Adam's First Loose Tooth!

Adam lost his first tooth on Boxing Day!  His bottom tooth has been loose for over a month now!  He has been wiggling it and playing with it for weeks on end, but he wouldn't let anyone touch it.  We were on holidays at my mom's house in B.C. and Adam's tooth had been REALLY loose for the last few days.  I kept asking him if he wanted me to pull it out.  He said yes, and then freaked out when I got in there! 

So on the 26th, after we put the kids to bed, Ian and I were upstairs watching a movie with Mom and John when Adam came upstairs and asked me to pull the tooth out.  I guess he'd had enough.  It was so loose that I could bend it forwards and there was a hole behind it!  I told him I just needed to twist it out and it would be done.  He finally relented and after a few attempts, I got the tooth out!  He and Noah were very excited!  "What's going to be under my pillow in the morning?" Adam asked expectantly.  (We've told him that when he puts his tooth under his pillow, there'll be a treat waiting there for him in the morning.) 

So after he and Noah finally settled down and went to sleep (it takes a long time at Grandma & Grandpa's because they're so excited to be sharing a room together), I snuck in and took the envelope with the tooth in it and left a Toonie there for him.  In my day, we were happy to get a quarter!  I hope $2 is generous enough!  Adam was beyond excited in the morning.  "Where did my tooth go?" he wondered.  He couldn't figure out how the tooth was gone and the money had appeared!

As an aside, he's heard about the Tooth Fairy from friends, but we're trying to make sure we're honest with him and he knows there's no such thing as the Tooth Fairy, Santa, the Easter Bunny, etc. but that it's really Mommy and Daddy who do these things (though we do pretend things are from Santa or the Tooth Fairy because it's fun to pretend, we've still told him they're not real).  It's hard to know what the right thing to do here is.  We don't want to deprive him of childhood fun, but at the same time, we don't want him to think that Jesus and God aren't real since he can't see them either.  We'd prefer he know which things are real and which are imaginary.  Hopefully we're doing the right thing! 

The House Saga (Part 1)

We have lived in our current house for over six years.  It was our dream house.  It is actually the second house Ian and I bought together.  We lived in an apartment for several years after we got married, and when Ian got his continuing teaching contract, we decided to buy our first house.  It was a cute little blue bungalow and we liked it.  It was old, but we gave it a fresh coat of paint, and the previous owners had replaced the carpet and redone the kitchen, so it was pretty good for a first house.

Well one afternoon after church we decided to go look at show homes.  We absolutely fell in love with this house.  Ian was hesitant to buy it because at the time it was almost $200 000 (which was a lot at the time!).  We prayed and discussed and finally decided to build this house.  It was so much fun choosing our paint, flooring, fixtures, etc.  We built our dream house.

Our first house sold, and we moved in with my mom and step-dad for about four months while we waited for our new one to be finished.  We finally moved in in April of 2003.  We enjoyed finishing our yard and basement and planning for the birth of Adam.  We really liked this neighbourhood and our neighbours.

Well a few months after Noah was born, the neighbours to the left of us moved and a new family moved in.  They were very nice.  I introduced myself to the mom as they were moving boxes into the house.  They had two teenage boys.  The mom and I made salsa together, went to some home parties, visited over the fence.  It was very nice.

About a year after they moved in, their house turned into the party house.  Their teenage sons were out of control.  They would have loud parties in the backyard almost every weekend, well into the wee hours of the morning, and almost every night in the summer.  We spoke to them about the noise, even phoning them at night when it was too loud, but it never seemed to stop.  Eventually we ended up calling the police one week in July when the partying started at 8:00 and looked like it was getting out of hand.  The parents had been away for a week, and every night it got worse and worse.  The police came and dumped out all their alcohol (they were all underage and there were no adults present).  There must have been several hundred dollars worth of liquor.  Needless to say, the kids were not happy with us.

That`s when we started feeling unsafe.  I don`t think they would ever have hurt us, but the kids started coming onto our property.  One night the doorbell rang at 2:00, and when we looked out the window, there was a pop cup at our front door (we didn`t open the door because they were drunk and who knows what would have happened).  In the morning, Ian dumped the contents of the cup on their lawn and several days later there was a brown spot...  Another night, they threw garbage over their fence into our backyard.  We didn`t want to let our boys play outside when they were around because of the filthy language coming from next door.

