Jonathan's #6 Birthday Party

Jonathan and his friend from kindergarten.

Jonathan waiting for the candles to be lit.

Anna with her sweet cousin JoJo.

The Dooligans 4!

After the pinata broke, Anna and her cousin Trystan collected the candy! Jonathan had 3 hits and broke it in half. We won't let him go first again!

Justine wearing half the Darth Vader pinata on her head.

Anna, Justine and Janenne.

Again.

Aerial view of my crazy cake.

Jonathan helped me decorate the cake. It was a group effort...

Grateful

I am feeling grateful today. Grateful that I found a job that I really love! I quit the after school assignment last week, and started at another school this week, and I love it a lot. The ladies I get to work with are really great and fun to be around, and I feel like I am really helping the kids. The kids are just so fun to be around and they really respond in the small groups we work with them in. One little girl told me my "marriage ring was blingalicious!" I got to work with a Kindergartner yesterday who was so stinkin' cute I almost didn't mind when he sneezed right in my face! (I feel like I am coming down with something today, but trying to tell myself it is just psychological.) I finally feel like I found the right fit with the assignments I have now, and I really like that I only work Tuesday and Thursday, even though they are long days. Everything is falling into place so nicely for me right now, at least job wise. I am really, really grateful to have found employment in times like these, and on top of it all, to have found a job I feel passionate about and I really enjoy.
I am also feeling grateful for my kids who are both safe and healthy. Watching or reading the news this week makes me want to give them both huge hugs (which Anna welcomes and Jon pushes away bashfully).
I am also feeling grateful for my husband who is such an awesome help to me in everything I do. He is so supportive of anything I do that it makes me feel like I could do anything. He is always behind me and a constant help. Like today, he is helping me make this cake for Jonathan's birthday party tomorrow. He is doing all the hard work so I have energy later for all the decorating. I am attempting a two layer square cake (each layer is 10 by 2 inches) with 3 small round cakes on top, serving as pedestals for some of the Star Wars figures I am using on the cake (thank you, Lara!) And he offers creative help also, like just now we decided to use an 8 inch round cake pan on top, instead of 2 square layers, because we weren't sure we had enough batter. This cake will have 4 sticks of butter and 6 eggs and 8 cups of powdered sugar in it... so I am thinking even if the cake looks like a disaster (expect pics either way!) it will taste quite acceptable! I am making the frosting a cool gray blue with some purplish blue and teal accents. I woke up this morning with no idea what I was going to do, but I went to the stores and got some Fruit by the Foot and other candies, and came up with some ideas. It could be a success, or a total disaster. But the important thing to Jonathan is that it stays with the Star Wars theme.

Jonathan's Drawing of a City

J brought this home from K today. I like the road and the cars on it, and the TOY store.

Anna's Fall Fun Day

Anna came home from Fall Fun Day at preschool and her ballet class that followed, and went to sleep like a cat on the laundry stacks.

Anna picks her clothes out. She has very specific reasons for why things match, and I can't argue with her logic. And really, it is much easier at 7 AM to just go with it than to try and change her to something that I think matches. Matching is all a matter of perception, anyways.

Anna on the hay, three years old.

I can see the zoo.

Today Jonathan wrote, from memory, all by himself:
I CAN SEE THE ZOO.

Isn't that amazing? He spends at least an hour after school, beyond his homework time, working and working on his letters and numbers. Our house is a paper-rific mess. Anna and him both spend most of their time drawing and coloring and writing. Anna is trying her darndest to catch up to Jon, and she does not seem to take into consideration that she is a whole 26 months younger than him. I keep thinking, I will use some of these skills that I am learning at my job to help Jonathan learn to read, but he is learning to read faster than I can learn to teach him to read!

I got these fantastic tools off of Amazon called Hot Dots. Anna started with Reading Readiness, and Jonathan started with Consonants. They are just these flashcards that are compatible with these special pens, and when you press the right answer it lights up green and says something positive. Anna is super insulted that I got her the "baby ones" and she wants to do the ones that Bubba has. Well! Excuse me for thinking you were still only 3! She really can get most of the answers in Bubba's stack, just not the ones that ask about sounds in the middle of words. I can't believe how smart she is, and how much her learning is fueled by competitiveness. Especially since Jonathan is so NOT competitive. He does nothing to egg her on. I wonder where she gets it from? I guess it is the nature of the baby of the family to either act like the baby to try and get everything done for them, or to try and catch up so they can shake off the baby identity. Anna likes to do both, whichever works to her advantage at that particular moment.

