Wednesday, November 16, 2011

NaBloPoMo 16/30: Random stuff for a Wednesday

Wednesdays are half-workdays for me. I spend the morning with Carter and then work from home in the afternoon with Michelle here. If I manage to get ahead on work, I also run errands on Wednesdays or get a little "me" time in.

It's nice to get to sleep in with Carter on these mornings. We have a leisurely breakfast and then play for a couple of hours. I was still in my pajamas when Michelle got here today, in fact! Not a bad way to start off a Wednesday. ;-)

I took a few pictures with my phone this morning, so please excuse the blurriness. Here Carter is helping me feed the cats. It's interesting that he is more and more able to take on tasks like this around the house. There was never a point at which I thought, "Time to assign Carter chores." He just wants to help out with certain things, like feeding the cats, cleaning the litterbox, and laundry. He LOVES doing laundry! As long as the piles are presorted, he can load the machine, add detergent, and start the wash cycle all by himself. :-D



After breakfast we did some painting with watercolors. This is something we should probably do more often, because Carter's fine motor skills are definitely lagging behind everything else. He can count to 100, can read a bit, can do single-digit addition and some subtraction, and has a huge vocabulary -- but he can't write a single letter of the alphabet. In fact, he refuses to try. This is something I'm still trying to figure out how to help him with. I don't want to push him in any of these areas just yet, but every time I give him an opportunity to write, he just refuses. So instead we've been doing a little drawing here and there.



He likes to tell me what to draw and always makes interesting requests. He wanted me to paint the cats, and he specifically requested Gabi licking her paw and Lucy pooping in the litterbox. He even insisted I draw the poop!



The bird is supposed to be Jewel from Rio. I went to look up pictures online for reference, and then he wanted to watch Rio fanvids, and we ended up doing that for half an hour. He was so adorable -- he wanted to see romantics ones with Blu and Jewel, whereas I'm more interested in the ones that are funny or retell parts of the story in interesting ways.

We both agreed that this one was our favorite. It's incredibly well done!



After that Michelle came, and they went to the park while I worked. I went out to run a couple of errands and they were in the playroom when I got back. At one point Carter came barreling into the room I was in, leapt into my lap and said, "Hide me from the monster!" From outside the door came a truly frightening monster-like growling -- from Michelle, who can sound very scary! I covered Carter with the Monster Shield (a blanket) and he grinned up at me from underneath it. He loves games like that. Shortly thereafter he was the monster and Michelle was his victim, and he went chasing after her on all fours.

We had a lot of fun this evening hanging out and playing. We were looking up videos of animals on YouTube and saw a video of a sugar glider, and for the rest of the night we pretended to be sugar gliders. Even at bedtime, we made the covers into a "nest" and climbed in and snuggled up like (we imagine) baby sugar gliders do. We communicated through peeps and chirps only, which was completely hilarious. So much fun!

Finally, after doing some research on carpet cleaning options, I decided to go ahead and buy a Spot Bot carpet cleaner to handle the cat vomit stains that are EVERYWHERE in our house. I spent a good chunk of Saturday morning on my hands and knees scrubbing carpet and decided it was time to find a better option. The Spot Bot had good reviews and seemed to be just what I wanted. It's a little carpet cleaning machine that you put on top of the stain. You press a button and it does a 6-minute cleaning cycle, all by itself. I bought one at Target today, and Carter and I tried it out tonight.

So far, I love it! I just prep the stain, fill the tank with cleaning solution and water, put the Spot Bot on the stain, and that's it. After every couple of cycles it needed to be dumped and refilled, but that was no problem. Carter took charge of the dumping part (dumping is definitely his thing) and would have done the refilling except that he hasn't quite mastered the concept of "fill to this line" yet. I ran it on every cat vomit stain I could find for about an hour, with great results. I'm so excited!

It's almost midnight, so I will post this and get to sleep...

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