Alice the artist

Alice loves to draw and she loves the Powerpuff Girls. One of her favorite things to do is search on Google Images for various characters, such as the Powerpuff Girls, My Little Ponies, Fairly Odd Parents, etc.... She will spend hours drawing the images on the website.

She wants to get her art out on the web for all to see, so here is one of her latest masterpieces.

Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup - THE POWERPUFF GIRLS!!!!!!

Adventure Kids

During the first week of summer Alice and I began telling each other a story.  We talked about the characters, what they looked like, what their skills and abilities were.  Alice provided lots of details while I guided it into a workable form.  We talked over back-stories.  Most of this was during our hours and hours of swinging every day, and while we would drive in my car.

We started telling a story about this group of kids that go on an adventure in a fantasy environment.  Alice named them the "Adventure Kids".  I carry the majority of plot lines but she has to make decisions for her character and respond to questions and other characters while in character.  So the stories are very interactive and anything is possible, to a degree.  We roll dice to see what happens when we feel like it but sometimes we get riffing on the story and don't bother.

Alice took to the mutual story telling right away.  She loves it.  We had some discipline issues initially because she would get upset when we would have to stop for dinner or she would beg for it at all times of the day :-)  We got past this quickly and we now have settled into a daily Adventure Kids session starting around 4 pm, usually running for 1 to 2 hours.

Lately she has started trying her hand at carrying the main story line.  She'll set up a conflict and have everyone react and discuss.  She'll ask me questions about my character and roll, etc.  So, lately I've been GM (i.e. Game Master) for one or two encounters and she runs the final encounter.

I love spending time with her doing this.  It is tiring keeping up with the pace of the story (we'll switch to pre-made adventures soon) but with her doing more its getting pretty fun.  She has creative and funny additions to stories and gets really animated acting out her characters.

This provides us with a great way to be creative together as well as a way to set up ethical dilemmas and talk through them - the game provides consequences to decisions, etc.  I'm really liking it as a tool to discuss difficult topics of behavior and leadership.  The main thing is that it is easy to keep her attention with the story - she loves it and loves building it as we go

UPDATE:  Oh yeah - we also get practice with numbers and subtraction/addition, along with new vocab words.  Probability is in there but I haven't started talking about it directly.

UPDATE:  We went by Great Hall Games in Austin this Wednesday, after our weekly lunch with Cristy, so she could pick out her own dice and dice bag (she wanted her own girly ones... she was tired of using the ones with "boy" colors :-).  She picked out a purple dice bag and has many sparkly dice of different colors.  I was so proud of her .

Super Hero

Alice loves to hear stories about when we were kids. Yesterday I told Alice about the neighborhood where I grew up. All the kids in the neighborhood would dress up as superheroes. We had Wonder Woman, Batman, Spider-Man, Electra Woman and Dinah Girl, etc... Me and my friend Amy loved the Kroft Superstars show Electra Woman and Dinah Girl. We though Dinah Girl was cute so we both played Dinah and made her little sister play the older Electra Woman :-). There is a picture of this in existence, and I will try to remember to post it later. 

Since this story, Alice has wanted to dress up as a superhero. Alice loves the Powerpuff Girls, so we dressed her up in her PPG tee, with tights (because all super heroes wear tights), a cape and Bubbles style ponytails.

Summer Camp Part 1

Alice's last day at Bluebonnet was the week before our vacation in May. We decided Alice would stay home with dad for the summer and attend a couple of summer camps each month. The weeks she is not in a camp has been dubbed Daddy Camp. Dad will have to blog about their specific daddy camp events, but from what I can tell, daddy camp is a hit :-)

Alice's first summer camp was acting camp. The play they would be doing was Annie. I was worried Alice would be shy and have a hard time with new teachers and kids, but Alice surprises me daily :-) She LOVED acting camp. Even though she had a small part in the play, she sang loud and proud in all the musical numbers. She also learned most everyone else's part too. The week after acting camp Alice would be a one girl show re-enacting pretty much the entire play.

The next week was gymnastics camp. This camp was only half day, but Alice did great with new teachers and kids. She defiantly liked acting camp better, but this was fun too. We did go ahead and sign her up for another acting camp in August.

The next few weeks are daddy camp weeks. Then we have dance and art camps. Look for Summer Camp  Part 2 later in the summer :-)

UPDATE:  Weeks later and Alice still breaks out in songs from this play while we are driving.  She will also go through all the lines for all the characters of the play on occasion.

Practicing her lines

Alice is Piper (orphan) in Annie during acting camp this summer.

Cupcake survives!

I know the last post was doom and gloom, and we really were mentally and emotionally getting ready to tell our little man goodbye, but Cupcake turned a corner a few days after the last post.

After the weekend, we took him back to the vet for fluids and evaluation. The vet really didn't expect to see Cupcake back from the weekend. He thought he would crash and that would be the end of Cupcake, but he surprised the vet! His numbers were still high, so the vet game him another antibiotic to try. We were still waiting for test results, although we did get a positive from one test for Rickettsial, a tick born disease.

Monday night, Cupcake began to act a fraction more like himself. So we gave him his medications and crossed our fingers. The next day he was even better. On Wednesday we finally got our diagnosis for Liptospirosis. And so a THIRD antibiotic was added to the regiment in addition to an antacid for upset tummy, and appetite enhancer, and a phosphate binder (since his kidneys are still not working).

So far his lasting symptoms are reduced appetite, some bladder trouble (ie potty accidents) and he drinks too much water and then throws it up (sometimes). He is currently banned from sleeping with Alice until he gets the bladder back under control since Liptospirosis can be transmitted to people through urine, but he is pretty much back to his old self. He plays, he runs and lays out in the sun. We are thankful he made it through.

Our Little Man

We thought Alice and Cupcake Bailey would grow up together, but things don't always turn out as you had planned. Our happy, playful energetic puppy started feeling poorly on Saturday April 13th. We thought it was just a virus or something and he seemed to perk up a little by Monday, so we held off taking him to the Vet. But by Wednesday, we knew he was still sick and had eaten little in the past 2 days. Larry took him to the vet that morning and spent about 3 hours there waiting for test results. They told us he needed to stay in the hospital overnight so they could give him fluids and antibiotics. We went to see him the next day and were told the antibiotics were not helping so he needed to stay at the vet and we would see again the next day. We visited again on Friday and still received bad news. His white blood cell count was still high. Their general diagnosis was kidney failure, however the cause remains unknown.

We brought him home for the weekend to take care of him ourselves versus taking him to the Emergency clinic for care over the weekend. The only thing they could do for him we could not was give him IV fluids. We know he still feels really bad, but he has tried to keep with some of his routines. He spent a lot of time laying in the sun in the backyard, and Sunday morning he padded back to Alice's room to snuggle in bed under the covers for a while.

 

Yesterday Alice crawled into his crate with him to give him a hug and whispered into his ear "I've never told you this before, but I love you". She has actually told him this many times :-) She knows he is sick, but is struggling with really understanding what that means.

We are trying to make the most out of our days with Cupcake, but we all know our time is short.