Halloween

Well it's Halloween again and we've got one very excited little girl at our house.

She can't wear her costume to school, they have a "noir et orange" party instead so she's dressed in black pants and an orange t-shirt. We've got little goody bags packed for her to take to school to share with her friends and she's really excited about that.

After school we will be meeting up with some friends to go trick or treating at a local mall. It's the smaller mall here in town and they offer trick or treating within the mall. We went last year and it was great. It's safe, there's no worries about the weather (although we're expecting 18 degrees today anyway!) and they get lots of great candy. We'll go there from 5-6 and then go home to hand out chips to the trick or treaters around here. Darcy and Nick will probably go up and down the street too.

Darcy is going to be dressed up as Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Wesley has a cute little pumpkin costume we're going to attempt to put on him. We'll see how that goes but I'm not holding my breath on that one!!! There will be pictures tomorrow.

On a different note, after being invited to her friend Quinn's house for supper last week, Quinn was invited to have supper at our house last night. It was so funny to see Darcy being so excited to have Quinn there. He's a really funny little guy so she spent most of supper giggling. They both managed to eat their supper, which surprised me a little bit. It seems that they're becoming great friends.

Happy Halloween, everybody! Stay safe if you're taking out any little trick or treaters.

The Bus

If you've been reading this for a while you'll know that I had some concerns about sending Darcy to school on the bus. In the end we decided to go with the bus and on the whole I still think we made the right decision. Some of the things I was concerned about are starting to happen though.

Darcy's bus rides are nearly as long as the time she spends in school. That really lengthens her day. She's gone from 11:45 - 4:15 which seems like a long day for a 4-year old. Of course most school districts are doing full days for Kindergarten so I guess that's not much of a concern for anyone but me! Her friend Quinn was falling asleep on the bus ride home some days (once we had to get on the bus to wake him up!) but the farther we get into the school year, that doesn't seem to be happening anymore.

She's often coming home with stories about things that happen on the bus and these are the things that concern me the most. One girl pushed Darcy off her chair because the other girl wanted to sit with Quinn that day. Another time a boy spat in her face! She's also full of stories of big boys calling other kids bad names. Quinn's Mom and I were talking about it yesterday when we were waiting for the bus at the end of the day and it seems she's been hearing a lot of the same stuff from Quinn. Then when the bus got there the kids got off and Quinn looked at him Mom and said, "Loser!" That seemed to be the new word he picked up on the bus yesterday. His Mom had a little chat with him, letting him know she doesn't like hearing him talk like that so hopefully that's the end of the loser talk at their house.

We had to take Darcy to the school before the school year even started for a bus safety day where they learned all the rules of the bus. Then one day a couple of weeks ago she was telling me about a friend of hers sharing her snack with Darcy on the bus. I reminded Darcy that eating on the bus is against the rules. She responded with, "It's OK, the bus driver didn't see us." She seems to be learing quickly that rules can be broken if the authority figure doesn't catch you (she has also responded to me, when I'm trying to point out something wrong she's doing, "That's OK, Daddy's not here.").

So we're learning quickly that not all of her learning is done in the classroom! She seems to be handling it well for the most part. For example, when the girl pushed Darcy out of her seat, Darcy said she just went back and sat where she was. That's it, Darcy! Don't let yourself get pushed around.

Important Links

It seems that every Halloween you hear some sort of warning about keeping your children safe. Some are just common sense, some are complete craziness and some are worth reading about. One came to my attention the other day from my Mom and I thought it was worth posting about here so any other Moms who read this who may not have heard about will hear about it from me. It's a warning about tainted chocolate coins that could be handed out this year, which are part of the melamine in milk disaster going on in China right now. For more information, please read this article.

