Muppets and Puppet Shows

The week started off well for the kids.  Their friend Bobby came over for a Nerf gun battle.  Like last week, he came over in the afternoon.  And, again, our kids were excited from the moment they woke up.  Henry was all suited up in his Nerf gear by 8:00 a.m.  He walked around all morning with the giant gun hanging out of the backpack, consistently hitting the blinds and everything else in his path.  Take the backpack off!  They had a fun battle and towards the end when the heat got to be too much, they cooled off with the hose and a short water gun battle.  The afternoon was completed when our three kids showed Bobby and his mom their bike trick.  Josiah, on roller blades, held onto the bike handles of Caroline and Henry who whipped him around the circle and then flung him forward when they reached a certain point in the road.  The trick went off without a hitch, but then as our friends were getting ready to go, Henry thought he got bit by a fire ant.  A minute after he got 'bit,' the small red dot had grown much larger and it was clear it hadn't come from a fire ant.  All Henry could say was that the insect laid in parts on the ground where it happened.  We googled it and it looked like a wasp sting, which we have wasps everywhere here.  Wasps, fire ants, and mosquitoes.  There is no walking barefoot in the summer around here.  We tried a new thing and put lemon juice on it to neutralize the venom.  Along with icing it, it seemed to help a lot.




We spent some time learning useful skills like how to mime-walk down a staircase.

Josiah has developed a new obsession.  Muppets and puppets.  He has been begging me to watch a video with him to learn how to make a puppet like the ones they use on Sesame Street - the type that have metal rods to move their arms and your hand can make their mouth talk as well as control their eyebrows.  So we indulged him and watched a YouTube video...or two or three or four.  What we watched was a man in his workshop with clay and pottery tools and felt and tons of types of foam and glues and cements and cutting tools I've never seen before and a sewing machine and even hand stitching that had different names I've never heard of.  I was looking at Josiah like, besides a needle and thread, we have none of what that man has.  Nor do we have the same skill sets as this man.  So we told him he needs to start on a much more simple model.  And Amazon is sending us that model.

Before watching the puppet making videos, Josiah had taped coffee stirrers together to make long rods and then taped them to his Kermit stuffed animal.  He has put on three puppet shows so far with Kermit as the host.  It is a similar format to The Muppet Show.  He actually does a really good job of capturing Kermit's voice and mannerisms.  This evening, Josiah asked me if doing puppets was a good career choice.  Well.  How much money do you want to make?  He ended up saying that if he was a teacher, he would use puppets in his classroom to help.  Or if he was a doctor he could use the puppets with his patients. 

Josiah has had a sort of throat clearing tic this entire quarantine.  He has dealt with tics in the past and with all of them, they run their course and eventually disappear.  We've always been told to just ignore them and they'll go away.  But this particular tic had the added annoyance of being vocal.  We could hear him clear his throat every few seconds over and over and over again.  It would get worse as the day went on so that by evening time the throat clearing was nearly constant.  The quarantine did not help in that we are always together, always hearing it.  It was driving him crazy, and us as well.  Finally, Todd did some research and discovered that tics in children can often be helped with magnesium.  So we went to the store, got the proper dosage and tried to give it to Josiah.  The only problem was they were horse pills for his little mouth.  So we tried to crush them up in ice cream.  Neither worked.  Our next step was bananas for the magnesium they had.  We've made him eat a banana a day (definitely not his favorite fruit at all), for probably two weeks now, and his tic has just about disappeared.  It is such a relief.  It is a relief for him to not have this annoying thing he cannot control.  It is a relief for us to not have to hear it and I imagine his throat is feeling so much better.

The bickering has seemed to ramp up this week, especially between the youngest two.  Fortunately we have five days of rain in the future, so it's going to get awesome here this week.  To help with the arguing, or at least to put a pause to it, Henry has helped in the kitchen a lot.  He helped cook chicken pot pie one night.  Then another night he made minestrone soup.  I thought the kids would balk at a tomato based soup, but they actually all liked it.  There was only one side-eye glare from a family member questioning cooking soup on a 91° day.  Hey.  It's Day 85 of quarantine.  The other option was cereal for dinner.

Josiah made vanilla pudding.  We're getting these boys cooking!  Also, when I went to do laundry this weekend, I didn't do the boys' clothes since they mentioned they wanted to do it themselves (last week when we switched places).  It was far less exciting to do it this week.  But they did it.  Yay.

Todd got word this week that instead of being able to go back to his office in June, they've pushed it off til August.  He was then told that he was no "spring chicken" so he wouldn't be in the first phases of coming back.  At this point he misses his office.  A lot.

My quarantine meme of the week.  ;)