A Typical Saturday

Our typical weekend day goes like this:

• Ethan wakes up.  It's super early.  Like 5 AM early.  We toss an iPad to him in hopes that it will distract him long enough to give us a few more moments of rest.  This works 50% of the time.  He either plays quietly by himself for another half an hour or so (I know, I know, electronics are evil.  This is usually his only screen time of the day).  The other half of the time he claims he just wants to sleep with us and lies quietly jumps on top of either Bob or me.  Usually I'm the lucky recipient of his 'cuddling'.  Either way we usually are dragged awake shortly thereafter.  Forget getting those alarm clocks that roll away from you so you can't press the snooze button...we were blessed with a super early morning bird for a kid.
• While still trying to wake up, we do some from of a morning craft.  This either involves embellishing something or replicating one of his favorite books.  Please see exhibit A, B, and C.  Our little perfectionist is super detailed oriented and wants things to be as realistic as possible.  He can often be heard saying 'It's okay, we can just make it out of paper and tape it on!'. 3M should be sending royalties to us for all the tape that we buy.

Exhibit A.  

Pretty much everything has to be exactly like Daddy's.  Bob has a mountain bike.  Unfortunately, you can't get one with 16" wheels so we tried our hand at replicating it.  If you think the back is ridic, you should see the front.  We have paper hand brakes, paper brake cables, paper cup holders and emergency pump, and plastic! reflectors taped onto the spokes.  Ethan is super proud of his 'mountain bike' and likes to chat with our neighbors about all its features.

We recently got Mazda SUV.

Which leads to Exhibit B:

The 'snow' on the windshield is a relic from a pretend trip to Tahoe.

Exhibit C.   

His most favorite book is Voyage Across the Cosmos.  We have read this book so many times it is falling apart. Since he loves this book so much he wanted to make everyone in the family our very own copy so we can all read it with him.  The book is 144 pages long people.  This was a summer long project.  Every day we drew and colored a few pages to add to our book (times three since we HAD to have one for Daddy, Mommy and YaYa).

• Around 7 AM we have breakfast.  Gone are the days where he will willingly eat steel cut oatmeal (and yes, he used to love his oatmeal.  And fruit.  And milk.  All past tense).  He has these food phases which last a few months where he absolutely loves something and can have it ad nauseum.  As long as it's healthy-ish and meets most of the food groups, I'm fine with it. His new kick is waffles and we usually make a big batch of this mix so we can use it throughout the week.  We sub one cup of the whole wheat flour with half almond and half flax seed powder, nix all the oil and instead throw in a container of applesauce (or some other pureed fruit/vegetable) and extra dry milk powder when we mix it together with the wet ingredients.  So E does get his oatmeal and dairy (ha, the trickery!) and some form of fruit with his breakfast.
• After eating a vat of waffles (seriously, he can eat twice his body weight if it is something he likes) we do some running and jumping on the trampoline.  Good thing we loaded up on carbs!

• We make something else out of paper and tape.  Like this:

A replica of our iPad so that YaYa can play with one next to him.  The case was YaYa's Christmas present.  The inside scene in the iPad is from Fieldrunners which I may or may not have introduced him to.

• If there is a Home Depot workshop we go to that (his favorite part of the workshop is painting the finished object), followed by some class.  We are currently taking Karate which E loves much more than he did soccer.

• We have lunch and then head home.  Where we make something out of paper and tape.  (Sensing a pattern here?).

A story about a girl and a bear and an apple that he heard at school.  The title is 'I like red apples'.

• We go biking.  Ethan loves loves loves biking.  We do a 3 mile loop every afternoon along the Guadalupe trail.  Last October when Nai Nai came to visit, Ethan asked to take off his training wheels.  We put them in my bike basket and unfortunately it promptly tipped over and the screws that held together his training wheels rolled down an open grate.  Luckily, Ethan picked up riding super quickly so we just pedaled back home and never needed them since.

• Bob may or may not drag us to Costco.  Seeing as that is his favorite place on earth we probably do end up going.  Since Ethan likes to push around the cart and/or look for new books and I like the samples it's not a hard sell.  If we do not run errands we usually head to a local playground.
• We come home and do some more running/jumping/paper crafting.  
• Dinner is around 5:30 PM, and then it's shower and bed an hour later.  
• Day over!