Meeting Friends at Hillside Farm and for Dinner, School Work, and Claws and Paws with Owen

Samantha: 113 Months, Week 1

Aedan: 80 Months, Week 3

Owen: 37 Months, Week 1

I forgot to write about this in my blog post from last week, but over the weekend Samantha got in trouble and needed to have a punishment. I was up Saturday morning in our little peanut's room, and I noticed a light and heard a noise from Samantha's and Aedan's room. I opened the door and noticed Samantha climbing up the ladder to her bed with the end of Aedan's light saber to use a flashlight and a book as well. When I asked her what she was doing, she lied to me about it, and I was very upset that it before 6:00 a.m., and they were both awake, and she was planning on going up to her bed to read with a bright, noisy light saber light. She had never, to my knowledge, tried to do anything like this before, but I was pretty angry about it. I told Ben what happened, and we talked about what a good punishment would be for her, something that would fit. So we told her she was not allowed to read for the rest of the weekend. For her, that was a huge punishment. Her AR goal for this quarter of school was 11.3 points, and we are only halfway through the quarter, and she is at 136 points already. That is pretty impressive in itself, and she could stand to take a break from reading as a consequence for trying to sneak around to read that early in the morning.

Our church, Restored, is not meeting in person yet, but they have been doing what they call microgatherings, which are small groups that meet inside people's homes to watch church and have some time of fellowship. We went to one over the summer, but really hadn't gone to any since then until recently when we decided we should make more of an effort to stay connected with people. This Sunday was our first time getting together, and it felt strange but good to be around other people in someone else's house again. The Peiffers hosted it, and the Gauglers came as well. Ben went to drop off our little peanut for her visit (and ended up having to wait almost twenty minutes of time during which he knocked, texted, and finally called her mom, because she was still asleep and he woke her up), so he was a little late coming back up to meet us for microgathering. The kids had a blast playing together in their basement playroom, and the adults had a great time talking, catching up, and (sort of) watching church in between talking and just being glad to finally be around other adults. It was nice to be meeting back together with people again.

That afternoon, after we went back home for lunch and nap time for the little ones, before we headed out to Hillside Farm to meet the Stanley family for ice cream and time to meet each other and get to know each other since Cadence and Samantha had become such good friends. They also had a son who was in second grade, and at first Aedan was too shy to talk to him, and he was too shy to talk to Aedan, but after eating their ice cream, they warmed up to each other and started playing together, running around, and climbing up and jumping off of rocks. Samantha and Cadence obviously had a great time talking and getting together outside of school. I had met both her parents before, since they are got teachers in the Lake Lehman School District, but we never had much of a chance to talk in a casual way. They were easy to talk to, and we enjoyed watching our kids talk and play together. Once Covid is not as big of a thing anymore, and we feel like it's safer to get together without masks, we will definitely have to invite the kids over to play sometime. Making friends and getting together is definitely harder with Covid changing everything.

Here is a cute picture I took of Aedan and Owen holding hands that afternoon as we walked around the farm.

Here are some pictures of the kids posing with the sign. The first one of Aedan and Owen, and the next two of Samantha and Cadence.

That afternoon I went around our house and took some pictures of the hydrangea bushes and our weeping cherry tree that the deer have just demolished. I can't believe they are eating so much of our bushes! It makes me so sad. First, they ate all our hostas in our front landscaping, and now they have moved on to our hydrangea bushes, eating any leaves they can reach from standing out in the grass. Because of them eating them so early in the spring, the hostas weren't even able to bloom and look pretty like they did the year before when we moved in. I will have to do some research before next spring to see how I can prevent this from happening again.

Here is a science test from Samantha that she got a 100% on and a self-portrait she drew.

Here is a half done page of coloring sight words from Aedan, as well as a person that he colored to look like Harry Potter, simply because he knows Samantha likes it, so he likes it as well.

Here's a reading test and spelling test that Aedan got a 100% on. Great job! And his handwriting is so nice on his spelling test, too.

Here is a math page from Aedan where he's practicing with modeling addition, practicing words with short i sounds and another with words that are part of the -ock family, other worksheets with practice with words that go along with his story for the week, and a Halloween addition page.

