Jackets & Cold Weather

I know it is not snowing here in Florida :) but this past week has been really cold here...cold for us. It was cold enough that I made Aidan wear a thermal outfit underneath his clothes plus his jacket. It wasn't until this morning when we are about to walk out the door that I realize his jacket is missing. He informs me that he left it in P.E. yesterday. I told him he has to tell his teacher to let him go & get his jacket, I also write her a note and told him to give it to her since it HAD to be found today...it is his ONLY jacket. Although it doesn't get super cold here normally in December (Monday morning when he goes to the bus stop it will be 23 degrees) I just am not prepared for winter yet. Aidan came home today with no jacket. I asked him where it was and he said his teacher said she'll get it. Excuse me? Either it is stolen or it is in the lost & found box, either way I need to know. The office tells me that I have to come down myself and look in the box for the jacket between school hours, 8-4pm not going to happen when Joe has our only car for work during this time period. This is why I sent the note!! Aidan should have been allowed to go to the lost & found box to look for his jacket, his teacher doesn't know what it looks like. Now he has to go to school again tomorrow with no jacket and tomorrow night I'll have to go buy him another one if it isn't found.

As I'm typing this I ask Aidan to bring me his blue folder so I can see what homework he has and he says it is not in his backpack. WTF?? Yet again mix up with the teacher not giving Aidan his folder or the right folder with his name on it.

I am very appreciative that Aidan's teacher is doing well with him. He's happy & I can see a huge improvement with his learning, with that being said... I really do not like his school as a whole. I can't call his teacher during school hours, she hasn't returned my email in 3 days, the administrator who answers all phone calls is also the B*TCH that laughed at us when they lost my son on his first day of school. Their website is not up to date and any important school information never seems to make it's way home either in a flyer, phone call, email, or website info. Next year I really am considering driving him 30 minutes to the Elementary school I went to. I grew up in a small town in the next county over and some of the teachers I had still are teaching there today. There is only so much incompetence that I can take from a school.

A lot of space in between

I have been so busy since Halloween that there is a large gap in time here. We had Thanksgiving here at our house with all of my side of the family. Aidan specially requested Spiral Honey Ham and I was surprised that he ate Turkey, Ham, Mashed Potatoes & tried some corn. He still is the pickiest eater I have ever seen, even more then me at his age but I'm happy that he is slowly trying new foods. Before school let out for a whole week for the holiday Aidan made a vest & an Indian headband with feathers. He wore it on Thanksgiving day, it was so cute!



Over this past weekend we celebrated Aidan's 6th Birthday! My little man is growing up. He requested a bounce house over any other present & he played on it the second it was set up until nightfall.



He is doing very well with letters & sounds in school. Rhyming and numbers as well. We are working on characters in stories and predicting what might happen next. He seems to have a really hard time listening to a story he finds boring and remembering anything from it....I don't blame him but it is something we just have to get through.

Halloween

Halloween was 2 days ago. I dislike that it was on a Sunday and Aidan had school the next day but it still went well. Aidan was Iron Man. Skylar also wanted to be Iron Man. Skylar at the last minute became very sick and with it being a little chilly here at night this past week, we decided no costume for her but warm pajamas and shoes & socks. She had a wet cough in her chest with a lot of head congestion :( (this is after I was also sick 3 days before for about 48 hours as well)

We were getting in the car, packing up the kids and the stroller to drive a few blocks away in our neighborhood to my sister in laws house to trick or treat with her kids when me and Joe felt really badly for Skylar. It wasn't as chilly as we thought it would be so we grabbed her pumpkin for candy, threw on a cute pink punk skirt, (over her ducky pajama bottoms) a skull necklace and a "play and destroy" T-shirt. she looked adorable. In the end it all worked out. It didn't get as chilly and she of course wanted to walk and trick or treat the entire time. We pushed the stroller the whole night for nothing :) I take that back, JOE pushed the stroller the whole night while I ran up to every door with her and listened to this cute sick voice saying trick or treat. At one house she asked the lady for a snickers bar for her daddy :) that was the best!

It's been awhile...

I work from home and the past few weeks have been crazy... I have lots to update and pictures to upload :) with coffee in hand, here I go.



First Aidan's field trip to the Green Meadows Farm, that is where we left off. There was confusion in the morning with my sister's truck not starting and she was chaperoning and they were an hour late getting to the school but they made the buses just in time! (charter buses too!) A neighbor drove them to the school so they could make it there in time. Lots of drama.

Aidan got to ride a pony, feed a goat, pet chickens and hold a baby ducky. Milk a cow, ride on a train/hay ride, & pick a pumpkin. All in all he said he had a great time. My sister says she will NEVER chaperone again :) success! She was only in charge of Aidan and one other little girl but because EVERY child was wearing the same tie-dye shirts :) she couldn't keep track of the kids. She said all of the other chaperones had to be on Valium because no one seemed to mind anything. She was frantic to keep a hold of her 2 kids and other parents would hand her more kids to do potty breaks and the kids would just run away and it was very funny listening to her tell me how crazy it was for her who will never ever do it again. :)

Tie Dye 101

Well I thought Aidan had missed his Tie Dying T-shirts for his field trip to Green Meadows Farm last Monday when he was out sick but turns out they did them on Wednesday right before their field trip. I still went out and purchased stuff to dye our own shirts and at least this way Skylar was able to join in to.



