school update

one of our last summer outings ... @ the splash park

i haven't posted any pics of nathan and our activities in a while, so this photo is pretty old. hoping to get a chance to do a photo update later this week. the photo above was taken the last week of august when nate and i got together for a last summer play date with tirza & kian and heather, mya, laila, menyelek & safia. i only wish we had discovered this park earlier in the summer. we brought lunches and ended up spending about 3 hours there. the splash area is more of a wading pool rather than the sprinkler type things that are at most parks. nathan loved it! i didn't even think that he would want to play (since i didn't know it was a wading pool), so i didn't bring any swim stuff for him. of course, since i didn't put him in swim stuff, he went directly into the water and got completely soaked from head to toe. good thing i had a change of clothes for him so i really didn't care if he ended up getting wet. we will definitely have to go to this park again next summer. it took nathan about an hour or so to warm up (he had fallen asleep in the car), but once he got going, he was playing all over the place. it was really sweet seeing menyelek and nathan in the park area. there was this ramp with footholds that nathan was unsure of how to navigate so the first time he went up, menyelek held his hand and helped him. the second time, nathan was still a bit unsteady, but tried to do it on his own. half way up, he felt like he needed an extra hand so he grabbed onto menyelek. i definitely see the advantage of having multiple kids when we all hang out together. the older ones look after the younger ones and us mommies can have a bit of a break.  :o)  the drama of the day happened when we went back to our cars. i was in a bit a rush cuz i had to pick up venetia from the airport. i get to the car and the engine won't start. seems like it's a battery issue, but of course, i don't have jumper cables. heather has some, but none of the three of us have ever jump started a car before so we weren't 100% sure what to do. thankfully there were people in the parking lot who helped us. and thankfully we had the DVD player in tirza's van to keep the kids entertained in the meantime. so now we know how to jump start a car and we also know to buy jumper cables to keep in said cars for emergencies. i got the car checked out and everything seemed fine, but just a few days ago, it happened again. good thing ken was with me this time. we jump started the car and made it home, but the next day it wouldn't start again, so i took it to the mechanic and had the battery replaced. hopefully that's the end of that!

so back to the title of the post... here's an update on the school situation: so nathan had been improving gradually over the course of the first week. then on sunday, ken and i went to drop him off at sunday school and for the first time ever, he did not whine or cry when we told him we were leaving. even though the drop off was a success, we figured that he'd still cry on tuesday when he went to preschool. so i end up having to wake him up on tuesday morning and hurry him through breakfast. i tell him he's going to school and of course, he says "no!" we go outside and again, he sort of cries/whines when we don't get in the car. i put him in the stroller and he seems okay. we turn the corner in the direction of school and again no protesting. we get there and he willingly gets out of the stroller. then we walk inside and he's still okay, but his eyes are taking on a watery quality. i give him his bottle of water and he holds onto it while sitting next to me on the bench. i tell him that i'm going to go, but that i'll pick him up later and he doesn't say anything. then i ask for a kiss and he turns his face up to give me a goodbye kiss. i get up and walk out and still...nothing. even one of the teachers looked surprised that he didn't cry like he did last week. then i go to pick him up a few hours later and he's actually playing in the schoolyard around the slides and such. and he's dirty from the sand! he wasn't even waiting by the gate for me like he was all three days the week before. and to top it all off, he doesn't want to leave! he ends up being the last kid left in the yard and i have to force him to leave after playing another 20 to 30 minutes. definitely good progress made!  :o)  way to go, naters!