Engineering Day

I find that the kids behavioral orbits seem to balance each other out - when one is trending in a frustrating way, the other makes up for it by being sweet. Charlie has been more defiant recently.  I think he is testing his independence and how much he actually needs to heed my directions. He seems to be that way mainly with family because his teacher says he is exceedingly well-behaved and helpful in class. Of course it is probably all relative given the behavior of some of the others in the class. The school recently decided to hire a behavioral tech.  It may not be 100% attributable to his class, but I think they may be forcing the issue!  It is strange how certain grades click to do well or terrible all together. Whereas Diego's grade is full of mellow characters, the 1st grade class has proven to be the toughest grade in site! Nevertheless, one nice thing is that Charlie has two very good friends at school - Tate and Ian.  They call themselves the triplets and love spending time together:

Charlie and Tate bowling on a snowy day

Ian, Tate and Charlie on a recent field trip

Diego, on the other hand, has been so sweet. He is very tender, wanting to cuddle up and dole out hugs.  He is also happy to entertain himself independently for hours with legos and action figures. Almost every week we have his friend Noah come over for a playdate - they run upstairs to play a combination of magna-tiles and legos and we don't hear from them for 2 hours.  They never fight, never yell, never hurt each other - just cooperative imaginative play.  Diego has really been into the loft bed project - he "helped" my mom and Carlos work all day last week.

Diego loves his share day - which is when he gets to talk about a toy/object - last week he brought in a favorite truck for his share day : http://youtu.be/Ic3HdfRY05o

Sofia is...well Sofia...tough as nails but sparkling with personality.  She is talking more and finally says "yesssss," but mostly she puts sentences into a single word.  "Iwannagotoo" - it took me awhile to understand that it was actually a sentence.  There are a few words I don't understand, but she generally gets her point across pretty well or just resorts to screaming if you don't obey her. She still refuses to put her hair up so she usually saunters around with a wild mane. It is all part of the persona.

This weekend I took the kids to engineering day at the building museum which was so awesome.  There were probably 50 stations with interactive displays.  Charlie and I thought the catapult one was the most fun, but Diego liked the "dissect a device" the best.  The device was a VHS tape and both Charlie and Diego were bewildered by the bizarre idea that movies played on VHS and not just on netflix.  For the catapult we were given a spool, two paint mixing sticks, a dixie cup, a ping-pong ball and some duct tape.  Why didn't I think of this?! We formed it into a catapult and then tried to shoot the ball into a castle.