Election and sick days

We've been somewhat home bound the last four days. N has developed the cough I had a few weeks ago. He doesn't have any other cold or flu symptoms, but his cough is relentless at times. I kept him home from school Monday and Tuesday to continue his breathing treatments and meds. My deal with the boys is that if they stay home from school they have to take a nap or have quiet time in their rooms. The meds and rest time have helped and he seems to be back on his feet. Because he wasn't super sick he still had energy to do crafts and low key things around the house.

I started the day today with an early morning work out at 5:40. L has been waking up between 5:45 and 6:00 every single morning (including weekends) for the last few weeks. D and I trying to figure out why he wakes up at that time. This morning while I was exercising I heard our neighbor's dog, Moose, bark and I heard an obnoxious whistle blowing train plow through town. And just a few minutes later L made his way downstairs... I think we figured out what's happening...Hmmm.

 Later in the morning, N and I took L to school. We then proceeded to cast our (well, my) vote. N showed a great interest in the process of voting and the election, so we did a few fun things to learn more about it. We created a word search online using election/presidential related words and names. N found two boxes and turned them into voting boxes. L and I played along and voted for our president of choice. (Our choices were Obama and Thomas Jefferson despite the fact that we learned the candidates today are Obama and Romney.) We also made ballots to vote for what we're going to eat for dinner. We each chose a meat (chicken or hot dog), veggie (mushrooms or brussell sprouts), side choices were rice and "no opponent" and fruit choices were apples or pears. I put brussell sprouts on the ballot as a total joke 'cause I already knew I was making chicken marsala with mushrooms and I thought nobody would vote for brussell sprous. L voted for them. Stinker. Anyway. I made a ballot for each person and each person circled their choices and placed their ballot in the ballot box. It was fun. The boys enjoyed it and hopefully they learned something.

This afternoon L only took a 40 minute nap (may have only been 39 minutes, but who's counting?). Therefore we had a lot of time this afternoon to work with, so I got supplies out for the boys to do this water coloring project. They really enjoyed it and actually painted for nearly an hour. We made numerous paintings that actually turned out pretty cool!

A little while later we constructed a tent that was really cool. I wish I would have taken a picture of it because we even put Christmas lights inside of the tent that the boys were tickled about.

Needless to say, it's only 8pm and I'm exhausted. I'm actually considering going to bed, but I have numerous baskets of laundry to fold. You know you need to fold laundry when the boys are wearing pajamas that consist of one piece that is heavy winter fleece with shorts that are two sizes too small. Ha!