One of the good days

I am trying to be better about recording simple awesome moments. Instagram is helping a lot with that. Today was one of those good days that I want to remember. It seriously was almost perfect...  

Here's why...

1. I managed to get out of bed before 9am on my own... which is so much better than being woken up by crying crazies... and I still got to sleep in till 8am. 

2. Catie slept till 9:30am, so before then Andrew played and I did some blogging work I needed to do and then we did some math activities. We did a school bus math activity yesterday, which he wanted to play again... wonder why? (M&Ms?)

3. We went running before 10:30am... and I ran a good chunk of the time pushing the crazies and Catie was absolutely adorable talking and singing to the park and home. She said, "hi baby hi" to basically every baby spider web that she saw and every baby flower, etc. We also met up with three friends at the park, so I had fun chatting with my friends while the kids actually all played pretty nicely.

4. Andrew had Cars, Trains, and Airplanes themed camp and Catie slept from when we got home from dropping him off (1:15pm) until the last possible second before I had to leave to pick him up (3:45pm)... which meant I had a lovely break all afternoon to do whatever I wanted. 

5. Andrew was a sweetheart and made Catie a train picture at camp. He told her yesterday that if they did a train project he would make one for her... and he remembered! So sweet. She loved it... although she also loved the wooden airplane he made too and that was quite a grabbing/hitting/name calling fiasco. Guess every day can't be totally perfect, right?

6. I worked with Melissa & Doug on a project earlier this summer and they paid me AND let me pick a few products to have as well. Our box of goodies arrived today... and since Andrew has been way into dress up lately, he loved his new costume and went right to work cooking in his play kitchen for us! The rest of the toys got saved for another day.

7. We did some reading and writing activities later in the afternoon and the little dude LOVED them. Catie played happily (or commandeered my lap to watch) while we worked. I don't think I have EVER seen a kid so excited to read words. I actually don't know much about typical development for 4 year olds and how much Andrew should know already, so he could be totally behind, but I was amazed that he was decoding simple short vowel words by actually sounding them out letter by letter and blending them to come up with the word. 

He was amazed by himself too and wanted to do it again and again. I had to force him to drop the activity so that we could go to the pool.

We also did a volcano name writing game... because little dude loves anything and everything with volcanoes. I laminated it so we can do volcano name writing every day.

8. Later in the afternoon we went swimming at the pool with our neighbors and there were no tantrums when it was time to leave to go home. Normally Andrew throws a giant tantrum and I have to leave with him running after me crying.

9. After dinner and family time I got to have a quick trip to the mall by myself... and I ended the day with one of these.

Yeah... I don't think it gets much better than that.

Tomorrow is going to have a hard time measuring up.