Santa Elves

We're working on a little Christmas project (psssssssst.  it's for Uncle JJ).  Don't tell him.

Nico wanted to be under the bike, like a car mechanic.  I tried to explain that it doesn't really work like that.

Pukey McPukersons

So, we had a bit of an adventure in epidemiology this past week.  So, how it is in the Bishop-Royse house is that we put Nico to bed in his bed.  At some point in the middle of the night, he wakes up and comes into our bed.  Also, apparently, there is usually some ruckus at some point over night, because all the boys in the family are awake... but I usually don't wake up.  The dogs usually have to go out at 1 am and start their dance (refer to JBR explanations no how they conditioned Dave to do this).  Dave heaves a few deep sighs before kicking the covers off to go let the dogs out.  Sometimes Nico stirs when this happens.  Usually, I am dead to the world at this point.  But on Wednesday night, I stirred a bit too... Nico was fussing around a lot.  I was starting to get a bit annoyed with this when I heard the sound of someone puking.

Its distinctive.  There is no other sound like it.  So I spring out of bed and snatch Nico out- but the damage has been done.  PUKE.  IN.  THE. BED.  Eh.  So we change him and strip the sheets.  We get him back to sleep.  But Thursday morning, he wasn't feeling so great, so he stayed home from school.

Fast forward to Friday, where I had an especially hard workout at the gym and didn't feel right for the rest of the day.  I got home and didn't eat much.  Around 9pm on a Friday night, I PUKED.  On the floor in the basement.  You know you are an adult when you have to clean up your own puke.  Saturday night it got Dave.  It got Dave. I can't even.

Yeah.  So that was our week/weekend.

Upside to having a naturally curious, but relentless 5 year old?  Now realizes that packages arriving at our house may be for him. And insists that we open.  Its not even Thanksgiving and I am tired of explaining why we cant just open presents now, even though he has presented compelling information.  He said that if he could open them now, he will act surprised when he opens them for real on Christmas.  He actually said that.  He clearly doesn't know who he is dealing with.

It's hard to see it, but he wrote that we should not open the package from Amazon until Christmas.

I'm just a little shy...

Nico got in a scotch of trouble at school last week.  Apparently he wouldn't stop talking during class.  And he did not feel the need to participate in school activities.  You know me, I was like:

Precisely.

So we had the conversation about it and I made him write an apology letter.  The next day when it was time to deliver it to her, he didn't want to (he IS terribly shy about approach ANYONE to ask them something or say something to them).  As we were walking into school he was trying to convince me to do the heavy lifting on this.  And I was like, "I wasn't the one disrupting class.  That was you.  You need to apologize and give her the note." And he said, plain as day, "Mom, remember, I'm just a little shy."

It basically made my day.

He's really amazing...

I know, right?  Do I even blog anymore?

It's the end of the quarter.  That is all I can say about that. I wish there were some better reasons why I find it so hard to keep up with the blog.  Nico continues to amaze us every day with the things that he does and the things that he says.

Last week we went to pick up his report card (CPS requires that you actually go and get it from school- it gives the teacher a chance to sit down with parents).  It was a really good experience... Nico is off the chart on a lot of things.  She mentioned that he gets off task some times- but not in a destructive way.  She will say something or they will do something in class and it will remind him of something he thought about last week... so he will tune out for a while.  She thinks that this is partly due to his experience with Montessori school, where that kind of thinking was encouraged and emphasized over the day to day "tasks" of completing work.  She said that this would probably be a struggle for us for a while- because he is so smart and he does have a really good memory... and that is the way learning should work- being able to follow thoughts and ideas to their natural logical conclusion.  Ultimately, this isn't a model that works well with public school where you often have 10 minutes for an assignment or an activity.

She is encouraging us to do even more activities with Nico at home- because she is afraid he isn't going to get anywhere even close to his potential only doing the work that they do in class.  The good news for us, is that he is starting to get curious about a broader range of subjects and topics.  He is passionately curious about nature and animals and geology.  Combined with his interest in military history and his now developing interest in reading and writing, and I am floored.  His writing needs work- and his drawing/coloring does too.  But he is actually trying to figure out how to spell things.

 
This is such a departure from before, where he wouldn't even try to write his own name because he didnt want to be wrong.

What is crazy is that the writing thing came on very fast.  For so long, he resisted sitting down to write and just wanted no part of it.  And now, whenever we are watching sport on TV, he's finding a notebook or a scratch piece of paper to write down the scores to the games.  He likes being the score keeper for games that we play at the house and even had a go adding items to my grocery list!!  Even better is that he is starting to be able to self-direct on homework.  So when he started school, one of us usually had to sit right next to him and encourage/goad/admonish him to do homework.  And now he knows what to do... so it just tears through it.  This morning, it was sitting on the table at breakfast and he picked it up and did a sheet of it without either of us even asking.  Even crazier is that we don't do homework in the morning.

I say this about all the ages, but this one is really fun.  I love that he is getting curious about the world around him.

The Photog Game

We are settling into the rhythm of Fall.  This week was the first week that Nico's soccer team was on "winter break", so we had LITERALLY nothing we had to do.  These kinds of weekends make me equal parts anxious and excited... anxious because I feel like there are things I am supposed to be doing.  Excited because I have so many things I am going to get done.

For example, this weekend, I made apple sauce from the apples we picked and blueberry muffins (from the blueberries we picked during the summer).  I also made Shepherd's pie for dinner tonight and a kick ass slow cooker shredded pork dish for dinner last night.  I made a serious dent in the laundry and caught a nap on both days.  Of course, there is all the teaching stuff that I had planned to do, but somehow didnt have the time for it.  :)

In other news,  I have been booked for two weddings.  As a photographer.  Wait, what?  What am I even talking about?  I have been trying to breathe life into JBR Photography, whenever I am not teaching and doing the 23498723498 things it seems like we have to do.  Back in the Spring and the Summer, I was bidding on smaller, one off jobs: someone needing photos for med school applications, someone needing photos of products for a website.

To be honest, I've been weary about shooting weddings.  Mostly because the stakes are so high and I get nervous.  An old friend from Tallahassee recently got engaged and was looking a photographer so I submitted a bid.  One of my gym girlfriends also got engaged over the summer and was interested in whether I would be interested in shooting her wedding- but that is not till 2016.  So I have time.

In an effort to take my photog game to the next level, I purchased a new Canon camera.

I thought about going with a Nikon- as it seems like a lot of the photographers that I know shoot with Nikons.  However, I wanted to be able to use my current lenses.  I'd been keeping my eye open for the Canon I got on eBay and Amazon.  It is the lower end of the professional grade cameras- but I love it so far.  I am definitely looking forward to shooting more when the quarter is over.