Keeping them active

It's been an up-and-down few days.

This weekend was fantastic! Mark had a base ball game at an historic village outside of Springfield, IL, and then a demonstration at the Old Capital in Springfield. The boys had so much fun. We take their big trucks to the base ball games and they play and play and play. At the demostration, they got to play with Mark which they loved. I have some wonderful pictures that I will try to get up soon. Dima has quite the arm--and he's a lefty so Mark's hoping to have an MLB pitcher on our hands...that is if he can keep from falling down. The coordination's still a bit lacking there. LOL

Sunday Dima had a meltdown at home before church (most likely due to still being tired from Saturday). Usually the boys come to worship with us and then go back to their classroom for the sermon, but since Dima did not obey at home Mark had him sit with him through the sermon while Zhenya went to class. Dima did really well in the sermon and then got to go to his class for the second service while Mark and I were in class. It's hard, because we don't want to use church as a punishment, but at the same time there have to be consequences for not obeying or exhibiting inappropriate behavior.

On Tuesday, Dima had a meltdown at school. This is the first time he's done this outside of the house, ever. And it also explains some of the problems we've been having at home lately. The teacher that the boys have in the afternoon is very sweet, but she is compounding our discipline problems because she does not discipline. Dima has figured out that as soon as he starts crying (if she hears him--she's older and her hearing isn't great) she will come over and apologize and then say that she still loves him but he really needs to listen. As long as he's crying, she fawns over him. Well, he's all for that!! So on Tuesday if I had to guess he started crying and when she didn't hear him he started wailing at the top of his lungs to get her attention. I'm going to try to get him switched to another teacher if at all possible for the next couple of weeks.

Tuesday night was swim lessons. Since Dima had behavior issues at school, he had to sit out the first 15 minutes. Both boys loved the lessons, again, and they are making progress. We've been working on blowing bubbles in the bathtub (gross, I know) for a few weeks to help prepare them for swim lessons and they're just getting to that in the pool. We did take the camera this week and I got some fun pictures that I'll post when I have time to wait for them to load. ;)