Skylar made a pink & purple shirt for her and Rachel's little sis Mackenzie who is also about Skylar's age. I think they turned out the best. ( I still have to upload those finished pics later for you)

Aidan did dark colors, red, blue, green & some purple. He went a little crazy and they were really saturated, but still cute. We didn't make no where near the mess I thought we would -for doing it in our play room in the house. I didn't even wear gloves. We used the Rit-dye liquid & powders. I'm glad I bought squirt bottles, I think that is the best and most fun method for dyeing.

And the sickies just keep coming...

Last Thursday Aidan came home from school and barely had touched his lunch, plus he didn't throw it away, he left it spilling into his lunchbox which is very strange for him not to just throw it away at school. He also had no given his blue folder to his teacher or his 2 library books. I emailed his teacher and asked her what went on at school and why didn't he turn in his stuff. She responded with she asked him twice at two separate times of the day to get his folder & put it in her mailbox and Aidan walked over to his backpack each time and then just walked away. Ok something is wrong. Well 2 hours after he got home from school I figured out what it was. He immediately spiked a fever of 102 and kept it for 48 hours. He was just out of it. He laid down on the couch and wouldn't eat or drink anything. I finally had to force cold sprite and Tea down his throat since he refused to take any medicine that might bring down the fever, needless to say he received 3 cool baths on Thursday to help. He slept in our bed all weekend and by Monday morning his fever had returned and was still throwing up. So now we have missed Friday and Monday of school again -which I HATE because he was doing so well and I hate to know what he missed at school. I'm sure tonight will be homework catch up night for sure!

His field trip is this Thursday so I hope he feels a lot better by then. I thought he missed out on Tie Dyeing shirts that they will be wearing on his field trip but his teacher emailed me yesterday and said they are doing them today. So I sent him to school today, phone is near me in case I have to go pick him up.

However I spent $20.00 is tie dying stuff yesterday at Walmart because I thought he did miss out on doing it at school. Now when he gets home today we are all going to do it together. We even got pink & purple so Skylar can do her own T-shirt! I spent over an hour Google-ing techniques :) I have never tie dyed anything before! So I will add pictures tomorrow of our mess

Also I have decided that for his Birthday (December 2nd) since all he wants is a party with a bounce house that he is getting one present from us. I've been looking into different things he wants but I've decided on this new Leap Frog Leapster Explorer. It seems to have a lot of learning features that he would really like. Plus I really would like him to have a hand held device that he can take in the car or in his own room and get off my computer. It has lots of learning games and tracing letters and a lOT more features including E-books, videos, even a camera attachment. What do you think? It is $69.00 which makes me gulp very hard on top of an already $80.00 Bounce house with party & food. However, if he gets it for his birthday, he can break it in and then get more games & accessories for Christmas which isn't much later.

(Maybe I'll just start a birthday fund :)

Bad Weather & Lockdowns

Here in the great state of daily thunderstorms and hurricanes we get some really good downpours in the afternoon. Do I own at least one umbrella for walking Aidan to the bus stop? I do...somewhere...in a closet...or was it in the car? Needless to say, I can't find a single umbrella! Bus stops are not fun in the rain. Mud puddles with clean white socks are not fun in the rain. (Maybe to Aidan)

Yesterday (Tuesday) It was time for Aidan's bus to be dropping off the kids when I receive a phone call from Aidan's teacher...The children are still at the school on lock down because of all of the lightning and flash flooding. I'm really glad she called. I could hear chaos in the background. The teacher put me on hold to calm down a little girl who was scared and her mommy was now coming to get her from the school instead of riding the bus home. I hear the word "Lock down" and I fear the worst... When they are crimes and police chases or anything of the sort, in the area of a public school, the schools are put on "lock downs" until the crisis is taken care of. I feel better knowing it's just the weather. I didn't like it when the teacher informed me that it is their policy for the bus drivers to also stop and if the weather is too bad, to bring the kids back to the school so the parents can pick them up there. Thankfully, the weather let up enough for the buses to continue and needless to say Aidan arrived safely home about an hour later than usual.

p.s. I called Rachel's mom to see if she had heard the news and she had not. (Skylar was still sick so Rachel's mom was going to pick up Aidan & Rachel from the bus stop for me) Luckily Aidan's teacher was calling all of her student's parents but not the other teachers in the higher grades (Rachel is in 2nd).I bet after Aidan's first day of school bus fiasco, I was first on her calling list :), she definitely reassured me on the phone that Aidan was ok and he would be coming home soon. I feel bad for all of the other parents who sat in the rain at bus stops for about an hour waiting for their kids to come home not knowing why they were so late...Don't bother calling the school to find out why, the lines were busy the entire time.

*Note to self: buy a large umbrella*

Yesterday I just so happen to be waiting for Aidan to get home so I could go grocery shopping otherwise the delay really wouldn't have bothered me. Now I was shopping an hour late, which put me into 6 o'clock traffic when we left the grocery store, which put me late into making dinner and now I have 2 children in the backseat of the car starving and chanting "we want french fries" *sigh* Damn Thunderstorms!

I really wish I could remember to not wear my flip flops when I go grocery shopping in the rain. My feet get soak & wet, then freezing cold as you step in the grocery store, plus you Hydro-plane on any flat surface until your flippies dry. Of course my little independent Skylar had to walk in the rain next to me from the store back to the car as opposed to riding in the shopping cart so I could at least run to the car in the pouring rain but Nooooo Miss Independent is all about me letting her walk like a big girl.

**Moral of today's story: Always keep an umbrella by your front door & if you are on a tight grocery shopping schedule and it's raining...don't bother, just order a pizza and shop the next day :)