Caterpillars! Again!

This morning, Brian was excited to see if the caterpillars were still at Goddard School, and boy, were they!  I think there were even more than yesterday.  We could hear them munching on the leaves!  I was glad to see that even though they were doing a number on the tree, the folks at Goddard were letting nature take its course.  Brian was so interested in these guys, that we looked up some information about them.  It turns out, these Yellowstriped Oakworms rarely actually harm the tree.  Brian was making notes about them in his new Dragon notebook, wanted to make a video about them to show all of you, sort of like a special news report.  I worked on it in iMovie to make it look like a news report, and include some of the information we found out later.  On the way to school, we were noticing the white Crepe Myrtles along the road were still in bloom–Brandon and I were both pretty impressed that Brian remembered what they were!  Unfortunately, he got a little stuck on the word, and called the caterpillars “Crepe Myrtles” for the rest of the day.  Poor kiddo..!  Also, his dysfluency is pretty pronounced this week, so bear with him.  It comes and goes, seemingly getting worse when he’s tired, going through a growth spurt, stressed or dealing with a lot of change..  Starting first grade seems to have really brought it out.

Also, yesterday after we picked up Brian from his new after-school program, he told us that he wanted to give away some of his crayons.  We asked him why, and he said, there are no crayons to draw with at the after-school program.  So, he wanted to gather up some of his own crayons, put them into a ziplock bag, and give them to the program.  Turns out that since the program only just started, and they don’t have a budget, at all–the tuition we pay is for the staff only (and we’re still hoping they make enough enrollment to keep the program around!)–they don’t have any art supplies for the kids.  Well, we were so touched by Brian wanting to donate his own crayons to the program!  We decided we’d help him do one better, and went straightaway to Stone’s School Supply and bought a case of crayons to give.  We found a cool class pack set, with 13 desktop bins of 64 crayons each–that should be plenty for all the kids!  Today we delivered the case of crayons when we picked up Brian, and maybe you can tell from the after-school director’s face–he was so happy (and a little touched!) to receive them.  We all felt really good afterward. 🙂  It’s good to give when you can, and I’m glad we could model that for Brian.