Plese Dad, Plese Dad

Brayden is a loyal patron of the lego.com website and spends hours playing the online games and browsing the catalog.  He has a never ending Lego wishlist that he gives us continual updates about.  His ultimate dream is the $399 Lego Death Star.

Brayden had saved up some allowance money that was burning a hole in his pocket.  He spent the better part of a Saturday begging for Matt to allow him to buy some Lego Bionicles online.  He basically spent the day following Matt around repeating "Please Dad" over and over again.  When we went to bed we found this paper from Brayden on Matt's pillow.

To understand how funny this is you have to understand how lazy Brayden typically is with his homework.  He manages to drag out fifteen minutes of work into several hours and it is like pulling teeth to get him to write anything.  When he does finally write his sentences they are so messy and illegible that he has to erase and rewrite half of the work.  We were so impressed to see his neat letters with periods and capitalization.

Brayden was excited when his bionicles arrived a few days early in the mail.

Finally the deck

For years Matt has wanted a deck.  He has been designing it in his mind since before we left for North Carolina.  While in Afghanistan he had more time to think about it and firm up more of the details.  He decided this was finally the time to do it and wanted to have everything ready to get started as soon as he got back from Afghanistan.

While the deck was being built during spring break the kids were not allowed to go outside, though they did a lot of spying on the workers through the blinds.  One day after the workers were gone they did some investigating around the yard.  Brayden was noticing cups of drinks left in the yard, a bologne sandwich on the playset, and lots of cigarette butts throughout.  Brayden said, "we need to hire new people because they are trashy and smoke cigarettes"  and then he proceeded to throw the cigarette butts into the neighbor's yard.

On another day he was peeking through the blinds in the kitchen and evidently caught one of the workers bending over.  He said, "Oh no I looked out the window and I saw a man with his shirt up and his pants going down.  He is wearing skull underwear.  I don't want to look out again and see his underwear."  He was very concerned about whether or not the workers went to church, and added, "I don't think they do".  For the rest of the afternoon he walked around the house singing and humming "Follow the Prophet".

We are pretty happy about how the deck turned out.  We are excited to start having our crazy parties that we are known for.  

Paper crafting

Brayden has been hard at work again making his paper products.  Apparently he gets his work done pretty quickly at school and in his free time he can get the scrap paper and ends up making paper castles, spaceships, people, ipods, and anything else you can imagine from the paper.  I end up finding all these pieces of paper floating around his backpack.

various action figures including, knights, ninjas, darth vadar, and aliens

robots with controls

a person for Matt

an I-Pod

 Brayden also made a princess mask for Julia.  He drew a castle scene with ninjas and knights on the inside of her mask. 

All grown up

With Matt home I was anxious to put him to work.  Near the top of the list was to cut Blake's hair.  I haven't really wanted to because I knew that he wouldn't be my baby anymore.  His hair was really long and had a little bit of wave to it.  To me it looked like a little surfer hairstyle with a few blonde streaks.

Brayden's first several years of haircuts were very difficult.  He did not like the hair clippers and scissors near his head.  He would squirm around, scream, and cry.  Blake was a totally different story.  He was great for his 1st haircut.  He allowed us to put a cape on and sat in the chair with no problems.  As Matt used the hair clippers it tickled him so he had a little smirk.  We only had to use the lollipop as bribery at the end when he was tired of sitting down.  With the haircut Blake does not look like a baby anymore.  

Reunited

Matt came home from Afghanistan a little over 2 weeks ago.  With dates and flights changing we decided not to tell the children until it was for sure.  After more than 24 hours of nearly straight travel from Afghanistan, to Kyrgyzstan, and through Germany, Matt arrived in Baltimore.  In Baltimore he got to go out to dinner with his brother Ben and called home to let the children know that he was on his way.  They were so excited.  The children were motivated to help me clean and decorate for Matt's arrival.  On the big day I had Kylee and Brayden go to school so that I could have more time to get things ready.  I picked them up on our way to the airport.  With pompoms and a sign the kids waited for Matt to arrive.  When Brayden saw Matt he went running up to him and the other children followed.  I wanted to video tape Matt's arrival, but with tears in my eyes I wasn't able to.  

With Blake being young we were worried that he wouldn't remember Matt, but he took to him right away.  He was happy to see him and laid his head on Matt's shoulder.  Both Blake and Julia wanted to hold Matt's hand while we walked to the car.  

At home the kids sprayed Matt with silly string.  We thought the people at the airport would not appreciate the mess.  

The kids were anxious to spend time with Matt. Brayden was excited to play his Indiana Jones Wii game with Matt.

The day was beautiful so we spent time in the backyard and on the trampoline.
  

We all headed over to Rudy's, our favorite barbeque place, for dinner.


We are so grateful to be reunited as a family, especially with the very sad news a week later of the death of my cousin, Jake Whetten.  He was an army ranger serving in Afghanistan and was 31 years old when he was killed when an IED exploded under a convoy he was traveling in on March 12, 2010.  We are grateful for his service and mourn his loss with the rest of his family who will miss him sorely.

keys to friendship

I was looking at Brayden's work that he brought home from school.  I was commenting on a ring of keys that Brayden made with 12 steps in making friends.  Brayden excitedly explained, "I already did all those things even before we made it.  That is why I have a lot of friends."

Here is the list of "keys"
1. Don't put others down.
2. Tell others what you like about them.
3. Make others feel special.
4. Be honest.
5. Keep secrets and promises.
6. Be a good listener.
7. Put yourself in the other person's place.
8. Encourage others when they try to do hard things.
9. Help others feel better if they make a mistake.
10. Apologize if you hurt someone's feelings.
11. Forgive others if they hurt your feelings.
12. Let your friends have other friends.

I thought it had some good points to use.  Maybe I could put them into practice to make some friends.

Awards from school

The PTA has a creative way to get parents to attend the meetings.  They give the children awards that are handed out at the end of the PTA meeting.  In December Brayden got a note telling him that he was selected by his teacher to get the award of Fairness for his class.  The only problem was that the meeting would be on a week night at 7 p.m. and Matt was gone in Afghanistan.  Brayden was so excited and wanted to go and get his prize for his award.  He was actually a little dramatic and was telling me he was supposed to go.   Not really knowing how important it was I reluctantly decided to attend and take all the children with me.  So, off I went with my 4 homeless looking children.  I took my favorite seat in the back and spent most of the time trying to keep Julia and Blake fairly quiet.  Then finally at the end of the meeting they called  a child from each class to come up and receive their award and a pouch of pencils, notepad, and erasers.  Brayden was happy.

A few months later in February Kylee got the same note telling us that she had received the award of Trustworthiness for her class.  I knew I had to go because we had gone for Brayden, and Kylee likes for things to be equal.  The same homeless crew headed back to the school for Kylee to receive her award.  Kylee with her jacket zipped up because she had a food stain on her pants headed up to get her award.