Dave was standing in the kitchen at my Mom's house last night, and he said something so true. He was holding Anna (as always, it's a good thing she has stayed so light!) and she was holding his ear. He said, "This right here, this sums up the difference between our two kids. When Jonathan was nervous, he always held onto his own ear. When Anna is nervous, she holds onto my ear!"
So true! Anna is so social and craves interaction and attention and touch so much. She needs so much affection and time, and Jonathan has always thrived so well on just a little bit... In fact, he has long been able to express his need for "alone time." They are so different when compared to each other. But when you take them out into the world and compare them to other kids, they are SO much alike. It is funny...They seem so different to us, but other people are always making categorical statements about "our kids." Like, "your kids are so quiet!" Um, yeah...
I know we aren't supposed to compare our kids, but I think noticing their differences is just part of knowing them and understanding who they are. I am not trying to pit them against each other. Usually I am just marvelling at how different they are and always have been, right from the start, how unique and completely their own they came into the world, just being. Anna is Anna and Jonathan is Jonathan, and they are both marvelous little beings, and I love them both so much. But figuring out how to parent them both at the same time every day is a challenge, because they are both so different.

4:30 PM

Jonathan is drawing Halloween pictures. These involve "cemetaries with dead people laying all over the place." I told him to stop it, I gave him a talk about how cemetaries are nothing like that, I even pulled Jesus into the discussion. But he really wants to draw these pictures. Should I take the crayons and paper away? I think he has seen some frightening images on TV (we don't let him watch anything, and we don't have cable, but maybe he's seen a few commercials or something?) and in stores lately, or maybe his friends at school talk about stuff like this? I don't know where it's coming from, and I tried to put a stop to it, but maybe he needs to draw these pictures to deal with frightening images/concepts? I really don't know.
Anna is singing a really sad song about Fazoli's. She often sings and dances to these dramatic songs she writes. If this song had a name, I would call it Ode to Fazoli's. She is singing about how it is shut down forever, and everything keeps shutting down and going away, forever.... Both of the kids have had a hard time dealing with Fazoli's shutting down. I think it really a tradition in our family, going there after church on Sunday, and they miss it. I guess it must have been about more than the meatballs... I think it was about the breadsticks :)
So anyways, between all this sad singing about Fazoli's and crayoned dead bodies, I am feeling like I should consult a therapist for my kids. I really don't like Halloween! Speaking of which, we are going over to my Mom's house for dinner this evening and to pick up our pumpkin. We will carve it to celebrate "fall."
Jonathan just came up, pointed to my typing, and said, "Mama, why is that A so stupid? Why are all the As on computers so stupid?"

Jonathan's Birthday Trip to Orlando

Jonathan outside the Lego store. We stayed at a nice hotel, went to Downtown Disney and Sea World. I asked Jonathan what his favorite part of the trip was... and he said, "Getting to see that real, giant roach in the hotel room!" Anna and him followed it around, talking sweet to it, and tried to feed it some broken up Pringles. Thank goodness we were all packed up and ready to leave! I would have never been able to sleep if we had seen it the night before. I wanted to kill it, or rather, I wanted someone to kill it for me, but Dave said he did not want to hear "the crunch" and Jonathan was ready to throw his body over the roach to protect it. I guess if it made him happy on his birthday trip...

Anna and I rode the merry-go-round at Downtown Disney. She loves the princess ponies.

Anna was a little overheated at Sea World, and pretty darn irritated about it! We left soon after this picture was taken.

Ugly Cake

So Anna and I worked hard on Jonathan's Ugly Cake while he was at school yesterday. The Ugly Cake started when I made Dave a chocolate fudge cake with caramel frosting, and it was a horrid looking disaster. The layers fell apart and I tried to reassemble them, and then I tried to hold everything together with lots of extra frosting. My pride was a little hurt, and my sweet, sensitive Jonathan picked up on my sulkiness and kept commenting, Mama, this is the best cake ever! Mmmm! I want Ugly Cake for MY birthday, OK?

So I tried to recreate the Ugly Cake yesterday, along with his favorite dinner, chicken and dumplings. When we were close to being finished, Anna looked at the cake and said, "Oh. It looks... good." She wrinkled her little nose up and said, "It really doesn't look ugly enough." She was right. It helped when the two of them picked half of the frosting off of one side of it. That uglied it up a little. Tomorrow night we are going away to go to Downtown Disney (Lego store!) and Sea World. Then he has his birthday party on the 25th. I am making a Star Wars cake. (I won't be making my own fondant from scratch, mind you, like some other crazy lady I know... ;)

We have a Darth Vader pinata, and Dave got the idea to use lightsabers to hit it with. It is going to be a great birthday party. Hopefully... I love how his birthday always blends into Halloween and Anna's blends into Christmas. It makes the whole month special.

A Stormtrooper, A Rainbow Ballerina Princess, and a Pirate

Our costumes arrived in the mail! (I still don't have one.) On Jonathan's birthday, the three of them tried on their costumes and posed for the camera. I love it!

