Grindstone Nature Area

 Yesterday, I took James and Leah out to Grindstone Nature Area. Amelie elected to stay home and read in the peace and quiet (with Sam as he's working from home).

James likes to look for minnows and take off his shoes for some reason. 

It was bright! You can see that this was before Leah got too terribly messy. 

Just look at that halo of hair. 

Getting dirtier by the minute. 

Striking a pose: 

James said, "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET ACROSS?!" 

And I said, "Well, Leah did," and he figured it out. 

Mold fossils from the rocky beach: 

We got Taco Bell freezes for $1 happy hour on the way home and James said that we needed to get Amelie one too even though she didn't come with us to the park - how magnanimous. 

Fireworks

Sam bought some sparklers and snappers for the kids. Here he is with the lighter.

This was from two different nights - if you were wondering if Amelie changed clothes (which would not be unheard of).

Video:

Girl Scout Cookies

I meant to take a picture of Amelie with the gigantic stack of boxes of cookies when they came in, but I forgot.

Here's James - he really wanted to accompany her when she went around making her sales pitches. He's also asked several times to join the boy scouts, and it seems as though the primary motivation is that he wants to sell things.

This is at our next-door neighbor's house.

The end of the cookie-selling season was right at the beginning of the coronavirus shutdowns and it threw a big monkey wrench in everything. We ended up with MANY more boxes of cookies than I'd intended just for our family. We spread them out a box at a time for our increased coronavirus dessert times. Even so, when I gave three boxes of Thanks-a-Lots to the Ridgeway teachers who were retiring at the drive-through retirement celebration, the kids exclaimed in disappointment that we were giving some of the boxes away.

Here's Leah in her tigger costume (all the more festive) with our drive-by happy retirement sign:

And here's Amelie with her completed cookie order form. Over 200 boxes!

She's got more patches, but hasn't seen her troop in person to get them for quite a while!

It looks like I was similarly late last year - here's the post about cookie sales from June: https://babybuffaloe.blogspot.com/2019/07/girl-scouts.html

Mani/Pedi

Leah asked for "glitter toes."

And then the next day I talked her into a finger nail trim by saying I'd paint  her fingernails. She disagreed with me saying they were for TOES, but she eventually came around.

Playing Catch

Sam got James a new glove since his old one was too small (it might have been Amelie's at first, and now it's Leah's.)

Photobomb!

They've also been playing four square:

Well-Child DR

Amlie had her 10-year well child visit back at the end of May. Double digits!

She had to wear a mask, and I gave her a piece of gum to sweeten the deal, though she seemed pleased to pick one out and put it on. Since I was accompanying her, I had to sign in and we both had our temperatures taken at the door. The waiting room was basically empty and the seats were all spread out far apart.

I think she was excited to get out of the house. This was the first time that she'd gone out in public (inside of a building) since the whole quarantine. The doctor asked about how things were going and I brought up that she'd missed quite a lot of her services through school and we got a referral to do an assessment for occupational therapy. We did that and they recommended once a week for 8 weeks. The first week was just various assessments, which was very interesting. The OT who called to give me the results of the assessment said that she was below where she should be in several areas with regard to grip strength, etc, but that she had lots of strategies to make up for it, which we knew. We've been several times, and they're working on some things like handwriting that she was doing at school and some social skills (which she was also doing at school!)

I found a list online of 10-year milestones:

Grow about 2.5 in. (6 cm) and gain about 7 lb (3 kg) in a year. (I thought this was funny because according to the post, she'd grown exactly 2 inches and gained exactly 7 pounds since last year.) 

Have growth patterns related to gender. Signs of early puberty may develop in girls. (No signs yet, I don't think, but we have a book!) 

Lose about four baby teeth each year. These are replaced by permanent teeth. 

Know the complete date (day of the week, day of the month, month, and year).

Can name the months of the year in order. (I am not actually sure about this one, but we can work on it this summer.) 

Can read and understand a paragraph of complex sentences.

Are reading books with chapters. (Favorites are still Wings of Fire and Warrior Cats.) 

Are skilled in addition and subtraction and are building skills in multiplication, division, and fractions.

Have learned to write in cursive. (I wouldn't say that she's completely learned, but they are teaching it at school and she's practiced it. I wrote the top lines and then she copied them.) 

• Can write simple stories.
• Enjoy being with their friends. They often have a best friend of the same gender.
• Continue to enjoy team and group activities. (I mean, there's no team or group anything happening right now. I suspect that she's going to be VERY enthusiastic about any kind of group get-together as soon as she can have one.)
• Continue to insist they are not interested in children of the opposite sex. But they may show off, tease, or act silly as a way of getting attention from or interacting with them.
• Like and listen to their parents. Some children, though, will start to show irritation with or lack of respect for adults who are in charge.
• Enjoy reading. They may seek out magazines and books on subjects of special interest.
• Can converse easily with people of all different ages.
• Have speech patterns that are nearly at an adult level. 
• Have developed control of their large and small muscles. They are able to enjoy activities that use these skills, such as basketball, dancing, and soccer.
• Have developed endurance. Many can run, ride a bike, and enjoy activities that require a degree of physical conditioning.
• Continue to advance their fine motor skills, such as those needed for clearer handwriting and detailed artwork. (We're working on these last 3 milestones in OT!) 

Significant Statistics:
Height: 4 feet, 3 inches (9th percentile)
Weight: 66 pounds (30th percentile)

Here's a link to last year's appointment: https://babybuffaloe.blogspot.com/2019/06/doctor-visit.html

Trash Day

I posted this on my facebook page and it sparked off a discussion about our very local politics. In Columbia, trash cans are a hotly debated political issue, apparently.

Through a series of unfortunate events (including the sanitation workers being exposed to COVID), we ended up missing 3 weeks of pickup, which translates into about a month's worth of recycling to take to the curb. For his chore that day, James took out the two blue bags and carefully dragged a slightly larger-than-him box of cardboard and paper out to the big rock.

Since recycling service was (hopefully temporarily) discontinued, we'll have to find him a new chore. He feeds the dog in the morning and takes out the recycling and does other tasks as assigned - he likes laundry and vacuuming the best.

Rainbows

There will probably be a series of posts from the last couple of months, getting caught up with the picture archive. Sam took these of a big rainbow in our backyard back at the end of May.

It's hard to see in a picture!

James walking around our block in the rain.

He doesn't mind getting wet.

And then there was a big rainbow at our park towards the end of June.

I think Sam might have saturated the color in the photo above, but you can tell from this one that it was very bright anyway. He had to lie down on the grass to get the kids and the rainbow all in the same shot.

Here's me and Amelie waiting under the tree. We got caught out in the rain at the park, but it didn't last too long and then there was the rainbow :)

4th of July

We were so excited this year that MUUSA and the city's big fireworks display wouldn't overlap! Then everything happened.

I put the kids in holiday-themed outfits, because why not?

 Family photo with the tripod & timer.

We were planning on driving through Wendy's but the line went on forever, so we got expensive Baskin Robbins so as not to miss the start of the show. I asked Sam why he didn't turn the car off while I was trying to take a picture & he said because he was trying to provide some light/like a flash. ha. 

 I'd heard that the display was going to be a lot higher than normal - visible for a 4 mile radius. Sam's work is one mile from Cosmo-Bethel park, so we parked there. I think there were too many trees and maybe the fireworks didn't make it up as high as they'd planned. 

So we scooted over to an adjacent lot where we could see better - it was really quite nice other than the last-minute scramble.

 Happy slightly belated Independence Day!