Last Monday was a teacher workday and so the little stinker tagged along with me to the studio. He loves visiting ‘his lovely ladies’ there and touching their stuff, and asking them about what hey are doing, and tell them when they are doing it wrong. Apparently they love it, and kinda miss it when he is not there to keep them on task.
So I am thinking this day he wanted to really make his mark and leave his lovely ladies with something to talk about for all the following weeks he would be spending back in school. Because when we weren’t paying attention for a few minutes, this is what he did with the poly fill that was originally destined to be inside Michelle’s peculiar pets
Last month Nolan started first grade which ofcourse had to be documented thoroughly on camera. As I was digging though pictures of last year, I realized we had taken near identical pictures of his first day of kindergarten too. Something tells me there are probably also similar pictures for the first day of pre-school, but for those I will have to dig a little harder.
So here is our little beansprout on both his first days:
His backpack can still swallow him whole, and probably a second kid too, but he certainly seems to have grown in both confidence and height!
And both my birds still sit on their perch waiting for Nolan’s ride every morning:
I wonder at what year this picture will show a wiry Nolan towering high above his dad, sitting like this. That is ofcourse if Nolan doesn’t first decide he is WAY too cool to be sitting next to dad while waiting.
I still just can’t believe we have a first grader! What’s next, college?
I know I’ve been quiet here on the blog pages, but what can I say- School’s out and I’ve been doing a lot of hanging out with this little goofball
So can you blame me? We’ve been spending our due time at the pool, the kid’s museum, the free kids summer movies, and whatever else there is to be enjoyed during the hot summer days. We squeeze a little time at the studio too, and Nolan has made it his priority to make everybody there his new best friends. I am fairly sure he has succeeded in that. One even uses a powertool and I know she’s made it to the top of his ‘cool new friends’ list.
I will try to make more updates here over the summer. I said try. I can’t make promises. This little (big) guy is just too much fun to hang out with.
I have been in the process of clearing old pictures off the computer and burning them on a CD, which has to be done at least every 6 months, and that’s if I wait for the computer to get painfully slow due to limited available space. Which I typically do. I think it’s fairly obvious that I am a bit trigger happy when it comes to my camera.
While clearing out these old pictures I realised how many share-worthy pictures on Nolan I had not shared yet! Shame on me. So here I am making a few (probably more than a few, can’t say I didn’t warn you) retroactive updates, mostly of the boy, but also a few of the dog I am sure.
For starters, and I am ashamed to admit I didn’t post this, The First day of Kindergarten!
Greg and his mini-me waiting for the school-cab.
Nolan points out it’s his ‘first!’ day of Kindergarten, not to be confused with the second day.
And his backpack is about to swallow him up. It’s big enough for lunches, folders, notes, craft projects, and acting as a tent on those unexpected overnight stays in the wilderness.
Looking back at these pictures from only half a year ago, I can’t believe how much he’s grown already!
Last weekend we had a small party at the park to celebrate Nolan’s 6th birthday. We made a point to keep the party nice and small as the poor kid got incredibly overwhelmed last year at his 5th birthday party. That party had also been planned to be outside in a park, so we had invited lots or our and his friends, thinking there would be lots of space. Then windy weather made us change plans and we moved the shindig indoors, making our house filled with friends like sardines in a can. I will never forget the look in Nolie’s eyes when we all crammed into one room to sing him happy birthday. All eyes were on him, and he wanted nothing to do with it. He spent the rest of the party in his bedroom playing quietly by himself, and to this day refuses to be anywhere near someone singing ‘Happy Birthday’. A week later we got his autism diagnosis, and as we learned a bit that meeting what it means for a kid to live life with autism, we thought back to his birthday and felt terrible about the large amount of over stimulation he got that day, enough to overwhelm any 5 year old kid, but especially one that has trouble processing all of it.
So having learned our lesson, we kept things nice and small this time around. We felt sad that this meant there were a lot of friends we wanted to invite and couldn’t, but as long as it meant the chances of the boy enjoying his birthday party would be better, it was worth it.
This was also the first year that he had specific requests for is birthday cake. The requests were: A purple cake (his favorite color) with gumballs (he’s been eying a gumball machine at our favorite Mexican restaurant for months). So that’s what he got, and he loved it. But when it came time to blow out the candles he reminded us plenty of times that we were not allowed to sing the birthday cake, though after some careful thought we were allowed to say ‘yay!’ after blowing out the candles. He isn’t anything if not specific.
For the rest of the party we just had a really great time at the playground. We couldn’t have asked for better weather, it was a freaky 70+ degrees sunny, and breezy. Kids blew bubbles and colored the ground with chalk, ate chips and cake, and played on the playground. Adults socialized and saved the occasional child stuck at the top of a climbing contraption. And most important of all, Nolan was genuinely happy, relaxed and enjoying every single second of it.
I have a whole folder full of additional pictures right here should you feel the need to check the rest out too.
We went to Duke gardens again last weekend and took advantage of the last of the spring-ish temperatures that lingered in our state. I love Duke gardens for many reasons. It’s a beautiful place, it’s a great place to take pictures no matter what season, every time I go I see something new, and I love what a great mix of people come to the gardens.