I caught Anna at the end of a twirl. This is how she looks during ballet class. Very serious business.

Good Morning, Birthday Boy!

Jonathan at 1 and a half years old, asleep in his stroller.

I went in and took this picture of Jonathan asleep today. I can't believe he is six! He wasn't really happy about waking up to the flash, but Mama's got to have her fun, right?

6 years ago today, in the hospital.

Sunflower

Jonathan painted this super sunflower at school.

Apples

Anna made this beautiful apple print painting at school.

Bag Lady

Our bags are all packed up and ready to go for the week. I have a bag for each of my three tutoring jobs, a bag for church nursery stuff, my purse and my AVON delivery I need to make tomorrow, Jonathan's backpack, Anna's ballet purse, and Anna's backpack. I can't believe how much weight that shelf from IKEA can hold!

Obsession

This is the extent of Jonathan's obsession with letters, numbers, writing, and all things Kindergarten right now:

Today, he was very "starsick" (as he calls it), from riding in the car from church. He rushed out of the car into the driveway, saying, "Mama, I've gotta go puke!" As he ran to the toilet, he stopped, looked back at me with a quizzical expression on his face, and said, "Wait a minute. Does puke start with P"?
"Yes, yes it does."

"Okay. And another word for puke is VOMIT?"

"Yes."

Then he resumes his run into the house, so he can p-uke in the toilet.

In the picture above, you can see some of his practicing. He uses scrap paper, his notebook, or this magnet board to write his numbers, letters, and to copy words. The other day he wrote a sentence using his sight words: I can see. He also is able to pick out more and more words as I read to him at night. It is amazing the transformation his brain is undergoing right now! I am going to start his piano lessons after Christmas. He keeps asking for piano lessons, but I wanted to wait until he was really quick with letter recognition (or at least letters A-G!).

Thursday

I came home from tutoring this evening, and Anna had a band-aid on one foot, and was walking around with an ice pack on her finger. I asked her what happened, and this is what she said:
"I bleeded my toe. I really did. I not kidding. Um, also, I hurt my finger in the door. Um, I standed on the Magneato box and then I fell. I don't know how I hurt my finger in the door. I was trying to close it and it shutted on my finger."
Jonathan just came in the room, and threw his toy up in the air. It is a large toy ax from the Lego store, and it has made for many humorous reprimands. Like just now: Jonathan! Don't throw your ax in the house! And then Anna said, Yeah, it might fall and hurt my other toe.
Or: "Anna and Jonathan! We don't hit each other with axes!' Or: "Anna! Don't hit your brother in the face with that ax!" It is situations like this that make me glad our windows stay shut year-round. Who knows what the neighbors would think if they heard what I said, without actually seeing what was taking place?

What's for dinner? We decided on pizza, since I have no groceries, just walked in and changed into pajamas and sat my butt down on the sofa. I just asked Dave, "Did you order the pizza?" And he said, "No. I was waiting for the computer."
Oh, I said. He waited a minute, as I continued typing this, and then said, I guess I could just order it on the phone. Isn't it funny that ordering pizza online is the new norm?
Anna just came in the room, in tears, because Jonathan choked her. I said, "WE don't choke each other!" She looked at me with those big teary blue eyes and said, "But him just did! He choked my neck!"
This is one of my dumber parenting techniques. I started it when they were just babies... "We don't hurt each other. We love each other." But now I say it on auto-pilot (like when I am trying to ignore my kids so I can blog). In situations like this, where they actually did hurt each other, simply stating, We don't hurt each other does nothing to change the fact that we did hurt each other. I think it comes from trying to state the behavior you do want, rather than focusing on the behavior you don't want. Which is a good idea, but somehow I've twisted it into this we don't hurt each other thing, which I never say unless they have just hurt each other.
I was at work this morning, pondering how on earth I ever learned to read, and read pretty well at a fairly young age. I was wondering this because I realized how poor my phonics skills are, and reading instruction was very much based on phonics when I was a kid. I am having to go back and re-learn all the phonics. Like a and o as in ax and ox, meaning when you just see a, you should prounounce it like ahhh, but when you just see o, you prounounce it more like aww, rather than ohhhh. Does that make any sense? Probably not. I am just saying, there's been some confusion over these basic sound awareness and phonemic skills for me, and it has made me feel quite stupid and inadequate. I find it easier to tutor the 4th graders than the 1st graders! I guess that makes more sense, since I have worked with older kids more than kids in primary grades. But I learned A LOT this week, and I have all the materials at home with me, and we have next week off, so I can hopefully get caught up enough to be "smarter" than a 1st grader. My Dad watches that Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? show, and I've noticed, watching it either makes me feel really dumb, or it makes me think the contestant is really stupid. It seems like the questions are either really, really tough, or they are really basic and the contestant won't know any of them.
So, Dave gave up and used the phone to order pizza. It will be here shortly, and we have a nice three day weekend ahead of us. Although I have A LOT of stuff to get done before I can actually relax. Tomorrow Dave and I have from 8-2 together, with both kids at school. We will go to the gym. Dave and I both joined Planet Fitness this week. They were having the Dollar Sale. I decided since it is apparently NEVER cooling down in Florida this year (record heat all this week), and once it does it will be too dark to walk at night, we should try a gym again. They don't have childcare but that's okay, since the last gym we belonged to had such awful childcare that we refused to use it.
I just told Jonathan, "I love you, buddy."
He said, "Thanks. I hope they get cheese pizza, Mama."

