Fire Drill Freak Out!

As January rolls along, so do we!  Our week was mostly fun and filled with "happiness" to quote Kacie, but we did have a little unnerving experience when the school's fire alarm went off on Wednesday.  But first... 

We found Alexis and Drew at the Health Fair last Saturday, where they ran into Ellie from Parks & Rec and our former AoA buddy, Meghan. The four of them enjoyed Zumba together!  It was great to catch up with Meghan and find out she's enjoying her job at a local restaurant.  We're proud of her!  Thanks to all of our AoA families and friends who stopped by the Health Fair, even if the photographer didn't see you!  It was another successful event, and a lot of good information was shared! 

Our regular week began with dancing on Tuesday morning.  Alexis and Kacie handled DJ duty and were happy to take requests from their friends.
  

We couldn't resist grabbing the video camera when Annmarie asked Devin to "cut footloose" during our warm up!  At the same time, Dev and Sam showed off a few moves to one of our favorite songs.  Take a look!  (Might have to rotate your computer as we were unsuccesful at rotating the video before uploading it. 😏)

After dancing we headed to bowling.  It was quite chilly outside AND inside the bowling center, so some of us remained bundled up while we played!

Dev made some great adjustments to his game today.  He tends to look at the floor as he releases his ball, so we we suggested he keep his head up, and here he is giving it a shot.  He had two good games, scoring in the 90s on each!

Here comes lunch, and as always, it was delicious! We'd like to thank Drew's friend, Melinda B., who gave us a donation for our pizza lunch!  We haven't met her yet, but we hear from Drew's mom that she's a big fan of the AoA and we are grateful for her support! (She also contributed to the purchase of our refrigerator last summer.)  

Kacie and Alexis each rolled strikes during side by side turns, and just as we were about to snap their picture, Dev ran over and said, "I made one, too!"  💙

We caught Sam doing a little twist/jump thing he does when he bowls well.  This time it was for a spare!

It was too cold to walk outside so we went back to AFCC and made "snow paint" out of shaving cream, glue, and iridescent glitter.    Laura worked on creating a snowman.

These guys got into the painting, too!

One of his friends put the outline of a big snowman on Devin's paper, and he filled it in by dabbing on the paint.

We left our masterpieces to dry overnight.  The "snow paint" is supposed to dry like puffy paint and give a 3D effect.  We thought they looked pretty cool!

Here's our first birthday boy of the year!  We're so happy Cameron was born in January, because we had a great time celebrating with cupcakes and games.

We set up a series of game stations and everyone enjoyed playing together.

Dev B.'s mom sent us an UNO game that is played with chocolate squares instead of cards!  We played with great focus, considering we really wanted to eat the pieces!  In the end, everyone won a chocolate Kiss, and we saved the UNO game (and the chocolate pieces) for another time!  Thanks, Mrs. B.  It was a lot of fun!

We have a musical "hot" potato that we hadn't used in a long time, and were quite surprised at how much fun our guys had playing with it!

Drew was clapping because Laura got caught with the hot potato!

Patrick had fun showing off his corn hole skills, which are very good!

Our Birthday Boy, Cameron, is also a good corn hole player.  Nan said we should send him to a tournament! 👏👏

We also set up our Jingle Bell Toss game, which we ran out of time for and didn't get to play during the holidays.  Kate and Chris were a good pair to play together, as they both have great aim!  Our birthday games were fun!

After the Arctic Blast of Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday was practially tropical!  With temps pushing near 60 and the sun trying to shine, we found ourselves outside enjoying the updated basketball courts, walking around, and getting some fresh air!

Just a little higher next time, Kevin!

Gotta love Laura's spunk as she tries to block a very tall Dev from making a pass!

Kate, Liz, Cam, and Sam stretched their legs for a brisk walk around the blacktop and garden!

Kacie enjoyed some quiet walking time while Bo walks and reads.

Wednesday was also one of the more unusual national days..."Library Shelfie Day."  This is a day to arrange your collection of books, take a picture, and post it on social media.  We decided to celebrate by making our favorite librarian, Mr. Nonnemacher, a cheery sign!  He liked it!

He also likes when we help shelve the books in his collection!  Chloe, Bo, and Liz were busy this morning!

We had yoga with Patti after lunch and she taught us about our lymphatic system!  The main take away was that lymph is a fluid that travels throughout our bodies and is important in helping our immune systems stay healthy.  Movement is good for getting the fluid moving, and so is massage.  Here, Dev gently massages his arm around the elbow joint.