Most nights are not entirely restful in our house due to having to wake up with our little peanut throughout the night. In fact, early Monday morning, two kids woke up within 15 minutes of each other, around 4:00 a.m. Neither of them could tell Ben what was wrong. One kid was our little peanut, so he fed her a bottle, and the other kid was Owen, and Ben just gave him a hug and told him to go back to sleep. Then, once everyone was awake that morning, Aedan told us that he had been dreaming about fighting Darth Vader, which made him wake up early so he couldn't get back to sleep. And Samantha couldn't fall asleep until after 9:00 p.m. the night before because she was worried about getting a bad grade on a test, and then she dreamed about being on the Titanic. Since I was out of town for a few days in Chicago, I had work I had to get done for my class, so I was up until almost 1:00 a.m. finishing work that was due for the week. It wasn't fun starting off the week with everyone being tired.

As we were getting ready for school that morning, Aedan actually barricaded himself in his room because he didn't want to go to school. He was talking about how he doesn't like it because it's different from last year, and it's not as fun. I'm sure it's not the same, and it's not as good. His kindergarten year was interrupted too, so he hasn't really even experienced what school actually should be like for a full year. I just don't know if he would be any happier doing school at home, virtually. I don't know if it would be worth it to let him try it and see if he likes it or if we should just stick with what we're doing. It's hard to know with him because I don't want to ignore his requests, and I don't want him to end up disliking school just from this experience, but I also don't know if I would have the time to help him with school like he would need with everything else I'm doing right now.

After I fed our little peanut her bottle that morning, Owen wanted to hold her, so I put her on his lap and took a few pictures. He enjoys having her around, and often talks about how cute she is.

Once I got our little peanut down for her nap, Owen and I got out the new better orange paint we got from the store so he could paint his pumpkin a brighter, bolder orange than the older, washable paint that I had on hand. It looked much better with this different paint, and he had a great time painting it exactly how he wanted it to look. You can see how serious he took his job of painting in this video, even stating that he needed a different color to paint the stem of the pumpkin. After we painted the pumpkin orange how he wanted it, we let it sit out to dry before decorating it with more colors.

I was so tired on Monday, after being up late working on my graduate class, and our little peanut was having a rough morning. She was just refusing to drink her bottle. She was just crying and screaming, and nothing I was doing was helping. I could only get her to eat 2 ounces, and then she cried every time I tried to put the bottle in her mouth. I had no idea why she was acting like that, as it was very unusual for her. Once it was nap time, I gave her some Tylenol and fed her the rest of the bottle. She was interested then and went right to sleep. It was times like these that I wondered if there was any progress in pursuing the grandma more because I felt so tired and overwhelmed. I just felt like life was too much for me, or really both Ben and me, at that time. We were too busy and always tired. I felt like there was just always so much going on and so many things for me to do, that I could never really enjoy the present moment that I was in.

Here is some of the work the kids brought home on Monday. Aedan got 100% on his reading test, did some practice with a color by number subtraction page, as well as a copy of his spelling words and the STAR test results page.

Here is Samantha's Chapter 2 Math Test that she was so worried about getting a bad grade on. She got an 89%, which isn't even a bad grade, but she felt like it wasn't good enough. We went over the problems with her that she got wrong, and she understood why, but she was still being hard on herself. Ben and I try not to put any of this pressure on her. It's mostly from herself. She expects herself to be perfect (which reminds me a lot of myself, especially in regards to getting good grades), but we just try to remind her that all we care about is that she is trying hard and doing her best. Even if she got a bad grade, but still tried hard and did her best, we wouldn't be upset with her. I did talk to her again about not highlighting so much and switching between colors. We also talked about maybe starting with the multi-step problem at the end first, and the importance of going back and reading the question carefully. We were proud of her and felt bad that she was so nervous about how she did on the test.

Here is a Social Studies test that she got 100% on. Her teacher wrote, "Excellent!"

Here are more papers from Aedan with practice adding an s to the end of words. adding numbers in any order, completing sentences, and drawing Jack and the Beanstalk.

After selling our pool table when I got back home on Saturday night, we did some rearranging of furniture to make our play areas work better for our needs. We moved the large green table downstairs so Samantha and Aedan would have more space to build and play with their Lego creations. Then, we moved this smaller coffee table upstairs so that we would still have a table for the kids to play on upstairs as well. Samantha and Aedan were then taking time organizing their Lego area, which as you can see in the picture, was a work in progress. It was so nice having the pool table gone. We had so much more space, and I was getting really tired of it just taking up so much space and it being a place that everything was just dumped.

