Skip to main content

Utensils are Optional

G has recently discovered the closet where we keep all of our board games. I often find him playing Hi Ho Cherry-O, Candyland (aka "the gingerbread game"), and the memory game all by himself. Last week, he discovered our Twister game, and thought it would be fun to play with Ava and me. I politely declined (not sure I could become a pretzel at this age) and offered to run the spinner for him.

After some begging, Ava was a good sport and joined in the game with her little brother. She actually did a great job and followed the rules, while G didn't quite grasp the full concept of keeping his various hands and feet on the correct colors while moving around. He ended up just sorta flopping around on the game board instead. And eventually he just decided it would be more fun to use his sister as the game board. I'm not 100% confident that Ava thought that was very fun...



I got a head start on our Christmas shopping AND enjoyed a huge craft fair with my mom last Sunday. I'd say I'm about 65% done with my Christmas shopping already, and I'm planning on working on some more gifts and our cards in the upcoming week. Hooray!

Ava worked very hard on her math homework this week, and with some prodding managed to finish up some assignments with the end goal of minimal work to do this weekend. We always work on weekend homework after breakfast on Saturdays so we don't have to deal with the tears and frustration on Sunday evenings. I still believe we made the right choice to keep her in the advanced math class. I reached out to her math teacher and advised her of our decision, and her response back was perfect - she's incredibly supportive and I think this will help push Ava to focus more and try harder in her schoolwork.

I had a super busy week with plans every evening Mon-Wed, so by Thursday, I was pooped. Good thing I'm off of work November 17-26! I thoroughly enjoyed my day off on Friday, and was able to spend more fun time with Ava and G yesterday since I wasn't trying to cram all of my weekend chores into 2 days. Plus, I have some fun plans in the upcoming week (can't wait to see the Justice League on Tuesday with my mom!) and we're set to host Thanksgiving on Thursday. Fun times!

Scott had a very long work week, and ended up working another full day on Saturday, so we treated ourselves to a fun night out. At my parent's recommendation, we went to the Lakeville Brewing Co. The food was fantastic, the beer was great, and the atmosphere was perfect for kids. Great choice to go there! After that, we headed over to Fleet Farm and walked through Toyland so the kids could get all amped up and excited for Christmas (and then we burst their bubble when we didn't buy them anything...ha!) I have to run back there this week for another reason, and it'll be a great time to pick up some toys for them for Christmas.

I swear, he does know how to use a fork...



Ava's been begging me to put up window clings for Thanksgiving, so I better get that going. And next week, we'll decorate for Christmas! The holiday season is really here!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Goodbye Sweet Spanky

This is a post that I'm not very excited to write.  As you probably know, our oldest dog, Spanky, had struggled with health issues (ear infections, seizures) his whole life, and recently, his health had severely deteriorated.  He hadn't been eating, his ear infection was so severe his face was swollen, he had a hard time getting up the stairs, and he very rarely wanted to play.  Last week we got a few tail wags from him, and he ate a few bowls of food, but it was a 50-50 chance that he would actually keep the food down. On Thursday, we made the decision that if he wasn't any better by this weekend, we were going to put him down.  I know Scott didn't want to make that decision as Spanky was a very special dog to him - he truly was his little buddy, following him around everywhere, wanting to be wherever Scott was, and howling his sadness whenever Scott would leave him. Throughout Friday night, it became clear that Spanky wasn't going to have a miraculous recovery...

Happily Ever After?

Lately, I've been adding to the Disney Princess movies in our collection.  Last week I bought Beauty and the Beast for Ava.  That was never a favorite movie of mine, but now that I've seen it several times in the last week, it's growing on me.  I figure this is a good chance for me to catch up on some of the stories that I missed out on! Watching all of these princess movies has me thinking about fairy tales...why is it that it's always the evil stepMOTHER?  Or the mom is dead, and no one has taken her place?  Very rarely is it the father who is evil, or dead.  This has actually come up as a topic in more than one conversation lately, and has me a bit intrigued.  Fairy tales are often not very happy - and usually someone dies at some point.  I was a giving an overview of Snow White to a friend of mine, and as I was going through the story, both of us were horrified at the message - mom dies, evil stepmother wants to murder her pretty stepdaugh...

26 Hours in a Day

Just yesterday morning, I was thinking to myself that I could really use a few more hours each day.  We don't sleep a whole lot, both work long hours at our jobs, try to play with Ava as much as we can at night and on the weekends, and then we have to do all of the adult-stuff...paying bills, grocery shopping, cleaning, work on side jobs, house projects, etc.  If there were only 26 hours in a day, we could: *Sleep just an extra 30 minutes - we need it since the dogs have been waking us up each weekend day at 5:30am.  What could be SO urgent that they need to get us up then?!?  You'd think we only feed them once a week, or something. *Spend an extra hour with Ava...we could go to the park every night, take an extra long bath, read a few extra stories, and just enjoy the giggles and chattiness. *Take 30 minutes to talk to each other about how things are going.  With Scott leaving for work each day before 5am, and then all of the craziness that ensues wh...