It's Veterans Day

So today is Veteran's Day, the day most of us take off to honor our military veterans for their service. No school for Johnnie today too and he did learn about what being a veteran mean in his Social  Studies class yesterday. This is the best thing about school is learning about things like the Constitution and the election and the Presidency and Veteran's Day and all of that. Of course Johnnie is just happy trying to be Owen Grady training his raptors, or pretending to be Dr Wu creating DNA clones of dinosaurs. Today he and I headed out to Target right after breakfast. The mission was to purchase a book called A Book with No Pictures which Lisa read with him and which she made a big deal for me to get him last Monday. She even went through the trouble of finding it AT Target and so here we were looking for it. Of course the trouble with going to Target for me is that I can never resist going to the kids clothing section. Lisa insists on keeping all these clothes for Johnnie that he has clearly outgrown and whenever I see him dressed from her house he's wearing stuff that is 2 sizes smaller. I hate that. And so I have been systematically replacing his clothes. All of them. I don't care that I am spending for them, it's not like they are that expensive. And so even before looking for the damn book, I had purchased a couple of pieces of clothing for Johnnie. And then only to find out that they didn't even have the book in stock. I bought another one that he liked just to appease him but I could tell he was disappointed. He had already read the book mind you, and enough to know some of the parts in it that are supposedly really really funny.  I'm going to have to find this book somewhere I could already tell. Anyway, speaking of switching clothes, I bought him a different wetsuit to use today, something that would fit him much tighter than the previous one. He was still pretty cold after a couple of laps last week and so I want to make sure he doesn't have that problem today. And true enough, he did much much better today. No whining after a half hour, no complaining. He even stayed there the entire hour and then we went on home. No 3 PM Huddle meeting today since Eloisa had cancelled the series so Johnnie and I had to figure something to do. It did occur to me that while I was watching his swim class, I would have been in the middle of the Tech Council Meeting that I had cancelled earlier in the week. Hey I've been faithfully holding it every month for almost 2 years. It's ok if I miss a month every once in a while. And actually, since he still kept talking about the Book With No Pictures, I figured I'd try to download it. I did find it... but instead of printing it, Johnnie himself came up with the idea of the day. He decided he wanted to write the book. As in copy the words and re-create the book! What a fantastic idea! It was only 33 pages long but I figured this would be an excellent way to get Johnnie some writing practice too. And so we got started late in the afternoon. And he started writing. Of course he went slow and he actually asked for a break about 5 pages in. It dawned on me that #1 he wasn't going to quit until he was finished, #2 he was going to need a lot of breaks, and #3 this was going to take the bulk of the rest of the evening. YES! And so we went to the usual Panda Express pick up in Westwood for dinner. Look at him doing his gymnastics thing at Panda. And then just as soon as dinner was over, he went right back to working on the book. I have to say, when that kid has it in his mind to do something, he does persevere. What an excellent skill to have. He of course had to ask me questions about words he did not yet know. And there was one particular page where he insisted that I do it with him. This was a page full of made-up words and gobbledy gook pretty much. But we had so much fun writing out that one page. He kept laughing and laughing and I so enjoyed doing with this with him. He finished the book and then he read it with me. And then we read it again. And then when we went to bed we read the new book I bought for him earlier. And so day off for Johnnie turned out to be a pretty good day off after all. And the best thing was I wasn't at all stressed about work still. And that is very very good.