The End of Summer

We had Nico's birthday party this weekend!  We invited a bunch of his little friends from school and had an olympic field day event at the park.  I broke out the poles for jump the creek.  Nico was in "rare" form.  He apparently misunderstood what it meant to be having a birthday party.  He must have somehow thought it was okay to be a maniac because he was OUT OF CONTROL.  Seriously, we haven't spanked him, but he came pretty close...

Unfortunately, Dave had a coaching thing in the morning, so we were dragging on getting things set up, and consequently, we ended up not getting very many pictures of the day.  I will say that a highlight included Nico taking a big bite out of the #5 candle that we had for him to blow out candles.  I was busy distributing cake, and didn't notice, until he had had a go with it.

In other news, we are on the countdown for the last days of summer.  Nico's school closed on Monday, and so we're trying to squeeze the last drops out of summer and get ready for school next week.  On Tuesday, I stayed home from work and we cleaned his room.  We got his closet set up and most of his clothes clean.  I even bought an iron last week and pressed some of his nicer long sleeve button ups.  We have most of his school stuff ready to go.

I wish I could figure out what it is about kids feeling the need to be a pack rat.  Seriously, he wants to hang onto every single little crappy birthday party toy, happy meal toy.  Ugh.  I guess I need to start a box to transition toys out of the house.  Although, his memory is so good, I'd be nervous that I transition some of his toys (like the bigger trucks and such) and then, one day, he asks, "Mom, have you seen that bulldozer I haven't played with in 6 months?"  No good can come from this...

Nico is still having fits.  It was something that I had hoped that he would grow out of by now: but alas, he hasn't.  I am hoping that this is merely a temporary thing... that there will be kids in kindergarten who are WAY too cool for that.  It could also be due to the fact that he isn't really napping anymore; but hasn't fully aged into the age of reason.  Obviously, we need to handle night time a little better- getting him in bed earlier.  Apparently at his age, he needs to be getting 10-11 hours of sleep at night.  Which means, that if we are waking him up at 615-630 to go to school, he needs to be asleep at 830.  It could get very ugly in here.