a story about today:

"We went to the Zion bank and we went to the US Bank." Cool what did you guys do there? "We just looked at it and then we, the only place we went inside was Zions bank because it's really famous because it's the tallest building in Idaho."

I called the landlord of the house across the street, and she said she still hasn't heard anything about their specific move out date. She told me their lease is up at the end of June, and then she will spend the next month painting. I told her we're willing to wait for it, so she asked me a little more about us. I told her where we're living now, and that Nico is going to Adams and we'd like to stay in the district. She mentioned the rent would probably be going up (out of our price range), but she said nothing has been decided yet and to call her in the middle of June. Currently lawn care is included in rent, so I asked if she'd be willing to drop the rent if we took care of the yard and she said the owners have had bad experiences with letting tenants do that in the past. I'm hoping they will make an exception for us, but I'll wait until June to touch base with her again and talk about all that.

Still hoping beyond hope!

Grandparents Russell, Tea, Bird Bingo

On Friday Nico's class had a Mother's Day Tea that I attended. They had the classroom all set up and I sat across from Nico at his desk. He pulled out his journal and we read through the entire thing while we waited for the other mothers to arrive.  I can't wait to share some of his journal entries with you all when the journal comes home at the end of the year.

When everyone was there, Mrs. Smith went around the room and each child got to introduce their guest and tell the others why they're special. When it got to Nico, he said "My Mom is special because I love her so much!" And while he was saying "I love her so much" he pretended to faint and laid down on the floor.

After everyone went around, it was time to serve the food. Nico asked me what I wanted and then he went and told Mrs. Smith and she handed Nico my order. I ordered one fruit kabob. After all the moms got their orders, the kids got theirs. Nico ordered a fruit kabob as well and also went and got each of us a glass of apple juice.

After eating, we got to open our gifts. Nico made me a cut out of his hand with clay, signing "I love you" with a rose between his fingers.

It came in a sweet bag.

He said to me this week: "Mommy, when you die... and then when I die, and in heaven, I will come find you because I love you sooooo much!"

Later on Friday we got to see the Grandparents Russell because they came into town!! They came over and hung out until Nico's bedtime. It was so sweet to see Nico snuggling with them! They brought Nico a Bird Bingo game and we played it that night, too!

Saturday morning we drove over to GG's house to visit her. It was the first time Nico and Guy had seen her new place living with her sister Pat. They have a pasture that lines their backyard and they often see horses back there close to the fence. We didn't see any this time, I am sure we'll catch them on one of our visits. The Grandparents met us at GG's house and we played another round of Bird Bingo with everyone, then headed home for lunch. After lunch we headed off to the Aquarium! 

We spent about 45 minutes there and then drove over to where the Grandparents were staying so we could take a dip in their hotel pool. Here's Nico and his sweet new spiderman towel!

Then we ventured back home with everyone and made pizza for all of us. 

It was a VERY fun and full day and I'm so glad we were able to spend that time with them! We will see them again in June when we *FLY* out there!

On Sunday at church I applied henna to someone on stage during the sermon. The tattoo illustrates the sermon, which was about clothing yourself with inner beauty instead of with fancy clothes. 

After church we went over to the Grandparents Salisbury house armed with our Bird Bingo game, and played a blackout round with everyone. Uncle Jonny, Aunt Alanna, and Lexie were also there! Oh fun was had!

On Tuesday, Brianna came over for dinner for the last time before she moves away. She will be visiting every few months so we will get to see her, but not as often as we have been.

Nico worked on his "Day of Learning" project today. It's an optional research and presentation project that anyone at the school can participate in. Nico put together a tri-fold poster presentation about the Purple Martin (bird). He is proud of it, and will take it to school to set up next Tuesday. We are checking out a bird book from the library this Saturday that may inspire him to add more to his poster, but he says he's happy with it the way it is. Fine with me!

Ok that's it for this week! See you guys next time!

