Today's Tidbits

I just got back from volunteering in Brandon's kindergarten class - it was so fun!! I led the arts & crafts project... six kids at a time cycled through my station, and I led them through the project. Before you give me too much credit, his teacher designed and set up the project. I just showed up and kept an eye on them. But, I loved getting the chance to meet all his friends and watch him interact with them. And I got to spend around 90 minutes in the classroom just seeing how things run and how the teacher manages the classroom. I was impressed! There were two other stations besides mine. One, where the kids had to color all the pictures on a page that started with the letter "h" and the second where the teacher helped the kids write sentences in their journals - she helped them sound out the words. When it was time for all the different stations to clean up, the teacher would put on "twist and shout". The rule was that as soon as you finished cleaning up your area, you got to run to the center of the room and start dancing... so everyone cleaned up as fast as possible so that they could dance! Brilliant! I'm totally trying this at home, except that we'll need a whole CD of songs to clean up my boy's rooms. Icing on the cake was that the teacher pulled me over at one point to tell me how much she loves Brandon... she told me how sweet he is and how excited he is to learn new things and how much she loves having him in the class. I was so proud! It was really interesting in general to see how all the different kids approached the project and who raced through it and who was very detail-oriented. It was a really great morning.

We've had a bit of a rough week of sleeps. Parker has some funky cough that only comes up at night... seriously, no other cold symptoms during the day but he wakes up coughing at night. So, he's been waking Chad and I (and sometimes Brandon) 3 or 4 times a night because he starts coughing so hard that he's almost vomiting. I think after doing that for a few nights, he's getting a little too used to our coming in anytime he cries... this morning at 5am, I heard him crying and went in there... he was crying because he dropped his tissue on the floor. Not cool, Parker. Anyway, last night, our cat Jessie decides to get into the act with what Chad and I call her "crazy cat routine." In involves her suddenly getting hyper around 3am and running like crazy around the house, jumping up on doorjambs and then sliding back down and meowing at a ridiculously high decibel. It's super fun. not. She used to do it alot when she was a young cat, and it would drive me crazy. But, this is the first time she's gone into crazy cat mode in a while. I have no idea what set her off. I'm hoping for a less interrupted night tonight.

Gotta run and meet Brandon's bus now!