July Recap

Wow, so crazy to think July is just about over. This month has flown by. We've been doing a lot of fun summer things this month, most notably:

Pizza Mondays - a neighborhood thing where we email all the neighbors Monday AM to see who is interested and to get their pizza order. I order pizza in the afternoon for everyone and J picks up the pizza on his way home. We put all the pizzas (plus normally a salad or two) out on our fold up table out on the front lawn, along with some ice water, cut up fresh fruit, etc. We've gotten fancier and fancier and started adding cupcakes or ice cream cones, etc. It has made me actually really look forward to Mondays. The neighbors all come over with their chairs, the adults yak and enjoy each other's company while the kids run around playing and do some eating. It typically lasts from 6 to 8 and is so relaxing and nice.

Movie Time - more often than naught after Pizza Monday, a couple of the kids work it out that they want to watch movies together so a couple of kids will come over to our place and watch a (partial) movie with the boys or the boys will go to their house. If they watch at our house, we wind up setting them up with my laptop on their bed so there is enough room for all of them. We've also done Movie Time on many a non-Pizza Monday night. One funny thing to mention is that during this month, I found the boys a Lego movie DVD - which they L-O-V-E! - but it is pretty boy-centric so when the little girl next door neighbor has come over and the boys want to watch that movie, it is so funny to watch how amazingly bored she is and she is proof that kids can find a movie so boring they'd rather not watch it and just go home.

Wednesday Night Free Concerts in the Park - a neighboring city has free kids concerts Wednesday evenings. We've gone to 3 so far. The boys love the event and all that goes with it - the picnic, playing at the park with J while they wait for the show to start and most times the actual concert (depending on who is playing).

We've kept Friday Date night and recently we added Tuesday and Thursday speech appointments for N (I'll catch up on that in a minute). Since those are at 5 and last an hour, those evenings are pretty much shot as well. It's actually been hard to arrange any random social get togethers with this current schedule!

As for N's speech appointments, once we finally decided to have the boys do the "bonus year" at pre-K and received the assessment back from the psychologist recommending that, it was suggested that N might benefit from some speech therapy so we elected to go ahead and have him assessed there as well. They determined that he had some processing delays as well as some word retrieval issues. After his assessment, they suggested we do 2 sessions a week during the summer and we hope to scale back to one session a week once school starts.

Unfortunately, for his first real session, I totally goofed. I had arranged to have S go to the neighbor's to play while I took N so that S wouldn't have to come unnecessarily. Unfortunately, I didn't think about it from all angles. The afternoon of the first sessions, the boys were napping so hard and I actually had to wake them up so we wouldn't be late for the session (STRIKE 1!), N had heard that S was going to the neighbors without him and so he woke up angry already (STRIKE 2!) and while he put his foot down and cried and said he wasn't going, I was too busy stressing about getting to the appointment on time and out the door that I didn't handle it so well (I essentially brow-beated him into getting in the car, while he was crying no less) (STRIKE 3!). We dropped him off on the way (STRIKE 4! - he sooo wanted to get out of the car too). My only saving grace was that I had brought a special snack just for N and presented it to him in the car when it was just him and me. He ate his snack very quietly and slowly woke up and calmed down but I KNOW I didn't handle the whole situation so well. When we got there, he was sooo shy and apprehensive (his therapist was someone different than the person who handled his assessment) but luckily she got him to warm up some and they were able to have their session. Today is N's 4th session and he seems to be fine (in general) with going. I've had to take S with us this week since J's out of town and I've been reluctant to set up any alternative like I did that first session. Luckily, next week, we move to one appointment in the morning and one in the afternoon.

In the middle of all this fun and our appointments and swim lessons, music class and gym class and baseball class, we also took a quick weekend trip to Visalia. After a much longer drive than need be (cause of fire issues in the mountains), we got there late Friday evening. Saturday the boys swam most of the day, napped well, got to play Lego's, my aunt and uncle and cousin entertained and fed the boys so J and I could go out on our own date night. When we got back, the boys had eaten, ridden in the golf cart, lit some fireworks (they hadn't but had watched my aunt and uncle light some), and were swimming in the pool when we walked in. What a dream day for them! Sunday we did some more swimming, golf cart riding, chalk sidewalk art and eating and then around nap time we headed home. The boys slept the whole way and our drive home was really uneventful. We always have such a wonderful time when we go to my aunt and uncle's place.