Legos, Mother's Day

I felt like we needed to go out and do something last Friday so I asked Nico what he wanted to do and he said Fred Meyer. To get legos. He had saved up about 15 dollars. When we got to Fred Meyer he was very quick about his decision. I wasn't used to this. When picking out a toy car it takes him forever plus changing his mind. Legos I guess are different. He bought an Ice Crawler. We came home and put it together. He is amazing! He opened up the lego booklet and saw all the related pieces for the Ice Crawler set and asked me to buy him all of those sets too. I think for his birthday we will get him a huge lego. Hmm, but then I talked to Guy about that idea and he reminded me that with big lego sets, he loses interest before getting to the end. So I think we'll do lots of small ones for his birthday. Including a lego block separator, since taking pieces apart is hard work if you don't have fingernails.

Saturday we went to the market for 3 pounds of ground beef. Nico decided to spend his 2 coins from the market's Sprouts Club to buy some asparagus. You have to buy fresh fruit or veggies with it, and no fresh fruit was available. (apparently fruit is for boys and vegetables are for girls?) When I made him the asparagus later he was not happy. ha ha. He didn't even want to try it. 

About a month back he started saying "EWWW YUCKY!!!" to every dinner I put in front of him, so we told him about a nicer thing to say: "This is not my favorite." Sorry if I have already posted about that, I forget what I have already written sometimes :)

We got this cute poem and handprints from his preschool. Oh man, the poem made me imagine what it will be like someday when Nico no longer crawls into bed with me at night and no longer enjoys snuggling and no longer asks me to play cars with him or rough house. I was definitely feeling grateful this past week that for right now I do have a little buddy that is snuggly and wants to spend all of his time with me.

This next one was a nice Mother's Day Gift, except I don't think Nico understood about it. He showed it to me and I asked him what it was and he said it was a flower. I asked him who it was for and he told me it was for himself. Oh well! I did get quite a treasure of things from Guy - a whole stack of coupons he wrote himself!!! It was fabulous. I am already making a mental list of things for him to do when I cash in his "One weekend of complaint free and instant 'honey-doing'"

And here's the envelope that the first one with the double handprints came in. Nico thanked us for his chocolate yogurts from Trader Joe's.

I saw my Mommy on Mother's Day and Guy called his Mommy on Mother's Day, it was a pretty complete day. No Bible Study that night but we did go out as a family to the Co-op and WinCo. Running errands is fun together, we don't do that very often.

Guy started a long stretch of work days on Wednesday. He is working for about 15 days, though some nights he will be going in at 9 PM instead of 5 PM, which gives us more time with him.

Nico brought home the flower on the left today from school. The flowers on the right are ones that Nico has found growing wild on his adventures outside with Evelyn. He comes running to the front door yelling "JOANNA! JOANNA!" I open the door and he says "I have a flower for you!" The stem on the yellow one was about 2 feet long so I trimmed that one before putting in this jar.

Here is Nico's recipe for lemonade. You can see he numbered the steps 1-3. 

1 - 8 lemons

2 - 1 cup of sugar

3 - 4 cups of water

He was watching Leap Frog this morning on his iPad, and a character in there called Burfder really likes lemons and wanted to make lemonade. Nico was inspired and asked me to pour him some lemon juice in his cup so he could drink it. I explained that it was going to be sour and he said "I want sour lemon juice!" So I poured him about 2 tablespoons and he drank it all. 

He's been drinking from his "baby cup" lately, which is actually a shot glass. He likes having a tall glass full of water next to his baby cup so that when the baby cup runs out, he can refill it.

He is in bed right now singing songs. He stopped for a minute and whined and said "Mommmmmmy, I need some tea."

Me: You need some tea?

Nico: Yes

Me: Why do you need tea?

Nico: Because I want to go to the cabin and have tea

Me: When we go to the cabin on Saturday we can have some tea

Nico: Ok

I think that's it for now. Nico has had no more tummy aches, thank you for the prayers!