The girls were SO excited. We made him his favorite breakfast (biscuits with sausage gravy), which none of the rest of us really enjoy so it's a BIG treat for him :) Then the girls gave him the numerous cards and pictures they've been making for him over the past few weeks. Matt said at the end of the day that one of the best parts of the day was when one of the machines broke down at work and he got to spend several hours trouble-shooting and trying to fix it. (Translated this means he didn't have to write any reports or answer anyone's questions for several hours :)
While Matt was at work, we made and frosted his pumpkin cake ...yum! We had a tasty dinner with fresh asparagus and then the cake for dessert. Poor Anna didn't finish her slice since, in her own words, she had already had too many desserts yesterday. (In her preschool class there are two boys that are from a set of triplets and they celebrated their birthdays yesterday at school with ice cream sandwiches AND cookies. The cake must have put her over the top :)
Before the birthday celebrating began, we had a rough week last week. Anna fought off a mild stomach bug on Wednesday and Thursday. She never actually got sick, but didn't eat for a couple of days and was feeling pretty under the weather. So combining staying indoors because of that, along with staying indoors because of the cruddy weather, and we were all feeling cooped up for awhile.
At least I had the idea to get out the big boxes of legos my mom brought down awhile back. These belonged to my brother and me when we were kids and probably hadn't been played with for decades. Needless to say, they needed a bit of cleaning up and organizing. But once that was done, the girls were very content to just sit, play, and pretend with whatever they could find. We had to put them away again on Saturday morning otherwise they wouldn't have wanted to do anything else!
The other struggle recently has been Anna's behavior. After things slipping and sliding downwards for a few weeks, we finally decided last night to do some intentional refocusing. Don't get me wrong, Anna's a great kid. But there have been too many fights when leaving the house or getting ready for bed recently and something needed to be done. Thankfully we remembered this time how well Anna responds to positive incentives, so today is Day 1 of the our plan which involves lots of positives, but also some well chosen consequences for our almost-five-year-old. Hopefully this will help us get back on track so our home can be a bit happier when it comes time for our kids to take on responsibility for themselves.
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