Thanksgiving Break

Can you believe that kids have a week off of school now during Thanksgiving? When we were kids, we had 2 days off! Seems like kids these days hardly go to school anymore, with all the extra days off, early release days, etc. due to budget cuts!

With that said, we met with Jadon's teacher for parent/teacher conferences this week (already!) He is doing very well, on track and above in all areas.  Especially in reading.  He is really excelling in reading.  They have reading groups in his class, and each group consists of just a handful of the kids. His teacher said they are at the point in the reading now where a lot of the kids start to slow down in the learning, but she said Jadon keeps climbing away, and she doesn't want to keep him from continuing that so she wants to move him to the next group level. So, she sent us home with 2 extra lessons to get him caught up to the next group, which we are working on and so far is easy peezy for him, and he is very excited to move up! He enjoys reading and is eager to learn.
His writing and drawing/coloring are not the best, only because he is not interested in those things, so he doesn't put any effort into it.  He has no problem in actually doing them though.  He can easily write his letters now, its just sloppy. I have to get on to him about writing with nice handwriting, especially when writing things like schoolwork or thank you cards. Of course, I can't talk, I have terrible handwriting so who am I to tell him to write nicer!?

On friday he and a couple other kids in his class got to go with the principal and get a cookie because they ran the most laps in their class for the jog-a-thon!  We are pretty proud of him! He is really enjoying school!

So in other news, our bug problem persists. I've been trying desperately to get rid of these ants, but it seems that no matter what, they are all over the place. Since they are all over just randomly, I cant place any bait traps. The last straw for me came the other day when I found about 5 on my couch throughout the day. Also that was a bad day and I was finding ants in every room of the house pretty frequently. I spent 2 hours vacuuming the house, and taking the hose and vacuuming the floorboards and around the walls, moving the couches.
The bug guy will be here bright and early Tuesday morning to treat the bugs. :)

Every year we do Operation Christmas Child.  If you're not familiar with it, basically people can create shoe boxes full of toys, toiletries, school supplies, etc. for kids in less fortunate countries, and every year they send millions of boxes to children.  You can make a box online through the website and they will pack the box or you can pack your own and drop it off at a designated location.  In the past we've just done it online, but the kids have not seemed to understand the point much.  This year, since Jadon seems to be having an issue with being quite ungrateful lately, and because we want the kids to understand that Christmas isn't about getting. We want them to experience the joy of giving, and to see that while yes, its nice to get gifts, but its even nicer to give gifts. So this year we packed our own boxes.  This way the kids had to go to the store, pick out stuff that they would not get to keep, that would not be for them, and then give it away to children who would get to keep it.  In addition, Derek showed the kids videos and pictures of kids receiving their boxes. The kids liked seeing the children so happy. It always brings a tear to my eye to see those videos of those happy faces.
For me, its bittersweet.  I wish that I could make hundreds of boxes, and I wish that I could personally deliver each one.  The reactions from the the children receiving the boxes are always the reactions that I hope to see from my own kids when they get presents from anyone, but its usually not that way. One of the downsides of being so fortunate is that you grow up not appreciating what you have and what you get, so we are hoping to instill this into our kids early on so that they realize that they are really and truly blessed.

Praying for sanity

Hard to believe its already nearing mid- November!  

We've been here at the rental now for around 3 weeks, and continue to have problems.  Since the day we moved in, I would randomly find an ant here and there every once in awhile, and I'd kill it and then wouldn't think anything else of it. 

Last friday morning I was sitting on the couch in the early morning before everyone else was up, and had an ant crawl out from one of the arm sleeves of my robe.  I smashed it then flicked it.  A second later, one crawled out from the other sleeve!  I about lost it at that point!  I hate bugs!  The kids love to have the ants and bugs crawling on them, but I can't stand it!  I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. 

Then a few minutes later I got up and looked in the cupboard for something, cereal i'm guessing?  And the cupboard had ants all over in it.  You've GOT to be kidding me. 

So I immediately went and got some Terro ant bait traps and set them out.  They worked almost immediately, and before long I had a line of ants running up and down the wall.  I set up several more in the kitchen, and after a couple days I only see an ant every once in awhile in the kitchen. I am still seeing quite a few every day in the bathroom though, so I've got one set up in there as well. And randomly throughout the house I will see one here and there, and when I do I kill them.

So after a day or so of using the Terro bait, I got out my swiffer sweeper vac and was vacuuming the kitchen floor, and I looked in the canister to see if I vacuumed up any ants before I dumped it in the garbage can, and I noticed there were no ants, but something ELSE was moving.  Little worm looking things.  Oh fantastic!  So we saved the bugs in a ziploc bag and called the landlord and she called the Good Earth guy, who came today to confirm what both Derek and I had researched to be.... carpet beetle larvae. 

On a positive note, this house has a big backyard, and the kids have been LOVING it.  Its fully fenced, and they are outside rain or shine, dark or light, cold or hot.  So, i'm confident that we made the right choice in selling, afterall, the biggest driving force behind our decision to sell was that we wanted a bigger property for the kids to be able to run around in. The unfortunate thing is they don't have many outdoor toys, so they (read Jadon) is very destructive.  A tree branch is taking quite the beating and i'm afraid it will be broken off before we leave (the hummingbird feeder that was hanging on this branch has already been broken), the apples from the apple tree are used as baseballs to throw at the house and fence and trees.  2x4 boards that we brought from the old house and were sitting in the backyard in a stack were moved all over the yard and almost crashed through Avery's bedroom window on at least one occasion. The little pea gravel that's used as landscaping, has been used for play... as seeds all over the place, as fireworks all over the grass, or just  thrown all over the deck and porch.  Its beginning to look like a tornado has gone through out there, and quite frankly, sometimes watching Jadon running around back and forth out there it feels like i'm watching a tornado. At the same time, if he's not under constant surveillance, those are the things that happen. Is it normal for boys to be so destructive?  Or is he just bored and trying to come up with things to do?  He's always destroying everything.  He never plays with toys for long the way they are meant to be played with.  This drives me crazy because most of his toys end up broken because of this.  Its not just toys that he destroys. Anything he can get his little hands on ends up broken somehow.  Even the poor bushes outside take a beating in one way or another!  I told Derek several months back after a particularly frustrating day where Jadon was making a destructive path throughout the house and yard, that someday Jadon was going to be a famous creator of some trillion dollar invention or something and we would be the parents interviewed years down the road and we'd say "as a child, he was always destroying things. Everything he played with he never played with the way it was meant to be played with. It was never played with the way it was supposed to be played with. Little did we know that his destruction was paving the way of a brilliant inventor!" 

Needless to say, between the bugs and the destructive child, i'm praying for my sanity!