Kate and Chris listened intently as Patti explained that we have a lot of lymph nodes in our hips and groin area, so in this movement we circled our hips around and around.  We hope this will help our immune systems, as several of our friends are fighting colds this week and we wouldn't want anyone to get more sick than a few sniffles!

Yoga was barely over when the fire alarm went off and sent us scurrying outside!  Bo didn't even have both shoes and socks back on, but he didn't let that stop him from evacuating the building!

We were out for quite a while, and the alarm never stopped sounding.  After a few minutes, some of our friends sat down, while others stretched and got some of their wiggles out.  We figured there was just a glitch in the alarm system, but then...

This arrived!  For a few more minutes a few of us were quite anxious, but it turns out it really was a glitch in the system.  After about 35 minutes outside (thankfully it was a mild day!), we were allowed back inside but the alarm continued to sound intermittently.  Luckily for us, it was almost the end of our day, and we would soon be going home.  The fire drill freak out wasn't so bad, but we had to postpone our Squirrel Appreciation Day lesson!  You know we will make that up as soon as we can!

What better way to begin a rainy (and kind of dark) Thursday morning than gathering around the disco ball during our dance warmup!  

After dancing, we spent a lot of our morning time celebrating National Compliment Day.  We talked about giving and receving them, and some of our friends shared a time when they received compliments and how it made them feel.  Next, everyone made a sign to go along with giving a compliment.

We then drew names, and surprised each other with compliments (complemented by the messages on our signs).  Laura told Kacie simply, "You're very special."

When it was her turn to compliment someone, Kacie went to Chloe, who is very deserving of Kacie's compliments about her skills in reading and giving mini-back rubs, but found it a little hard to accept.  We talked about how it is sometimes hard to accept compliments, and agreed we will all work on saying "thank you" and letting being complimented motivate us to pass one along to someone else!

Kevin said, "thank you" when Bo complimented him on how well he sings when we play one of his favorite songs, "If I Didn't Have You," from Monsters, Inc.

Behind all of these kind words are the faces of some very thoughtful complimenters!

As always, we enjoy pop in visits from Mr. Stutt (JRES principal) and Ms. Vallone (JRES assistant principal).  They usually come one at a time, so it was a fun surprise to see them come by together.  They wanted to apologize for the fire alarm glitch from yesterday and make sure all of our friends were okay after the "distressing" experience.  😍

Since it was also National Peanut Butter Day, we had a lesson on the difference between natural peanut butter and the "regular" kind we usually buy.  We learned that natural peanut butter is just creamed peanuts, and the taste is good but it's harder to swallow than the regular kind.  We also learned that regular peanut butter has added ingredients like sugar, molasses, and certain kinds of fats to keep it smooth and creamy.  All of our friends preferred the regular!  In the two brands we compared, the natural peanut butter had more calories, but the regular had more sugar!  The fats were about the same.  Our conclusion:  Everything in moderation!

We then moved on to making peanut butter granola as another example of a "healthier" snack option (remember our peanut butter/honey truffles from last week?).  Here, Chris uses all his might to squeeze the last drops of honey out of that bottle!

We added vanilla and cinnamon to oats, honey, and peanut butter to make our granola.  We baked it to almost a crisp, and it was very good!  We saved some to use on our pancakes at lunch tomorrow!

We got crafty after lunch on Thursday and made some cute penguins to hang on our walls.  The room is kind of bare right now, without many wintery decorations.  

Thanks, Liz, for making the letters! We'll leave these cute guys up for a couple of weeks and then we will decorate for Valentine's Day!  

During our educational groups, we worked on "number sense" concepts.  This group is working to associate the dots on the dice with the same number of counting cubes.  We are also comparing numbers using the terms "more" and "less."

This group talked about making sums up to 12 and listed all the possible combinations.  We need to work on the strategy of adding by starting with the larger number and then counting up with the smaller one to get the sum. (For 6 + 3, for example, we start with 6 and add on 7...8...9.)  As we get better at this, we can play the game we made with Christina last week without as much frustration. 

Monday is Have Fun at Work Day, so we celebrated it on Friday since we aren't here on Monday.  We have a LOT of photos to include, too!  (We really like looking at our pictures in the blog each week. 😀)

First, we played games.  This group tried UNO Attack.  It's regular UNO, but instead of a drawing pile, there's a machine that shoots cards at you!

