Aiden is currently on an “improvement plan” for goofiness at school (better than an improvement plan for being a bully, but still…it’s cause for concern). According to his teacher and the preschool director, Aiden’s class is…um…a handful. Aiden happens to be the leader of the silly brigade. I’m happy to report that he’s been doing much better lately. One day I tied a piece of string around his finger before school to help him remember to pay attention and be a good example. That day, he got a rave review from his teacher and, bless his heart, actually said, “thank you for the string mommy – it really helped me today”. We’ve been doing the string for about a week…sadly, the results are not always the same. So…..we had a long talk yesterday about what to do. He was afraid that he wouldn’t be able contain his laughter if his friends did funny things. We talked about how he won’t get in trouble for laughing, but maybe he could tell his friends, “let’s pay attention now and we’ll tell jokes later”. Every day, his teacher draws either a smiley face, a straight face or a sad face on the top of his hand so that he and I both see exactly how the day went. He’s never received a sad face, but he frequently gets “small” smiley faces and he got one straight face. Yesterday, after our morning talk (which lasted all morning…off and on….as we were running errands and going to gymnastics class), he got a BIG smiley face and a thumbs-up from his teacher. He was very proud – he didn’t want to wash it off!! When he woke up this morning, I took one look at him and told him he should go check out his face in the mirror. We had a good laugh…he obviously rested his face on the top of his hand while sleeping last night

Happy face face!

This next picture is from a playdate we had last Friday with Aiden’s “girl friend” from school. Now this is what I call Modern Love: borrow your mom’s phone, lay side-by-side on the floor and play games. Ahhhh….how schweeet!

The other little boy in the picture is Joey, Julianna’s brother and Brady’s classmate – it was quite the perfect double playdate!

I had to snap a picture of this: just another of Aiden’s tinker toy creations. With his love of math and love of building things, I say future engineer (he says future video game designer….I guess that’s in the ballpark)

 

 

Yesterday, the new coats I ordered for the boys came in the mail. The old ones were difficult to get on and off because they have a fleece part that zips in. It always turns inside-out when they remove their coats and no one (save for me) can get them “right side out again”, plus they were all one size too small. Coats are on sale right now and these ones should last at least 2 more years – I ordered them big! I LOVE them (Land’s End) because the sleeves can extend 1&1/2 inches when the arms get too short plus they have built-in fingerless gloves and lots of cool pockets (ok…the boys love the pockets….I like the sleeves and glove thing). They HAD to try them on as soon as they came out of the box (and yes…same coat, different colors…just can’t shake that whole used-to-be-a-cheerleader-and-matching-is-fun mentality!)

Later, as Aiden was designing his tinker-toy creation, Brady did one of his own (he already put on his “PJs” which is a pair of pants and no shirt – sigh). He told me to take a picture of him “doing exercise”