Sunday, January 6, 2008

Did I Mention, "Thank God for Day Camp?"

Thank God for day camp.

I love my son, but thank God for day camp!

Noah has been home since before Christmas for winter break. Hanging out with Noah and doing five-year-old stuff is great. Hanging around with twin toddlers and doing toddler stuff is great. Hanging around with all THREE, who want to do different types of things than each other, especially when the latter wants to destroy whatever the former is doing and both need to stay on opposite sides of the baby gate to keep tantrums and toys pelted head-ward to a minimum, and especially when both said age groups need to be with their Mama at all times or screaming ensues…

That’s kinda hard.

So, thank God for day camp.

Noah is off to winter day camp starting Monday morning, along with his best friend Cooper. There will be bowling and crafts and sack lunches. And I will go back to caring for one age group during the day…

…sigh…

But we have been keeping busy, building Rube Goldberg machines when Daddy is home to help, having scavenger hunts, decorating cookies and practicing our reading. Okay, his reading. I hardly ever read.

I could use some practice…

One of the fun projects we did is candle making! We gave Noah a chemistry set for Christmas and one of the projects was how to make a candle.

He LOVED it!


Daddy did the set up, cutting off soda can tops and melting wax on the stove. Noah did the dipping back and forth between the hot wax and the cold water.

At one point, we thought it might be safer to work with the hot wax away from the stove, on the dining room table.



We were wrong.

Do you know how fast candle wax turns hard when it hits a cold, cold floor? It's surprisingly fast!

But we put our brand new Christmas gift cards to good use, scraping all that wax up so we could re-melt it again.

You know... back at the dangerous stove.

The finished product didn’t look much like the candles you see in the store, or the one they showed in the instruction booklet. It looked more like a pile of pink poo.

But it worked!

And Noah was very proud of it.

He got to do the inaugural lighting. After all his practice with 36 Hanukkah candles, he knew what he was doing… he even started saying, “Baruch Atah Adonai…”

He was very proud.

So proud that he blew it out and lit it about 37 more times.

It was a good winter break. I miss having him around sometimes. But after the constant refrain of “What can I do next??” and the babies screaming bloody murder wondering when THEY get Mommy next, I am looking forward to day camp.

Thank God for day camp!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

ROFL! I LOVE Noah's candle. Good for you for letting him do projects that could -- potentially -- make a huge mess.

And ... yikes! What a mess!

Adorable that he started chanting when he lit it. Aren't kids great?

Snowbird said...

Thank God you have tile floors and not carpet!!! I was just reminding your brother the other day of a couple of my children who had fun with spoons and applesauce in the living room one day. Hmmmm, wonder who that was???

Anyway, love Noah's candle. Very unique. Maybe you should try marketing them. :-)

tonya said...

OMG-- look at all that wax on the floor! What a great mom you are! I love that you are honest enough among adult company to label that the little pink poo candle. Seriously funny!!