Catching Up

A primarily picture post:

TUESDAY:

O had his first ever breakfast at Cafe Capp (a local favorite). He had a chocolate chip pancake and didn't leave anything behind!

We worked on some puzzles and practiced the English alphabet. All words with "G" will have to be omitted from our vocabulary, because we lost that piece...

We might not have a full size pool, but that didn't stop us from having some fun in the front yard. 

We also put the sprinkler under the swing.

Day 2 with the Bop It, and the boys made it to Pro level (meaning they passed through Novice, Expert, Master and then reached Pro). Not only has O learned the names of the actions, but this means he also memorized their sounds and the color names of each one! And all in a foreign language! Such a fast learner!

WEDNESDAY:

On Tuesday we told O that we could go to the water park "tomorrow/zavtra". He was so excited and mentioned it over and over. When he woke up Wednesday, the first thing he did was ask what time we were leaving. On the way we called out, "Where are we going?" "Akvapark!" "Where are we going?" "Akvapark!"

We didn't get any pictures at the park, but we had a GREAT time! As he was swimming toward the stairs after the first slide, he was saying, "Again! Again!". Hunger eventually won out over the joy of swimming though, and he said he was ready to go home and eat. He had a bunch of Ritz crackers on the way home.

I showed him how to give a thumbs up and he gave a big one for the water park.

Swimming and the Texas heat are tiring.

THURSDAY:

Thursday morning we had blueberry biscuits for breakfast (Yum!), and O had a side of cottage cheese with honey.

After breakfast we decided to go to our neighborhood Independence Day parade. Basically there are some emergency vehicles and old cars and then all the kids and families gather at the circle with decorated bikes, strollers and wagons. And then they make a big loop through the neighborhood. They also have some food and a brass band. It's pretty entertaining.

After we came back from the parade we pulled out the pool and did some "swimming". haha Even Drew got in on the action this time. 

Ha! You thought our pool looked small in the first set of photos...

O can just blast right through his books, so we're working on encouraging other forms of entertainment. He loves these foam stickers, so he worked on his sticker book for quite a while in the living room. 

We went to dinner at Five Guys for some promised cheeseburgers, french fries and Coca Cola. Afterwords we drove over to our friends' house to wait until it was time to go to the fireworks. They were so sweet to let O run all around the yard and house with their dog. And the dog was really patient to let O lavish him with some slightly too rough boy affection.

They also let him bang around on the drum set, which he LOVED.

They had quite the beat going.

The fireworks show was really not that entertaining for our crew. They had some kind of malfunction at our downtown fireworks presentation which resulted in about a 60 second show. We ended up leaving after an hour, although they did finally get it going again. Next year we will need to pick a place to watch that has better acoustics so that we get more volume too. But on the bright side, O got even more time to run around with Major!

Day 3 - ish

Our first full day at the house went pretty well. He's still orienting himself to the layout of everything, but he listens to "left" and "right" if we offer advice.

Monday did start off VERY early though. He was tired from all of the travel and excitement on Sunday, so he went to bed around 8:30ish. Well, that was fine except that he woke up around 4am and stayed up. I finally went in at 6 and offered to play a movie for him, but he got bored fairly quickly without language dubbing. He decided he wanted to go outside, so we played around in the back for a while and listened to his audio book.

When he discovered that my car was open he we played in there for a long time. Everything was good until he accidentally set off the car alarm. haha I decided that maybe we should go do something, so I asked him if he wanted to go to Starbucks with me. I explained that it was a coffee shop and he looked less than interested. Then I said that he could get warm vanilla milk and he was all in.

Don't worry. He put on his seatbelt before we left.

So we had our first trip to Starbucks. The vanilla steamer was quickly consumed and he declared Starbucks to be good. :) Since the outing went pretty fast, I decided to hop over to Target. We got what we needed, and then I remembered that we wanted to get him a Bop It. So we walked over to the toy section and I found one. Once I turned it on and he heard that it was a game, he was all smiles. He said a HUGE thank you and we went to check out.

He listened to his audio book in Starbucks too. - HP book 6

It wasn't long before he had the game all figured out! He gets upset with himself when he loses too quickly, so sometimes we step in and ask to play along. It's not so bad when OTHER people cause you to lose...haha

We decided to try out the zoo yesterday while Alona was with us, so that she could see the zoo and so that she could provide better explanations. I didn't remember there being much tactile and auditory interest in the exhibits at the zoo though, and I was right. He said he liked it, but he was very tired by the time we finished. They let us check it out before we payed in case we wanted to spring for a membership, but we opted to just pay for our visit when we left. I think he would like visiting with other children, but more for the social aspect than the exhibits.

We came home from the zoo and had lunch, and O had his first popsicle. This was also declared to be good. As was the string cheese, of which he requested seconds.

Another big thing around here now is audio books. O LOVES listening to audio books and would probably listen all day if he were allowed. Drew asked him after lunch if he would like to have Harry Potter book 7 and he was overjoyed. He apparently had all of the others except the last one, and has listened to them multiple times. He had been listening to Book 6 all morning (even in the Starbucks). They set it up on an iPod and speaker dock and listened for about an hour in his room. After that, I had to coax him into an activity. He was falling asleep on the floor (which wouldn't be a problem except that we really want to avoid a bad sleep cycle.

He wasn't too excited about my efforts, but I finally managed to wake him up enough to go outside and play with me. We spent a good deal of time yesterday playing with his new basketball. We pass it back and forth or see how many times he can bounce it in a row. His top yesterday was over 300!

Other than that, he helped me make dinner. We had mashed potatoes and sausage. O helped slice the potatoes and then mashed and stirred them after they boiled. He wanted to make sure I knew to use salt. I let him taste the potatoes after he added the salt and he declared there was not enough, so he ground in some more salt, tasted them again, and declared them to be normal. haha

After dinner, Drew set up a swing in the front yard with some help from Jonathan. O was getting a little testy by the time it was finished, but we went out and got a few laughs. I think he will like it more today when he is not so tired.

After O got ready for bed, we talked some more about what other books he would like Drew to find. He loves fantasy books and has a seemingly endless list of desired books in his mind. He chose two authors last night and we managed to find both on the site Drew was using. He was very pleased, but wanted to make sure Drew knew to download them in Russian.

So we had a short talk about staying in bed until 7, and then Drew and I hung out and listened to Harry Potter with him for about 15 minutes. He was already falling asleep on the floor, so we had him get in bed, said some prayers, and left with a reminder about staying in bed until 7.