Schoolwork and ice cream

Dima had a very bad, horrible, not-good day on Friday. He lost all three of his apples AND got sent to the principal's office. Thankfully, none of it was for anything very horrible, just consistent not listening or obeying. Part of the issue on Friday was that he had a substitute teacher. Dima does not do well with change in routine, but this was also another teacher at the school whom he knows and likes (according to her, she completely butchered the routine on Friday ;)). He is doing better with changes in routine than he used to--he doesn't freak out or get upset anymore, he just gets overly excited. So at least there's progress. ;)

Saturday started off with schoolwork. This past week was not a particularly good one for Dima, and he chose to not do a lot of his work at school which means he gets to do it at home. House rule: Homework must be completed before you get to play. However, if he's had a bad day at school, he tends to be pretty tired after school and homework doesn't go so well. As a result, he had several pages to do when he got up Saturday morning (which was really fine--he does much better with his schoolwork in the morning than the afternoon). He spent two hours doing 6 or 7 pages of work, all tracing/writing and phonics. It actually went very well. He worked hard and stayed on task for the most part, and was able to do his work with minimal assistance from me. There are still some things that he needs quite a bit of help with, particularly anything involving vocabulary. He simply doesn't know what some of the pictures are...a rug, a plate of food ( the word was "meal"), a mule (which he said was a donkey, so he's close). He's now at the point where he will tell you he doesn't know what the picture is, so it's good that he's accepting that he doesn't know it and can get help by asking.

After Mark got home, we headed out to pick up some necessary items, and decided to eat lunch at Culver's since we had a free kid's meal there. For anyone not familiar with Culver's, their kid's meals come with two tickets, one for a free scoop of custard, or you can save up all of the tickets towards a free meal. We had enough tickets for a free kid's meal plus enough for all 4 of us to get custard...but we didn't tell the boys that. :) :) After Dima had finished eating, Mark asked him if he'd like to go get some ice cream. Dima stared at him like he'd grown another head, then said "yes!" They went and got custard, and apparently it is not just a free cup of custard, it includes one free topping. You should have seen the excitement on Dima's face when he came back to the table with his vanilla custard with Kitkats! He was so excited and it was so much fun to watch. The boys normally only get ice cream when they finish their sticker charts, so this was a completely unexpected treat for them. Zhenya was also excited but was feeling a bit under the weather so he only ate about half of his vanilla custard with M&Ms. No worries--Mark was happy to finish it off for him.