And we weren`t the only neighbours that had a problem.  Our neighbours on our other side and also a few houses down also complained of the noise.  One night when our neighbour called the police about the noise, the other neighbour`s dad was sitting outside on the porch while his sons and their friends blared their music on the street.  When the police questioned him, he said, ``All they need to do is ask, and we`ll turn it down," which is ridiculous because we had done that many times.  Ian asked the police when something would be done because we've had to put our house up for sale because of the noise.  They just told us to call the bylaw officers Monday morning.

So needless to say, we'd had enough.  After much prayer, we decided to look around to see what else was out there.  We started by looking at acreages, but we couldn't find any that we really liked.  Then we looked at some other houses in town, but again, no luck.  Finally we walked into the Pacesetter showhome and found another dream home!  We weren't planning on building because we didn't want to have to move twice (once when this house sold and again when the new one was built), but all signs pointed to building.  We even went into the builder and added all the options we could think of.  We made them an offer that was $80 000 lower than the price should have been.  Ian thought it would be a miracle if we got the house for less than $460 000, but the builder came back at $447 000.  We were stunned.

We prayed about it A LOT and felt that God was giving us the go ahead to build.  So that's where we're at now!

Well, we bought a house...

So tonight we went and put our deposit down with Pacesetter to build a new house.  I'll get into the "House Saga" on a later post because I'm really tired right now!  Needless to say, we are now the proud owners of two houses... well, one house and one lot.  Here we go! 

A New Little Sister?

Conversation last night at supper:

Adam:  Mom, it's too bad we don't have a sister.
Me: Yes, that is too bad.
Adam: We could get one!
Me: No, I don't think so...
Adam: Daddy could just plant another seed in you!
Ian: No, I don't think so...
Noah: No, we could just go to the New Little Sister Store and get one!

Ah, if only it were that easy!

Kindergarten So Far

So on his second day of Kindergarten, Adam came home, went up to his room and curled up on the bed very sadly.  I asked him what was wrong and he said he had no one to play with at recess.  There were only two other boys in his class, and they were cousins, so they would just go off by themselves and leave Adam alone.  I spoke to his teacher about it, and she talked to the boys, but they wouldn't wait for Adam or let him play.  After his first day of excitement, he was so sad about being alone at recess, and it broke my heart to think of him standing there looking for someone to play with.  What a horrible first experience with school.

So after much prayer and deliberation, we asked his teacher and the school if he could be switched into the other Kindergarten class, which has five other little boys and Megan (our neighbour, with whom Adam has played a lot over the summer).  This was no problem, so after four days in Kindergarten, he was part of a new class.  We wanted to do it sooner rather than later so that he wouldn't be the "new kid" in the class. It was a difficult decision because on the one hand, we want him to learn to deal with hard social situations, but on the other hand, he really had no other options of friends in the first class.  Normally we would have told him to try to find someone else to play with, but there was no one else!

Anyway, it seems to have been a good decision.  He is really enjoying school now, and in this class, all the kids play together at recess, so he has lots of kids to play with. We're still working with him on learning how to deal with things without bursting into tears, but that's another entry for another day!

Adam's FIrst Day of Kindergarten

Adam was so excited to start school this year! He barely slept the night before!

He loves his uniform (and I love that back-to-school shopping for clothes was so easy!).

I thought I would cry, but it wasn't that bad! He was so happy to be there, he went into the room and started doing puzzles. I don't think he even noticed when I left! This is the opposite of me. I cried and held onto my mom's leg until the teacher forced her to go! I'm so glad Adam likes school so much. He had so much fun on the first day. He really enjoyed playing on the new playground - especially the glider. He has to wait a week before he goes again because they're doing staggered entry, but he's already asking when he gets to go again.

Adam Bids Daddy Good Bye!

The other night, Ian went to give blood. Adam looked confused when we told him that, so we tried to explain what it meant. I told him that Daddy was going to give his blood to help people who are sick at the hospital because sometimes people get really bad cuts and go to the hospital where the doctors have to give them other people's blood because they are bleeding so badly. Daddy was going to help people who needed it.

Adam looked thoughtful for a few moments before he said matter-of-factly, "I'm really going to miss Daddy." He thought that Ian was giving all of his blood and that he wouldn't be coming back! Poor little guy! So then we explained that Daddy was only giving a little bit of his blood and that he'd be home soon!