In So Many Words

Make a Smilebox slideshow

On one of the days that both my son and his best friend had off school, he and his brother came over to our house and we went to the park. Here are a few pics of them having fun!

Well, this is officially the Week ‘O’ Fun at our house. The Little Guy has one more week of daycare and then starts his summer program on Monday, which means he will be gone from 8:30-3:30 each day instead of 7:30-12:30. His TSS is at a training out of town this week, so yours truly is in charge of filling the social schedule every day.

Monday we went to his best friend’s house and they played while best friend’s little brother was napping. Later on we all went to a park near their house so they could play on the playground and then roll down the big hill many times!

On Tuesday he had his last music therapy session until school starts, and from there we went to Toys ‘R’ Us to buy a present for a birthday party. The party was held at a park with a small pavilion and some nice play structures, and the kids had a blast. As the guest of honor is a little girl from his daycare class, there were quite a few kids he knew, which made him very excited. I was a little worried that the ground would still be wet from the big storm we had last night or that it would rain, but we ended up having very nice weather.

Today we are going to be staying home for the afternoon and probably watching lots of PBS Kids, as the wonderful man from Verizon will be installing FiOS phone/internet. Hopefully I will actually get some housework done since the computer will be unavailable for several hours (yes, this rambling is coming to you through the magic of scheduled posts).

Thursday we are headed to Hersheypark for the afternoon/evening – hopefully with friends if they are able to score some passes. Then on Friday, I will let the Little Guy pick what he wants to do, since he will probably be sad about his last day with his preK friends.

So lots of fun stuff this week, but I am looking forward to establishing our new routines for the summer.

I have been trying to take the Little Guy somewhere fun on Friday afternoons, especially now that it is nicer outside. Last week we went to Hersheypark for a few hours, but today it was too rainy for that. So we considered our options, called to see if his best friend was available (he was!), and ended up at Curiosity Connection.

Curiosity Connection, otherwise affectionately known as the home of the giant chick — seriously, it is 10 feet tall, check out the pictures! — is a discovery-learn-play place at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, in Harrisburg.

It is designed for children ages 2-7, and, although it is not a huge space, there is a lot to see and do inside. The Little Guy’s favorite part is the magical bedroom. Some of the other sections are related to the living forest, industry and transportation, farming, construction, and art. There are also puppets, books, some costumes, and an area especially for the littlest ones.

Another nice feature is the single entrance manned by a museum employee so you don’t have to worry about your child wandering off or getting lost. All in all, it is well worth the $5.00 per person admission fee.

When I got the email newsletter from our moms’ group from church the other day, there was a blurb about a new fun place to take your kids called Museum 4 Me. It is the brainchild of a former elementary school teacher turned stay-at-home mom turned entrepreneur.

I was really intrigued after looking around the website and wanted to take Little Guy to check it out, so we went there today with my friend Stacey and her youngest son, who is 3 1/2. The boys had a blast – we were there for 2 hours and both of them would have played happily for another hour at least!

The museum takes up the lower level of a house and has several different areas of hands-on play for the kids. The room you first walk into changes each month and right now is set up like a backyard, complete with a planting area and playhouse. Next there is an area with a couple of tables where you could eat food you bring in or snacks you buy there, along with a few items for sale.

The intended age is birth to 6, but older siblings are welcome and would probably enjoy playing with the younger children. One area that older kids may like is an art area with all sorts of different craft supplies – both of our boys chose to paint pictures. LG painted “A Sunny Day”, and I have to tell you I was amazed that he was able to easily come up with an idea and execute it, using several different colors of paint in distinct areas of the paper – I am getting emotional just realizing what giving him this extra year of preschool so he could be in a typical environment and allow his skills to develop has produced.

The biggest room is filled with several different exhibits – a construction area, treehouse, post office, store, kitchen area with dolls, building blocks, and an area with mats and soft climbing blocks for the littlest ones. The favorites with our two were by far the post office and the treehouse, although they investigated each one thoroughly and spent some time in almost all of them.

It was a wonderful way to spend a rainy Friday afternoon and I’m sure we will go back again. The maximum occupancy is 50, and I can imagine that it might be a little overwhelming for the Little Guy with a lot of kids there. Of course, if we ever get there and it is too crowded, we would easily be able to see that before we went in and he could decide whether we should do something different that day.

All things considered, I would highly recommend a visit if you have young ones at home. They are having a Grand Opening event on March 29th with a circus theme, special activities and half-price admission (it is usually $5 per person – 12 months and younger are free).

Well, it has finally happened – the Little Guy has discovered the joys of Chuck E. Cheese’s. He had been there twice before, at least a year ago, but wasn’t able to play most of the games at that point and hadn’t understood the connection between playing games, getting tickets and redeeming them for prizes.

Then last Wednesday, Hands-Free Heart calls and says she is making an emergency stop at CEC’s and do we want to join them, since we live close by and the boys are great pals. So we go and have a wonderful time playing games and collecting tickets. When it is about time to leave, we look over the available prizes and, to my amazement, he decides to hold on to his tickets until he can earn enough for a better prize! Wow, can anyone say impulse control and delayed gratification!!

From there, we are on our way to music therapy and he happily gets out of the car, goes into the building, stops at the bathroom and enters the therapy room, all with not one complaint (this has been a big issue for a while now). Mom & therapist are both very happy

Friday there is a make-up session for music therapy, but the TSS also has hours to get in, so she takes him from daycare to CEC’s, and I pick him up in time to get to music. By giving the tokens one at a time and requiring him to answer what game he was going to play and how to play it, she got some great responding to questions out of him.

Getting to music was again stress-free, so now we are working on a plan to use these little golden reinforcers to motivate some of the behaviors we are looking for. Of course, I don’t want to take the joy out of a fun childhood experience, but you have to use anything that works as long as you can!!