Just sitting on the big grass field and picnic (if I was smart enough to remember to bring one) and just watch the people relaxing, or playing is one of my favorite things to do. In a way it’s a ‘comfort food’ for me, because hanging out at a park in your free time is such a “European” thing to do. I remember every city I traveled to in my younger days had at least one beautiful park that 50% of the city hung out at during lazy afternoons or the weekends. It just makes me feel at home.
Nolan is really getting into kicking the soccer ball around. With Greg for a daddy he is getting introduced to a great many variety of sports, and so far he has loved trying every single one of them, but I can see him slightly gravitating towards soccer. After the three of us kicked the ball around for a while he even asked the two of us “go sit on the hill over there please” and he continued kicking the ball around all by himself for at least 30 minutes while he let us watch. And every time he looked up at us he looked so pleased with himself, it was adorable. So it appears as though he may have picked up a little Dutch soccer gene somewhere along the way. Though as far as I know, that gene is nowhere near in my family. Not a sporty gene of any kind to be honest. He would be the first.
So we spent most of our time wandering around, taking pictures of eachother, holding hands, looking at geese and ducks, imagining what the gardens will look like come spring and summer, and planning future trips back soon.
The weather here over the last two weeks has been of-and-on almost spring like so we’ve been doing a great job spending as much time outside as possible, soaking up the sun rays and breathing the fresh air.
We’ve been biking, visiting playgrounds and parks, and spending some quality time in our backyard. Greg and I even snuck out one lunch hour last week and took a ride down part of the Capital Greenway without our usual ‘tail gunner’ (aka Nolan, on the back of G’s bike)
I make an effort not to get too excited by these days because I don’t want to get bummed out when the regular scheduled winter weather continues. But knowing how much the winter weather can bum me out I am happy to take in all the pre-season spring weather I can get.
I will leave you with a video of Nolan running his daddy allover a playground. If you have a spare 6 minutes in your day I recommend this video. There’s not many things more enjoyable than watching Greg come out of a playground tunnel or slide designed for kids. You can take my word for it.
(I am totally stealing my own 365 picture from yesterday for this post)
I believe I have mentioned before that when I conceived the ‘made of money‘ jewelry line I had a great feeling about it. I felt that these pieces were really something that my customers were going to get excited about. And not to drive the subject into the ground, or pat myself on the shoulder (yet again!) but I have to share how confirming it is when I DO see you get so excited about something that I dreamed up by my very self! Every show so far these necklaces are earrings have been leaving my booth at lightening speed, and it makes me oh so happy! You’d think by now I’d be used to people liking, or even loving my creations, but I am not, and honestly I don’t think (and I don’t hope) that it’s something I will ever get used to. It totally lights a fire under my behind and keeps me excited about designing and creating and making and producing. These things can get very tedious let me tell you, so anything to keep me excited I am eternally grateful for.
So these cute little blossoms above are for the next batch of made of money necklaces. I am going to try my darndest to get a few of them completed, photographed, and uploaded to my etsy shop by the end of the day today. But today it’s early release day for my son’s school so I am not making any promises.
Speaking of my son, he has discovered my old camera this week, and he can’t get enough of taking pictures! I am absolutely loving this new development. Photography is a great source of admiration and inspiration for me and something I’d love to eventually get some education in, so to see Nolan so intreagued by it too warms my heart. Aside from that, anything to get his focus off vacuums or cars and onto something new excites me. If you desire, you may read more about his new discoveries here.
Mar 18th, 2008 Posted in Uncategorized | 7 comments »
This little man, I’ve been informed today, is diagnosed with Autism. Fortunately a very high functioning version of Autism that is, but autism non the less.
Though it feels odd to slap such a big ‘label’ on what’s been hindering the little guy’s development in certain areas, for me the news has oddly caused a great feeling of relief. As I met with the child psychologist today, who has been one of the team of people that’s been observing and testing Nolan along with interviewing me and Greg for the past 6 months, she pointed out all of the different behaviors that they observed in him and I saw with my own eyes how point for point they lined up with Autism diagnosis. I realised then that not only all his weird little oddities were not in fact that weird or odd, but ways he deals with the world around him, but we now also have a direction and incredible amounts of resources and aid to help him (and us) deal with getting across those obstacles that are keeping him from applying the incredible amount of information he absorbs on a daily basis, and applying it in the practical world around him. After seeing him increasingly struggle in many ways doing just that over the past few years, and now knowing that he’ll get help with that is a great feeling!
Jan 14th, 2008 Posted in Uncategorized | no comment »
By far one of Nolan’s favorite activities at home is painting. However it’s so much his favorite activity that he rarely gets to do it at home because then he wants to do it every 5 minutes, not to mention that it’s not a terribly clean craft to clear up after, and typically it will go a little something like this
*Paint paint paint (covered up to his elbows in paint)
*Mom, I am done and want to wash my hands now, Are you sure? Yes! I am sure! You don’t want to paint anymore today? NO!! I want to wash my hands, I am all done!
*Washes hands while I clean up the brushes and the bottles and the paper and the floor and the walls and the paint foot prints leading to the kitchen, but it’s worth is because he thoroughly enjoyed himself for those 15 minutes
*Dries off hands- Mom, I want to paint again!
:: repeat indefinitely until I lose sanity ::
So I decided, that’s what we pay pre-school for unless I am feeling extraordinarily generous at home.
