"Butter"

From what I was able to figure out this morning, Nikko must have woken up at 7a and crawled into Ronin's bed at the foot. He must have been lying on Ronin's legs, thereby waking up a very disgruntled Ronin, and causing cries and yells at 7a on a Saturday morning. We all were up. Ronin's crabbiness extended toward 10-11a when I took him and Nikko to Target to pick up a script. I made the mistake of going into the toy section with them. Ronin wanted to walk so I let him (mistake #2) and he dragged a whole construction toy set to me. $20 worth. And it got ugly. Nikko was walking, and he did amazingly fine in Target. It wasn't until we got to Costco that Nikko started getting unruly. I'm not sure why, but I think that his memories of stopping in the food court for some churros really stuck in his mind. I was completely exhausted when we came back home, mostly because of Ronin, but also because what I thought would be an enjoyable experience for the boys and myself was truly not. They may be my Velcro boys, but there are times when they don't like me either.

The afternoon passed quickly and it was nearing time to leave the house for St. Lambert's. I hesitated because Ronin's cough was worse and he just threw up his snack. His breathing was getting raspy, so I gave him an albuterol treatment and decided that if we didn't go to the San Lorenzo Ruiz celebration, something bad might happen to me. As we assembled our things to go, Nikko had fallen asleep on top of the parking garage toy, standing up. I put on his socks and carried him out to the car. Genius me, I didn't realize I had forgotten to bring his shoes until we got there. And for the first time ever, Nikko didn't take off running in Trainor Hall like he usually does. He was rather stuck at our table eating egg rolls and loving the flan in cupcake shells. It was Ronin that was running back and forth, which exacerbated his coughing and raspy breathing. He was totally winded and crazed, but still wanted to keep running. Denis had to take him outside to calm him and keep him from running into Mom's dancing routines. We got home and he got another albuterol treatment. Everybody got put to bed, finally, albeit 45 minutes late. I wonder who will wake up first tomorrow; hopefully not any of the kids!

One thing I'll mention is that I went online to look up some signs that weren't on the Signing Time DVDs. One example is the sign for Butter, which is like buttering your palm with two fingers, back and forth. It's similar to the sign for Read but the fingers are together instead of apart like a V. The Butter sign is useful for when Nikko wants bread and butter. He is actually trying to put the two signs together. At one point he signed to me that he wanted just Butter, because he had eaten the butter off the tops of the bread and wanted them re-buttered. Cool! The sign, I mean.