::last day::

Today was Max's final day of nursery school. I can hardly believe it! I mean, it seemed like the winter lasted a lifetime, but it feels like his school year just flew by.
The kids have grown so much in the last nine months--in lots of ways.

I don't know if I've talked about this before, but this school is a co-op school, where parents are involved in all aspects of the school. That means that I got to go in and be the teachers' aid at least once a month during the year. It was so nice because it let me have a little window into his world. I got to know the other kids at school, as well as the teachers, and I was able to observe the way their days went, so I could ask him better questions.
The co-op set up builds a community of parents around the kids, and it's really cool.

Today we all got together at the end of class, and the kids sang a long silly song they'd made up. Then each kid got a little certificate of completion. Then they all got ice cream. TONS of ice cream.
It was a fun little party.

I had to extract Max from a lip locked bear hug at one point with a little boy that adores him. It was pretty funny.
We're going to miss the kids and teachers, it's been a great school year!

(Max's b-day didn't get celebrated in school because we were out of town all of feb--they put him in with the summer birthdays today, and he was pretty happy about it.)

Thanks to our wonderful friends that told us about this school, we were lucky to know about it and to get him in!

::happy thanksgiving::

In honor of Thanksgiving today, I'm going to show you some pictures from the "Harvest Feast" at Max's school earlier this week.

It's basically a Thanksgiving party that's held the day before thanksgiving vacation.  But there are a lot of different people here in the city, and nobody wants to offend, so Harvest Feast it is!

The kids and teachers started making food for the feast at the beginning of November, and I think they made at least one different thing every week.

When I arrived at the school all the kids were outside playing on the playground. They were all being fire fighters. Max was up high on one of the slide platforms yelling, "FIRE!! FIRE!!"

The other kids came running and put his fire out. It was pretty cute.

The menu for the feast was pretty extensive:

Pretty impressive, huh?


Here's the butter and pickles. Max's teacher said that Max's class is the first class in 13 years that actually made the butter all by themselves. They made it by putting cream in a jar and shaking it. They took turns all through the day I guess. How cute!

Max was especially proud of the pickles. The kids cut up the cucumbers with those little pumpkin carving knives that aren't very sharp. I was told Max ate at least as many pieces of cucumber as he put into the jar.
The pickles turned out tasting pretty good!



Here's Max getting served some oatmeal bread. I was the helping parent the day they started working on the bread. They talked about yeast and kneading and all sorts of things. It was pretty fun.

Here we have applesauce and apple crisp.

Max had about 17 servings of apple sauce.


My plate! I especially liked the corn bread and the pumpkin bread.


The kids had decorated art for each table. I don't know if this is Max's or not, but it could be. He didn't know when I asked him. He said "Maybe I drew that." Silly.

It was so fun to get to see what the kids had been working on. We're thankful to have such a fun school here that Max loves. It's helped us all to feel more at home.

We're lucky.

::a walk & a parade::

So I know that it's past halloween now, and seeing a whole bunch of posts about it is a little bit anticlimactic, but oh well. It's how I do things.

So at the end of the week on an afternoon Max's school held a halloween parade. We live relatively close to his school, a little more than a mile away. So we often walk there. We walked to the parade, and met our friends Melissa and Grant halfway there so they could enjoy the festivities too.

And since I had the camera with me I took advantage. The leaves are so pretty right now.







Here's my usual view when walking to school. Max in the stroller, covered with a snuggly blanket.

He usually rides when we walk to school. But sometimes when we're not under time constraints he walks. He's just not much of a fast walker.

And we met Melissa and Grant. It was a really nice day.

A nice day to hang out with good friends.

And there we were at the school. The kids were running around, crazy with enthusiasm and excitement.

Max was inspired by our silly halloween movie and decided to be a wizard for the remaining festivities, instead of a giraffe. I think I already said that before. Anyway, because of the movie he had the impression that wizards went around with their hoods covering their faces. Of course that isn't true, but because of the movie now he doesn't believe me. Mostly I'm afraid he's just going to run into something and hurt himself. But I'm always worried about that.



Grant was fascinated by all the kids running around. He loves to watch Max, and the additional kids were just as fun.

He's so cute.

We finally all got organized and stomped/ran/noodled around the block. Max yelled "HAPPY HALLOWEEN!" at the top of his lungs most of the way.
There were lots of fun costumes, but one of my favorites was this cute little snake.

Pretty amazing costume.

I tried to talk Max into wearing his pirate beard, or a wizard hat or something else fun. But he's not really into any of that stuff, so he was just the wizard with a robot sweatshirt. Whatever makes him happy.

We ended the fun with a few doughnut holes, or "munchkins" which is what they call them out here. Then we walked home. It was a good day.