Decisions

Gosh, my part time job has really interfered with my blogging habit! I think this may be the longest period of time I've ever been absent.
My part time job is with a non-profit agency. A friend from church led me to the position, and it is exactly what I had been hoping for. I work an afterschool tutoring program at a local private school, Monday through Thursday afternoon, and today I started working two mornings a week doing Title I reading tutoring at another local private school. I also have the privilege of working with a high-schooler, tutoring in reading and math, and I go to her home. I really love it, although it is harder to juggle all of the other demands of my life... But, I think, well worth it. I really missed working with kids since I stopped tutoring privately, and I love this job because I get to work with kids grades first through high school. My first priority is my kids and Dave, and then comes all things New Hope... I love my church family and the work I get to do for them. That's why it has been a struggle for me to work, even though it's just part time. I am afraid that the kids are missing out, or that Dave has too much of the workload shifted to him, or that I am falling behind in my work at church, or that my house is messier than usual (which is true). But it all seems to be working out okay, and the nice thing about working is... getting paid. :) And also, it forces me to focus in on just one thing for however many hours a week. Oftentimes, I get all fluttery and all over the place and wind up spinning my wheels and accomplishing very little. I am also working on getting my certification in order, because I think I may want to start work in the fall. This is a difficult decision to make, but Anna will be in school 5 days a week, and Jonathan will be a first grader. And being a teacher will give me a very similiar schedule to the kids, which is a definite advantage. Right now, it's like I pick J up from school and immediately go to work. So, balancing my own career path (or, rather, finally picking one and walking down it) and my family along with everything else, trying to figure out how to do that and also what to do, that's one decision I am working on.
Another decision, far less significant but I think more fun, is what we are all wearing for Halloween. Jonathan will be a black Shadow Trooper from Star Wars (which, I'm sorry, looks an awful lot like last year's Darth Vader costume, but don't tell either Dave or Jonathan this, because they jumped all over me when I said it earlier). Dave will be Captain Jack Sparrow. A PIRATE. He wanted me to be a pirate wench, but all of the costumes were a little too, um, wenchy for me. Anna will be sporting a fabulous light-up rainbow ballerina princess costume (it has fiber optics in the skirt). She was trying to steer me away from the pirate girl costumes, telling me that they were NOT pretty. She wanted me to be a Disney princess. I considered many options, but never made a decision. We ordered the other three costumes. I am thinking I am going to be a black cat again this year. I like the opportunity to wear way too much eye makeup. Because black cats always wear too much eye makeup, right?
Another issue we were discussing tonight is Jonathan's birthday. He wants a Star Wars birthday party. But we are trying to decide what to do about the cake, because Wilton has stopped making their cake pans and they are SUPER expensive on Ebay. Dave thought maybe we should just order a Star Wars cake from Publix, but I think it would be just sad to miss out on an opportunity to stress myself out making the cake and decorating it myself...I am thinking I may just make a cake and put some of his Star Wars Lego creations on top. Would that be gross? What if I washed them off first? Also, I am trying to decide, who to invite, where to have the party, and how big of a deal to make of it. I am a little freaked since his birthday is only a week away. Even though the party won't be till the weekend after, it still seems too late to send invites out, and I don't know how to get specific addresses of kids in his class. These are the things Mommies worry about. But basically, as long as his cousins and family are there, and we have a cake, pinata and presents, I think he will be pretty happy. I just feel like his birthday snuck up on me more than usual this year! And he mentioned that he really wanted to go to Sea World (we have year passes and have not been in months) so I think maybe we should do that too, and say it's a birthday trip!
Right now, Anna is sitting next to me eating her bedtime snack. I thought to myself, what is that I smell? Is that pickled beets? I looked at her in disgust and said, WHAT are you eating? And she said, Just pickles, Mama! Oh, of course. The other day Jonathan had popcorn for breakfast. He thought it was the best thing and was still talking about it when I picked him up that afternoon. Anna's picture day is tomorrow. We need to go look at her extensive wardrobe and decide what she should wear! With Jonathan, it's an easy choice: which Polo shirt should he wear? He's like a mini-Dave.