Drew and Kevin were playing Spot It (can't see Kevin), while Cameron and Kacie had a serious game of Jinga going.

Xavier really loves a puzzle!

These friends were playing Perfection, where they tried to fit all the shapes into their places before the timer ended, which would cause the pieces to pop out of the tray.

Later, Laura enjoyed playing Perfection by herself.  She stuck with it until she got fast enough to win!

We have a silly game where you use a spatula to pick up pancakes and race a friend as you stack them on a plate.  Kacie and Cameron got a kick out of it, since today was also Blueberry Pancake Day!

After game fun, we all worked together to prepare our blueberry (or plain) pancake lunch.  Kevin gathered supplies from the closet and took them to his friends in the kitchen.

This group gathered all the ingredients we needed for our homemade pancake recipe.  They used a checklist and had to hunt for things in the closet, the refrigerator, and the freezer.

Becky and her granddaughter Emmy, who had no school today, came in early and helped Alexis and Patrick prepare the pancake batter.  We multiplied the ingredients by 5 so we would have enough for everyone, and this group did a great job mixing it all together without making too big of a mess!  Thanks, Becky, for coming early!  Having the extra set of hands is so helpful when we undertake a big cooking event!  We appreciate your support!

Emmy made her way to the griddle where some of our experienced cooks, Liz, Kacie, and Chloe, gave her an opportunity to try flipping pancakes!  They were very proud of her.  😊

 

Earlier, Laura and Dev cooked the sausage!

When you want tables set for 20, you put Sam and Chris on the job!  Using some of our leftover paper products from the holidays, they made sure everyone had what they would need to enjoy our lunch meal!

Yum!  This definitely worked for Fun at Work Day!

We weren't sure how the gang would feel about doing a thorough cleaning of the surfaces at the center, but they even said this was FUN at work!  

Thanks, Kacie!  All the better to see the birdies now!

Both Annmarie and Devin were with us on Tuesday (remember how they danced together?), but missed the rest of the week due to nasty colds.  (We hope they didn't share more than a dance!😷) We missed them this week, and dedicated our cleaning to them!

Chloe shows that we used a half bottle of disinfectant! (We cleaned the kitchen, too.)  Luckily, we have two bottles so we can make deep cleaning a "regular" thing!  Ironically, it was Devin's mom who donated the bottles of disinfectant to us!  Thanks, Mrs. T., it came in handy!

After all that fun cleaning, we ended our day with the ever popular Bingo game.  This time, Bo volunteered to be the caller, and since he is soft-spoken, everyone had to be quiet and listen carefully.  It worked out very well!  Fun and...quiet! 😁

As always, we played until everyone won.  Our prize box was depleted a little today, but our friends were happy.  Dev was really excited to get this W&M sweatshirt!  Thanks to our families and friends who regularly "find" things to donate to our prize box! Bingo is always a great way to end a great week!

Finally, we want to remind everyone about the film screening on Sunday at the Kimball Theater.  This is The Arc's second year cohosting a documentary that will raise awareness in our community about our loved ones with developmental disabilities.  "Intelligent Lives" showcases three young people who show that "you never know what people can do."  Doors open at 1:30 and the film begins at 2:00, followed by a community conversation.  Admission is free; donations to The Arc graciously accepted!

Here's what's up for next week, as we watch the first month of 2019 come to an end!

Tuesday:  We are visiting with our friends at The Mariners' Museum today.  We'll participate in a "Hands-On History" lesson where we will actually get to handle certain artifacts, while learning about their significance to history.  We will have lunch at the cafe, so please bring $10 (which also includes admission).  Weather permitting, we'll also take a walk on the Noland Trail.  Please wear Arc shirts!

Wednesday:  We will be busy today celebrating Puzzle Day (could get tricky) and Croissant Day!  Plus we are making up Squirrel Appreciation Day, which we had to reschedule due to the fire alarm freak out.  And, we'll have yoga with Patti, so dress to stretch.  We will be making Ham and Cheese Croissant Casserole for lunch, too!

Thursday:  It's Backward Day...so we will try to do lots of things, well, backward!  In fact, feel free to wear your shirts backward today!  We will also have some fun with Groundhog Day, which is Saturday.  Lunch on your own.

Friday:  We're going to Eaton for a work day!  Jorie has informed us that new parts have come in and she has a few new tasks for us to tackle.  Sounds like a challenge!  Wear Arc shirts and bring a bag lunch!

Have a great weekend!

Lisa, Carol, and Nan