Ups and Downs

Lately Simon and I have been having a lot of ups and downs. He can be so sweet, hilarious, creative and awesome so much of the time. The rest of the time? He's whining, complaining, crying, bothering his sister, bothering me, talking back, throwing toys, lying, manipulating and generally making my hair turn grey.

I go back and forth between feeling sentimental about school starting and feeling excited. Today I'm excited. This kid is BORED out of his mind. We do things, go places, visit people, play outside, play with friends, do art projects, etc. but the second we aren't doing one the aforementioned activities he is looking for trouble. To be fair, he does still play well on his own and get absorbed into his imaginary world but it takes longer for him to get to that place. Once he's there, we're good, but it doesn't start up as easily as it once did. And while we're waiting, it's just trouble.

Funny, a month ago Cecilia was giving me a run for my money and one day it switched. Just like that. She became normal (for an 18 month old), and the boy lost his damn mind. Thankfully, whenever we have phases like this he always finds his way back to normalcy eventually. I'm sure that will be Cecilia's cue to crank things up a notch :)

Here are some of our brighter moments over the past few days....

He was reading to Cecilia - how cute is this?

He actually helped me clean his room with little complaint, even getting under the bed thoroughly:

We were babysitting for some friends and they set up a farmer's market (I bought strawberries from myself). After it was all set, he went to the end of the driveway and started yelling "FOOD FOR SALE!" at the top of his lungs and was mad nobody was coming. He was hellbent on it being a REAL store and not pretend and was very adamant that he got paid with real money. The whole thing was just pretty cute.

And finally a little video of him...this is not how he normally is, but this is Simon trying to be funny. He laughed heartily at himself when looking back at his several times:

Like I said, we've had ups and downs :)