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Let’s Rodeo, San Antonio…and a bit of the plague (only kind of)

Weekly Happenings: Monday, Paul had the day off, so we headed out to the rodeo. It was freezing! We still had a fun time, though. We saw a lot of animals, visited the petting zoo (and got to pet deer and a wallaby…oh, and llamas, too), saw a bunch of reptiles and local animals, ate some yummy food, and window shopped. The rest of the week was kind of a blur because Joseph got super sick. I took him to the doctor who said he had a double ear infection and pink eye. So now he’s on antibiotics and has to get eye drops in his eye, which he REALLY doesn’t like. I got a milder form of his cold which has been aggravated by my allergies. Luckily; so far at least, Paul has dodged the sickness bullet. The antibiotics and eye drops have been working for Joseph and he is feeling a lot better. The other big thing that happened this past week was that our new swing set arrived, so Paul put it together on Friday. Oh, and yesterday, we went to the park and cleaned up trash. Paul organized the whole thing and we had quite a bit of neighborhood support. We cleaned up more than two large trash bags full of trash in just under an hour. I’m hoping that people will see how clean it is and leave it that way!

The Weekly Weather: Bipolar to say the least. As I mentioned before, it was freezing cold on Monday. It warmed up a bit during the rest of the week, and Friday and Saturday were really nice. It’s cooler today, but we are expecting freezing rain some time over the next couple of days. I guess Mother Nature has decided that since it’s still February, we can have some more cold weather.

What Paul’s Been Up To: Work and school, as usual. He also spent a lot of time on Friday after work putting together Joseph’s swing set. He even set up a spot light as it got dark so that he could continue to work. I helped out a bit, holding things in place, mostly. Joseph was super excited to see it and play on it yesterday. Paul also organized the clean up at the park event. You can read more about it here [1]. He created an event on the neighborhood’s Facebook page so that other neighbors could see it and come help. We had probably close to ten people there, which was great for a first turn out. Coming up this week, he’ll be doing his turn at teaching his Pathway class, so he’ll be prepping for that.

What Sarah’s Been Up To: I had kind of an empty week. I ended up canceling about half of my students because Joseph was sick (and I wasn’t feeling too hot, either). One fun thing was that choir started back up again. We had a really good rehearsal today. I took some pointers that I learned at the stake music training and implemented them at the rehearsal. It ran much more efficiently which was great.

What Joseph’s Been Up To: Mainly getting over being sick. The rough part was that he started feeling better half way through the week (right before he got pink eye), so he didn’t understand why I wanted him to rest (since he still had a fever). One night, he woke up screaming because his eye was stuck shut thanks to the pink eye goop. We got him cleaned up and settled down (I ended up spending the rest of the night sleeping on the floor in his room), but I’m grateful for how quickly the drops are clearing it up. A funny story from this week was that Paul asked him to put his (Paul’s) shoes in the closet. Joseph willingly did so, but on the way, he said, “Whew! It smells terrible!” This is only funny because I know for a fact that Paul’s shoes do not smell, lol. He also had a pretty bad nightmare early on in the week. He said that the “tickle man” was getting him. Poor kid! Oh, and he declared that his nightlight that projects a picture on the ceiling was scary (he called it the orange face with one eye), so we ended up finding him one that is free standing and projects stars onto the ceiling. He likes it much better.

This Week in Pictures (be prepared for a lot of pictures from the rodeo):

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Joseph loves these cut outs…
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…every time we came across one, he had to try it out.
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Some were a little hard for him to reach.
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I think I may have boosted him up for one or two…which was a workout for my arms!
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Here he is “milking” a pretend goat. It really did squirt out water, which he found amusing.
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Petting a kid (baby goat, that is).
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Paul had to get a picture of this. That baby was quite insistent with its momma about being fed right there and then. It kept kicking her back legs back a bit so that it had a better chance at getting some milk.
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Petting the wallaby. It was so soft! It really liked laying in that pouch (probably reminded it of being with its momma).
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Checking out the snakes.
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Joseph liked them way better than I did.
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We had to get a picture with Smokey!
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He didn’t show interest in the cow ears while at the rodeo (last year he wanted to wear them all day, but he was a bit younger), but I’m glad I saved them because he asked to wear them later.
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After a rough trip to the doctor’s (it’s never fun to get a strep test, which turned out negative, and have your ears poked at), I took him to Target to get a Rescue Bot (pretty much a Transformer that doesn’t actually transform). He asked specifically for Bumblebee. I didn’t even realize he knew their actual names.
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Here’s Bumblebee fighting generic-type-Rambo-Army-guy.
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After his follow-up appointment (at his first appointment they did all the tests and told me to watch him for two days…at the second appointment they decided to treat him with antibiotics) we added Optimus Prime to the collection.
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Silly faces for the win!
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He said he was sitting in his nest (though he never told me what type of animal he was).
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He wanted to “play golf”, so he flipped his hat around to the side and started doing this. Never a dull moment.
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Chucking his basketball into his soccer goal. We’ll get this whole organized sports thing figured out eventually. 😉
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The new swing set.
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He wanted Daddy to push him.
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It’s a pretty cool swing set. Plus, it’s made in America (a rarity these days), which we found cool.
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So now we have a sand box, a slide, a fort, and the swing set (with an additional slide).
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He really likes this longer swing. He needed me to get him started (since it’s really designed for two kids to propel each other)…
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…but once he got started, he was able to keep himself going pretty well.
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Pushing his tractor around in the yard. I found a spot for the tractor on the back porch, so now it’s a purely outside toy (which is great for the floors in the house, not to mention my toes)!