Secondly, we know that as soon as Halloween is over we'll be hearing all about Christmas. If you are looking for some good ways to help others this Christmas, I've got some good links for you. The first is my annual plug for the World Vision Christmas Catalogue. We've bought things from this catalogue several times and have been very pleased with the whole process. I've also found two other organizations doing similar things so here are links to their catalogues too so you can decide what's best for you. Samaritan's Purse information can be found here. I had wanted to include some information about the Salvation Army's new program which is similar but oddly enough, I can't find any! If I find it, I'll post it here later.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Update:

I found the information I was looking for. The Salvation Army has a program called Gifts of Hope. There isn't a lot of information on the website, just a list of what can be purchased but you can find it here.

Great News!

Wesley has had a cough for a few weeks which just isn't getting better. He woke up from his nap this afternoon wheezing and fighting for breath and I decided enough was enough, we needed to see a doctor this afternoon (wait a minute, isn't this post called "Good news"??? Read on).

The doctor prescribed an antibiotic and in order to get the dosage right we needed to know an accurate weight for Wesley. We weighed him and he weighed 8.8 kg or 19.4 lbs! That's the good news. Our pediatrician had been concerned about Wesley's weight and had told me to be careful when feeding him to get him the most calories possible. He wants to see Wesley again in November and had hoped he would weigh 19 lbs then. I'm now hopeful that he'll weigh 20 lbs by his November appointment.

This is really good news for us and huge load off my mind. Keep up the good eating, Wesley. Now if only we could get rid of that cough...

Good Stuff

Well I feel like I wasn't really being fair to Wesley the other day with my post. It made it sound like he's just a troublecauser so I wanted to write a new post today to focus on some good stuff.

Wesley is a super-cuddly little guy. He will walk across the room just to get a hug. They're good hugs too. He'll lay his head down on your shoulder and give you a good squeeze. I didn't think there was anything better until he started giving kisses too. If he wants a kiss from you then he'll pucker up his lips, giving himself the cutest little fishy face. Then he makes smacking sounds until you give him a kiss. It's so sweet (unless he's doing this in the high chair when his face is full of food!). Our favourite thing is when you're putting him in bed. He'll lie down in bed, sick his bum up in the air and then as soon as you walk away he'll get up on his knees and start making kissing sounds. You go back and give him a kiss, he gives you a big grin and then he lies back down. You just can't beat that!

He's also starting to understand what we're saying to him. If he shoves too much food in his mouth at one time (which happens at every meal, several times) we tell him to take a drink and he does! If we're getting ready to go somewhere I'll ask him to go get his shoes and he'll walk over to the mat and pick up his shoes. He'll also do this on his own if he wants to go somewhere. If Nick is getting ready to walk Darcy over the school bus stop Wesley will pick up his shoes and bring them to me because he wants to go too. If his jacket is not hung up, he'll pick that up too.

He's really getting into a fun stage where he's learning new things all the time and we're loving it... when we're not trying to keep him from climbing the walls!

I've put new pictures up on flickr if you haven't seen them yet.

No Time

Sorry I haven't updated in a while but I don't have a lot of time for blogging when I'm so busy trying to keep Wesley out of trouble! That kid can figure out ways of doing things that we didn't think were possible.

First of all, he can open the child locks we have on the cupboards in the kitchen. Of course he figured this out using the cupboard under the sink where all the poisons are. He uses toy shelves as ladders and has ways of pushing toys together to make stairs. He likes to stand on the arms of the couch. We had to buy a special lock for the oven because he was using the handle as a chin-up bar. As I typed that he tried to crawl under my feet to unplug the computer. Needless to say, he keeps us on our toes.

Darcy is still doing well at school. The crying seems to have stopped and she's really becoming good friends with the boy across the street. They're always wanting to play at each other's houses after school. Her teacher is pleased with her progress and loves having her in the class. It sounds like she's getting off to a great start.

Things are changing a bit for Nick at work. Starting today his shifts will all be 11 hours long. He was just doing 9 hours shifts so he thinks these extra two hours are going to be long. My extra two hours alone with monkey-boy may seem long too!

As for me, I've got my formal wear worked out for the cruise with a couple of new dresses that I'm really pleased with and a new pair of shoes. Now I'm more eager than ever for that cruise!

So that's about it from our house for now.