Yeye's Post - April 3,2014

This Tuesday Joshua was quiet when he arrived but he soon brightened up.  He ate a bowl of cereal before he and I tackled the Mary had a Little Lamb puzzle.  He enjoyed that and had some successes, but I helped quite a bit.  After that I opened the Nee-how game.  It gives you 6 outdoors scenes: a cabin, grass, trees, cartoon characters, etc.  Then there are 25 turn-over cards depicting: a flower, dinosaur, rainbow, caterpillar, etc.  The player turns over a card and then looks for the dinosaur or whatever.  Some of the items are very hard to spot, but Joshua did very well; some things he spotted immediately after turning over the card. He says the names: caterpillar, rainbow, dinosaur, etc.  He really enjoyed it, we’ll do it again I’m sure.  After that Jean put out some red and yellow paint and a brush and Joshua daubed them on paper on the easel; we’ll show you next time you’re over.  

At 12:30 I picked up Nicholas; they were playing outside at the time and Morah Jan said they were a bit behind schedule due to wet hair from swimming.  As we drove away I asked Nicholas if he wanted to stop at the carwash to wash Dada’s car, and he did.  We stopped beside the coin-vacuum, and each of us took a turn vacuuming the inside.  I noticed a pencil of black plastic underfoot and picked it up.  Nicholas was standing between the vacuum and the waste barrel, so I handed it to him and asked him to deposit it.  He looked at it in his hand, and discovered a switch that turned on a red light.  I was worried it might be a laser, so I retrieved it and put in my back pocket, planning to toss it when Nicholas wasn’t looking.

Then we got into the car and drove into the wash stall.  Nicholas had been fascinated with the soap brush on our last visit, so he and I took turns applying lots of foamy soap all over the car.  (Nicholas knows he mustn’t leave the stall.)  We were a little slow getting to the rinse cycle, so we had to deposit 2 more toonies for rinse and then wax.  Nicholas wanted to turn the hose onto the floor to clean up the soapsuds, but I assured him they would drain away on their own.  The car looked pretty good!

At home, Jean made Nicholas a bacon on toast, but before we came inside Nicholas and I stayed outside half an hour so he could shovel the front path.  Jean was quite entertained, watching through the front window.  Nicholas would jam his red shovel (thanks Peter) into the snow bank, and then toss the snow over his head behind him.  Then he decided he was digging for treasure, but he didn’t find any.  (5 minutes earlier we had found a nickel in the froggy that sits on top of one of the posts of the front deck, but Nicholas didn’t consider that to be treasure.  We had put it in there a year ago on his whim.)   Then we went inside and Jean made the bacon & toast.

After that Jean and Nicholas worked on their Chirp project - a forest scene built on top of a cardboard box.  Nicholas produced trees and a small lake from coloured paper, and chose the plastic animals to populate the tableau.

Near the end of the day I’d gone up to use the computer when Jean called me.  Nicholas had been looking for the “plastic pencil” from this morning.  He couldn’t find it in my jacket (it was in my pants pocket), but he did find my guilty secret - a half-eaten gummy candy!  I came downstairs to face the music - Jean was not impressed.  I know they’re bad, but sometimes I succumb to temptation.

Nicholas asked about the plastic pencil which I produced; he showed Jean and Dada (recently arrived) how it worked.  Cam looked at it and concluded that it wasn’t a laser pointer, but we couldn’t figure out what it was.  I decided that “the unknown” had to go to the garbage can, much to Nicholas’s dismay.  I sat him on my knee and explained that we didn’t know what it was, and I wasn’t going to let him keep it because it worried me.  He wouldn’t let go of it, and in the end I had to pry it out of his fist.

Nicholas didn’t say anything, but clearly he was upset.  He marched into the living room and plopped down on the sofa, lying down.  Jean went and sat with him and I threw the plastic pencil into the recycling box.  A few minutes later Nicholas calmly got up and we all proceeded to get the boys ready for the ride home.

He didn’t seem to hold a grudge against me; I went out to the car with the boys and Cam, and helped Nicholas into his safety-seat and kissed him good-bye.  Reflecting on the incident, I’m very proud of him; his reaction to his disappointment was very mature.