Crafts, Snowboarding, Big Kids Party

He lost his second upper front tooth just a few days after the last one. I didn't realize it was that loose! He was messing with the punching bag in the garage and it came back and hit him in the face and kind of jammed that tooth on angle. But I was letting him run around outside the school and saw him smile and realized he was toothless on top!!

He is enjoying the swing and partial treehouse. He can climb pretty high up the rope of his swing, especially if someone holds it still for him. But he still needs some help getting back down.  He also likes taking the swing up to the platform of his treehouse and swinging from there too!

He loves to sing. I love hearing him sing. I think his favorite songs to sing on Rock Band are "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash, and "All Star" by Smashmouth. But when he is playing, he makes up a lot of songs. I love it.

Andrew was being testy one morning and on the way to school I told him "You're not smarter than me, ya know."  He asked me if I was in advanced classes when I was little and I told him no. "Well see, then I'm going to be smarter than you when I'm older."  lol   I told him advanced classes weren't offered to me until High School and by then I could decline taking them because I didn't need to take the classes. He told me that he was going to go to college to get a good job and I told him that I didn't even go to college and had my own business.  I explained that even if he actually was the smartest person on earth for real - if he isn't kind and humble, then Jehovah is not going to accept him into His organization and his life would mean absolutely nothing.  That he doesn't need to strive to be the smartest person on earth, he needs to strive to do what is right in Jehovah's eyes and be loving and kind and humble. Jehovah will train whoever he needs to to accomplish his will - and it won't be the smartest person on the planet.  By then we were turning onto the street the school is on, so he just thought about that the rest of the way.

Andrew asked me if I'd buy some pipe cleaners for him to do crafts with. Tuesday November 24th, he was out of school so Ted took the day off and they went snow boarding. I went to a craft store to browse for fabric and saw pipe cleaners. I bought a bag of 100.  By the next morning, there were only 11 left in the bag - and I had all sorts of pipe cleaner creations all over my house!  I loved it, but couldn't believe he'd pretty much used them all already!
He enjoyed his snow boarding experience. They got there around 11:30am and left around 3. Ted said he picked it up very quickly and when he did fall down he popped right back up and kept going.

November 25th - we were expecting it to start snowing in the afternoon so I thought I'd take him to the park while it was still sunny and I thought mild.  The temperature dropped 6 degrees in 40 minutes and the ice-cold wind was picking up. Usually being in the sun is enough to keep you warm even in sub freezing temperatures here - but the wind is another story!  40 minutes was all I could handle, but he thoroughly enjoyed the new park I took him to. The monkey bars wrapped in a semi-circle back to the platform, there was a climbing wall, a tunnel made of circular bars to climb, a ladder that curved to the side making the top more tricky, and some weird shaped objects to climb on among other regular playground equipment. Pretty neat. We can go again when it's warm.
I think thats the evening the Waggoners all came over and spent the night too. We played rock band and hung out all evening and stayed up late.

November 27th we had a few inches of snow and a Tweens and Teens Party to get ready for at our house. Andrew was great at helping shovel snow off the sidewalks and vacuum. Andrew enjoyed the party with all the big kids, even though it was a Star Wars theme (not my choice).  They played games like Stack the Cups, throwing a ping pong ball at bread with peanut butter hoping to get the ball to stick, balancing dice on a Popsicle stick (Andrew beat everyone at that!), threading penne pasta onto spaghetti only using the mouth, trying to get a cookie from the forehead to the mouth only using the facial muscles, and shaking beans from one 2 Liter bottle to another fastest. We also had a bunch of long balloons blown up, and pizza and snacks. At the end of the evening, they played Rock Band.