House sitting, and Matilda!

I was a day late with this July 4th treat, but it was still yummy! The cream cheese frosting turned out brown because I used coconut sugar to sweeten it. It turns out Nico is NOT a fan of cream cheese frosting. Oh well! All the more for me and Guy ;)

After pancakes and chores on Saturday morning, we headed over to the Idaho Food Bank where we volunteered for a few hours bagging up cherries. We had signed up for this a few months ago (they are booked that far in advance!) so the day finally arrived! Afterward, Nico and Guy went to the birthday party of two brothers and friends of Nico from church. They have a 3rd brother as well. Nico and them have gotten close lately, they are often "stranded" in the game room at the church together while both of their parents (me and Guy, and the brothers' parents) are practicing in the band on Thursday nights and early Sunday mornings. They play Minecraft together and watch Minecraft videos back in the game room.

It was a pool party. They stayed for several hours!

I texted Guy to ask if he was having fun and this was his response. This means YES he was having fun.

On Sunday we went for a walk after church. Guy and I walked the dirt loop next to the park while Nico played on the playground.

On Tuesday for Grandma Camp, they went to the zoo!

This week I have been dog-sitting and house-sitting Jonny & Alanna's house while they are away in Kentucky. On Wednesday, I brought Nico over to the house and Guy joined us after work. 

Playing Pokemon.

We ate camping food for dinner. Hot dogs and Smores.

Nico and Guy are going camping this weekend with the Cub Scouts and Guy wanted to try the tent out (we haven't opened it up for 10 years!), so we brought the tent over and they set it up in the back yard.

They slept in the tent last night and I stayed inside (heehee). It went well. They konked out early (8PM!) Nico went right to sleep and had trouble waking up at 7AM. He must have been tired. We learned that it would be good to have sleeping mats. They are going to borrow some from Jeff & Allicia for this camping trip. They leave tomorrow after work!

Today at Grandma Camp they went to the Kleiner Park splash pad.

And then tonight Nico got to cash in an early birthday present from the Grandparents Russell! They got us tickets to see Matilda the Musical in Nampa, ID, put on by The Music Theater of Idaho. We weren't allowed to take photos or video during the performance, but here's some before!

After it was over Nico said his favorite part was when Miss Trunchbull did somersaults through the air. They had her hanging from invisible strings. 

It was very nicely done! Nico stayed engaged the whole time.

Here are some pictures from this week with the other kiddos. We played Zelda and went to the park with them this week. And of course talked about Pokemon! Here Nico is showing Ivy a Pokemon in his Guidebook.

Nico teaching Avery how to play a new game on the iPad.

That's it for this week!

MST3K, Splash Pad, video

Grandma Camp was a huge success. Here are some more pictures

Reading for 30 minutes after dinner

Pillow fight

 Breakfast

Hangin' with the boys

The next Grandma camp is less than a week away, the theme is Treasure Hunting. I was pleased to learn that Grandma had served chicken soup that Nico ATE! He liked it, too. I will start making it myself. He seems to be over his fear of ALL noodles, and can eat some of them now.

On Sunday after church, Tiffanie asked if Nico would like to go with them to the splash pad in Meridian. Yes! We had no sunscreen so I whipped up a batch real quick and slathered him in it.

On Tuesday was the MST3K Reunion Show. Guy and I had purchased tickets more than a month ago, so we had a DATE NIGHT! We went to the theater downtown to see it. There was supposed to be a pre-show for the 30 minutes before, with trivia and music, but the theater had started the live show an hour early (it was supposed to be an hour delayed for the Mountain & Pacific time zones) so we missed it. After the show was over the theater called all of us over to give us free movie tickets to apologize. Those that had showed up on time missed a big portion of the show :( Thankfully, we were early enough that we didn't miss any of the content. 

Then we went to Trader Joe's and bought Guy some ice cream, and came home at about 8:30 and Nico was still not asleep, he was awake reading books in his bed. I thought this might happen, since he had taken a nap earlier that afternoon! 

We implemented a summer schedule for Nico on Monday, he has "family contributions" instead of chores, and we have switched the use of the iPad around so that he gets 30 minutes of screen time every day. There is emphasis on the WHEN-->THEN of the schedule. WHEN he finishes his family contributions for the day, THEN he gets to have 30 minutes of iPad and can also then play with his friends outside. The schedule also has snack and meal times on it. We are also implementing an allowance, $3 each week with opportunities to earn more doing other jobs.

I've been promising a video, and you guys get one this week. It's not too spectacular but I had to start somewhere. I'll get the rest of the videos made soon.

Fireworks, Puzzle, and Splash Pad

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. 

 I wanted to take a picture of him with the truck he got at the zoo, and he told me to take a picture of him while he was posing like this. heehee.

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.