Owen wanted to finish painting his pumpkin, so on Tuesday morning right after Samantha and Aedan went off to school, while our little peanut was still asleep, we got out the multi-colored paint so Owen could decorate his pumpkin in whatever colors he wanted. He was having a great time using lots of different colors, this time using his left hand to paint.

Here is his finished project. It looked great, just how he wanted it to be, so now we just have to wait for it to dry and then we could display it in the house.

Here is Owen posing with his pumpkin so we could send a picture to show Papa and Ema.

And here is where he chose to display his pumpkin. He was so proud and happy to have one just like Samantha and Aedan.

That Tuesday afternoon, our little peanut had a court hearing by conference call at 3:00. Ben came home so we could listen in on it together. It was pretty short, and there wasn't anything that we wanted to contribute. We just wanted to hear all the information firsthand, particularly in relation to unsupervised visits or our little peanut being moved to her paternal grandma. As of that court hearing, bio mom's visits moved to unsupervised now, still at her house. Bio dad will still have supervised visits at the outside agency. Her caseworker also mentioned that there would be a status hearing soon regarding our little peanut being moved to her paternal grandmother, and that she would let us know as soon as she got that date. Bio mom gets up to 8 hours a week to start, no overnights yet, but they may start in the near future. We now had to make a new visitation schedule, and they were trying to get us to do 3:30-7:30 on Fridays and 10:00-2:00 on Sundays, which really didn't work well for us because Ben has meetings on Friday afternoons and we have to pick the kids up from the school van. Plus, we are starting to attend a microgathering on Sundays, so the Sunday time would make it so that one of us is always missing it. After talking it through, we moved our little peanut's visits separate from her sisters for the visit during the week, deciding on Wednesdays from 10:30-3:30 so that Ben could pick her up on his way home from work, and then expanding the Sunday time from 9:00-2:00, so that way one of us could drop her off and still get back for our microgathering, while leaving her visit with her dad from 11:30-3:30 on Thursdays. I was happy we worked something out that fit with our schedule, and that the visit times were longer so it made it easier to just drop her off and come back home, rather than feeling like we needed to just stay down in that area.

Since I include papers from Samantha and Aedan, here are couple papers that Owen colored at AWANA that I found in his bag from last week.

Here are some math papers from Aedan with continued practice with addition.

I reached out to my friend, Kaili, about going to the Claws and Paws Zoo with us on Wednesday because it was going to be a beautiful, sunny day, and I wanted to enjoy our time outside doing something fun together. Our new visit schedule wasn't starting that day, so I had a little more freedom in my schedule. Kaili ended up not feeling like she could go to the zoo because her daughter was still in a leg cast, but she then texted and said she felt led to offer to watch our little peanut for me so I could just go with Owen. I was fully intending on just taking both kids with me, but since she offered, I decided to take her up on her offer. It took us awhile to get out of the house that morning, so we didn't drop off our little peanut and get to the zoo until 12:00, but that was okay. Owen could survive without a nap for the day, and he was really excited to be able to go to the zoo and spend time on a date with just me that day, where I could solely focus on him for the day and not have to take care of a baby as well.

We had such a beautiful, fun day at the zoo. I brought the stroller, just to be safe so I wouldn't have to carry him in case he decided he didn't want to walk, and I brought a change of clothes for him, in case he had an accident, and some snacks for the afternoon, but that was about it. It was so nice being able to go out without a diaper bag.

We watched these monkeys jumping, chasing each other, and making very loud screeching noises. Owen really liked watching them, and they made him laugh.

Owen doesn't usually ask for me to take his picture, so when he stopped and wanted me to take a picture of him under the giraffe, I was happy to take some pictures of my cute, happy little boy.

Here are some other pictures from our day at the zoo of animals that Owen found interesting, like this big tiger and these two leopards (I think that's what they are?). It was amazing seeing these big cats so close up.

They had a dinosaur dig area that Owen wanted to visit, and we were the only ones there, so I let him take his mask off and dig in the sand and use a brush to move the sand around to find the dinosaur bones hidden underneath. He was having fun, and I even grabbed a brush helped him dig for bones as well.

Owen wanted me to take some pictures of him on the pretend triceratops and inside the pretend dinosaur egg. He had fun pretending he was a baby dinosaur popping out of the egg.

