Just An Update

I don't know if this color will show up on the back round, just playing around with it. Anyway.... so last weekend we went to the Dinosaur museum at Thanksgiving Point - it is the coolest dino museum ever, and I've been to quite a few of them thanks to Syrena's obsession. They have a really cool sand and water table that I can play in for hours (which I have done, even the kids were ready to move on and had to chase me out of it). Syrena found a stuffed scorpion which I discreetly bought in secret to give to Tommy for his birthday, he will so love it. It will have to do until he can one day get a real one. On Saturday we watched a lot of the Olympics and went to the library. Tommy picked out a book about being prepared for tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes; no big surprise there since he's been totally into natural disasters for a while now. I didn't look closely at the book before I let him get it, I definitely should have... he started freaking out later that night about terrorists and criminals. He was scared of a picture in the book and asked me to go close it for him and when I looked at the cover it was a handbook for not only the preparedness of the above mentioned disasters, but also terrorists and criminals. It went through how a terrorist or criminal can be anyone, young or old, man or woman and had pictures of people being robbed and such. What a dumb idea for a children's book! Anyway, he spent all night hearing footsteps outside the house and thinking someone was trying to break in the house. He freaked himself out by envisioning a scenario in which someone was going to kill him unless he gave them a hundred dollars. I calmed him down, assured him of our safety and layed down with him until he fell asleep and it hasn't been a problem since then. I spoke with a co-worker who has a younger brother with autism; he said they had a similar situation where his brother was scared of fires (Tommy also went through this, we were able to curb it by installing a couple of smoke detectors - a good idea anyway) so they took him to the fire department and had the fire fighters soothe him. I thought that was an awesome idea so if this particular fear persists, I will take him to the police department and have an "Officer Friendly" talk to him about ways to stay safe and that the police are there to protect him and such. Hopefully he'll forget all about it, but I'm not sure how likely that is.

My mom called yesterday and offered to give me her mountain bike since mine was stolen and I'm way excited about it. I was looking into renting a mini-van for just the night we go down to comfortably fit the family and the dogs (Eric's Explorer is broken right now), but it would cost me $158 for the van alone! Then there's gas and insurance.... yeah, not happening. That seems like a way ridiculous price to me. Looks like we'll be looking for a dog sitter... any volunteers?