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Today, pre-Halloween festivities, we moved Ben's room into what was formerly the guest room and moved the guest room into the bonus room, which had been Ben's room... Why Ben had occupied a 20 by 20 square foot domain in this house when space is at a premium, I am not quite sure. It had something to do with the fact that Joel wanted a "dedicated guest room" and I went along with it because I was convinced I was having a boy and that the bonus room could be the bedroom for both boys and all their toys, leaving two extra rooms upstairs, one for the guest room and one for my office. Of course, we all know how that turned out, and two years later my office was still in my bedroom and I was beginning to complain loudly that we needed to do some rearranging. So today we finally made it happen. Now Ben has a much more appropriately sized room, and the bonus room is now home to the guest bedroom furniture, a futon which is serving as a couch/extra bed, and little tv which will eventually be replaced by another big screen tv. Soon my desk will make the move up there, and eventually it will be joined by an elliptical, the aforementioned new tv, some video game chairs... and we'll have a nice multi-purpose room.
The kids went trick or treating with their friends Jared and Evan this evening, and did not seem to notice that it was RAINING though mom and dad sure noticed... Rebecca did not want to put on her bunny costume, and it was too warm for it anyway, so we settled on tutu and bunny ears. She was not scared at all of the halloween decorations/ trick or treaters, and ran up to every house saying "I want candy!" Some pictures below, though I had to put my camera away after a while when the rain started really coming down.
Not only did Joel's parents babysit for us last night, but they also gave us a $100 gift certificate to one of my favorite restaurants, Blue. I had the poached pear and baby arugula salad (which is the best salad on the entire planet), the duo of wild boar ("Grilled tenderloin and crepinette of shoulder braised with porcini mushrooms over chestnut risotto, served with rainbow Swiss chard and black currant marmalade"), and for dessert we shared the cake di chocolat (a molten chocolate cake) and the creme catalana (like an orange flavored creme brulee). I really liked the wild boar tenderloin, but not so much a fan of the shoulder. Everything else was excellent though! Joel was not so fond of the duck entree he ordered, which was unfortunate, but otherwise we had a great meal. There was live music and a masquerade ball going on there, which made for good entertainment ;)The kids, as usual, had a great time with Nanny and Papa! Thanks guys!!!
1. Today was a teacher inservice/ conference day (as is tomorrow) so Ben did not have school. The JCC offers day-long programs for occasions such as these, so today Ben went with them on a field trip to a corn maze and went swimming in the indoor pool among other activities. Tomorrow he goes with them to Space Kidets, an indoor playspace with inflatables, arcade, etc, and swimming again. He is having a nice break from school!2. This morning I stopped in at the book store and found some materials to help Ben practice his writing. I got some cards that are dry-erase-board material on one side, with a dry erase marker. I got a set for practicing numbers 1-30, uppercase letters, and lowercase letters. You practice tracing each letter, starting at the circle and ending at the star and following the directional arrows. You can erase it and draw it over as many times as you want. And there's extra room on the cards to practice free-hand as well. Tonight I showed Ben the number set, since he'd been telling me he wanted to practice writing numbers with me. He seemed to enjoy being able to easily write and erase as much as he wanted. I am rather baffled by the fact that he can draw a perfect figure 8, but the number 3 stymies him even after I explained that it's just like a B without the straight line, and he can make a perfect capital B. During the course of our practice, Joel discovered that he writes his own "5" and "7" improperly. So Joel needed some remedial work as well. Ben helped him with his 5's.3. After I picked the kids up this evening we were playing in the cul de sac before dinner, and Ben and our neighbor Miller found a snake in the street. As they were watching the snake a car came down the street and ran right over it... the car was going very slowly, since it's a dead end street, but neither me nor the other adult present really wanted to pick a snake up out of the road... so unfortunately we all just stood there and watched the poor snake get run over. Poor thing. The snake was rather mangled after the event, but still alive! Barely. Ben and Miller were beyond fascinated with this event, and kept riding their scooters over to look at it. "Look! Look! It moved! It is only a little dead! Are those it's guts?" Rebecca walked up to it, bent over with her hands on her knees, and said "SQUISHY! Yuck!" Shortly thereafter Joel came home from work, and inadvertantly put the snake out of its misery...4. Rebecca looked up at the moon in the sky tonight and said "Look! Banana!" I am a little concerned about what's going on in that head of hers that she thinks a banana could be up in the sky. It reminds me of this book of hers that we have, and every picture in it is of some kind of animal. And every time she gets to the picture of the star fish (no matter how many times I have told her it is a star fish) she says "COOKIE!" I think she might fail all those tests where you have to single out which thing DOES NOT BELONG WITH THE OTHERS.
(Sigh).Thank you to Jon and Carolyn for finding some wedding pictures for me... at some point I will buy a new scanner and re-scan some pictures, since my scanner broke and I couldn't find any of the ones I'd scanned oh so many years ago...
This afternoon Joel and I had Ben's first parent-teacher conference and received his first report card of his public school career... a very momentous occasion... there really were no surprises. The grading system up through second grade is a number system of 1 through 3 for each category with 3 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. He got "3"s in all of the reading subcategories, "3"'s in all of the math, science and social studies categories, and in the "character development" section he got "2"'s for "takes care of materials", "completes tasks", and "works independently". These are all related to his absent-mindedness (losing pencils, forgetting things in his cubby, leaving his backpack on the school bus, etc, as well as his fine motor problems (discussed below). Writing does not get graded in the first quarter, but we had an in-depth discussion about his writing skills. Basically, he is improving, but doing his letters and numbers and free-hand drawing are much more difficult for him than for other kids. His teacher said she's thought about referring him for occupational therapy but wanted to hold off since she has noticed he is improving and that when he puts his mind to it he seems to be able to do it. She showed us some examples of his work, and on a couple of pages I had to unfortunately point out to her that he must have gotten someone else to do parts of it for him! I felt bad saying so, but in one picture it looked like he had drawn some trees, the moon, a night sky... all fine and looks like Ben's ability... but then there was a picture of a bat and a bird and I am sorry but there's no way my son can draw a bat or a bird. As Joel put it, "That's a better bird than I can draw right now." On a positive note, she said that when she tested his reading comprehension, he had one of the highest scores in the class. He was able to answer questions about a story that was read to him, and make inferences about things that were not explicitly stated such as the time of year, character motivations,etc, and retold the story to her in great detail. So, overall a good report card, and we're just going to keep an eye on the writing/ drawing issues and see if he continues to make improvements.
Three states of residence, one apartment, two houses, five jobs (seven if you count Joel's moonlighting gigs), five cars, three big screen tvs (just had to throw that in), AND THE TWO BEST KIDS IN THE ENTIRE WORLD later... HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO ME AND JOEL!!! Wondering what the next seven years will bring... thinking no more houses or kids, but maybe another car and another big screen tv... lol ;) I am trying to find a digital copy of one of our wedding pictures to post but having some technical difficulties. Since our anniversary falls on a not-so-good day of the week for going out, we're waiting until Friday night to celebrate.
Since June 19, 2008