And here he is inside a turtle shell. :)

We were able to see the whole zoo because it wasn't a huge place, but it has nice wooded paths and a decent variety of animals. I bought a ticket for Owen to feed the giraffes, so he was able to feed them several carrots, which he thought was really fun. The reptile house was also very interesting to him, and he enjoyed watching the huge snakes move along the glass, although it scared him a little bit when, at first, he didn't realize there was glass there.

Here is Owen posing for a picture in the pocket of a kangaroo.

Once it got to be about 2:45, we had seen all the animals in the zoo, and it was getting to the time where we needed to head out so we could go pick up our little peanut and head back home. However, before we left, I had Owen sit down next to me on a bale of pay for some pictures of the two of us together. We had a super fun day together, and it was such a blessing for us to have this time together, just the two of us. He had so much fun, I had to much fun being with him, and it was nice being able to give him my full attention. He does a better job of smiling for pictures when he can see himself, and we got some really great pictures of the two of us together.

After being out in the sun at the zoo all afternoon, he was a tired boy when we got back into the car. It didn't take too long for him to get tired of playing and fall asleep. He stayed asleep all the way to pick up our little peanut and most of the way back home after that. I was glad he fell asleep, especially because the kids had AWANA that night and would be up a little later because of that.

Thursday, October 22nd was another beautiful fall day. We have been blessed with such a nice fall with very little rain. I took a sub job at Ross Elementary School, and it was a pretty easy day. I think I subbed in a 5th grade class, and my day went well. Most of the work they had to do was on their Chrome Book, except for part of "Holes" that we read and discussed together. I was actually able to read my textbook chapter and do work for my graduate class, while they did their work, so it was a good day of subbing for me. While I subbed, Ben stayed home with Owen and our little peanut, taking her down for a visit with plans for us to go back and pick her up on our way down to Andrew and Alysse's house for dinner. They invited us over, and we were happy to visit some friends and share a meal together. Our kids really enjoy the Fillers, and they have fun exploring their collection of books and playing with the Legos they have for kids to play with when kids come over. They made us a yummy meal, and it was really enjoyable to just get together and talk to them, catching up on how life is going for our families, and watching our babies notice each other.

Friday was my shopping day, and it was a hard day because I had our little peanut with me as well. Owen was not listening to me at the store that day, and I tried to leave our little peanut in her car seat so she could continue napping, but Aldi doesn't have a good way to connect car seats to the cart, and it was hard to see around the cart to push it around the store without running into things. Nevertheless, I got the shopping done, which is all that really matters.

Here is the work the kids brought home from school that Friday: a symmetrical haunted house that Samantha drew; and then for Aedan: practice choosing words to fill a sentence, inflected endings word work, practice with words that end with -ap, a science worksheet on how plants and animals are alike and different, his Chapter 2 Math Test that he got 95% on, and a color by sum paper.

Aedan also had all these awesome drawings in his folder. He drew ninjas from Ninjago, and then Harry, Ron, and Hermione from Harry Potter. I love seeing how creative he is getting with his drawings lately. He has gotten so much better at drawing people, too! Aedan definitely loves to draw and replicate what he sees.

I think Aedan must have cleaned out his desk that Friday because he came home with a lot of papers. Here are more papers on telling what a story is about, practicing words from the -ot family, another science worksheet talking about plants and animals as well as living and non-living things, and a spelling test that he got 100% on.

Saturday was a frustrating day with Owen because, even though he has been doing pretty well with potty training, he seems to have reverted over the last couple of days. He isn't telling us when he has to go, and he was peeing enough that we had to change his underwear almost every time. Instead of telling us when he needed to go poop, he would just come walking toward you holding his bottom because he had already started pooping in his underwear. I know, gross potty talk. Then, if I would make him go to the bathroom more often in order to try to avoid having as many accidents, he would just cry or throw a fit. After having a hard time again, we decided to bring back the fruit snack rewards for keeping his underwear dry and telling us when he needed to go because apparently fthe potty training hadn't officially taken with him yet.

I don't want to go into too many details to respect Ben's privacy, but he has been going through a really hard time with his work, ever since last spring. He was feeling stressed out, exhausted, and was having a hard time sleeping. On Friday he started having pain in his stomach where he had his diverticulitis surgery, and he slept in a lot on Saturday morning, which is unlike him. I was starting to feel worried about him, and how all this stress was impacting his mind and body. I could tell that he was just so exhausted and discouraged, with no end in sight right now, and we were just really hoping that we would hear something soon.

(Blog about October 18-24, 2020)