Faces

Addie was interested in smiling for the camera this morning, so I took advantage. :) Kellen and Ellary were pretty much just interested in playing ball together, but I did get their attention a few times.

Today we went for a tour of the elementary school where Kellen will start kindergarden this fall. I tend to think I am pretty stoic about things, but when I saw the lines of children walking to and from the lunch room, it hit me what we're jumping into and how different things will be next year. I seriously thought I was going to cry! How weird!!!! :) Kellen and Addie are such good pals and hardly do anything without each other. I was wishing I could send Addie along to school with Kellen - she's really going to miss him!

Gymnastics Receives 2 Perfect 10s!

The day finally arrived - Kellen got to go back to gymnastics today!  And what was even better, Addie got to go, too!  At the end of the last session, Kellen was promoted to the class for 5-year-old boys, but we decided to break from gymnastics to give soccer a try.  Kellen hasn't really gotten a kick out of soccer (groan - I know!), so we're headed back to the gym.  We discovered that there is a class for Addie that meets at the same time as Kellen's class, so she's in, too.  On Saturday I took Addie to the dance shop and she picked out her gym leotard.  She really wanted purple, and it turned out that the only one in her size was purple!  She's very proud of her little outfit (though there were some initial complaints about wedgies...).  Anyway, tonight, Kellen was the only one in his class, so he had one-on-one instruction for an hour. It was AWESOME!  He was the only boy in a gym filled with girls from age 3 to 13, and at one point they lowered the rings from the ceiling in the center of the gym for him to work on some flips (I have no idea what all the skills are called).  It was so much fun to watch him - after just a few tries with help he was flipping forward and backward all by himself, and it seemed to me he was doing a pretty impressive job of using arm and shoulder muscles to hold himself up.  She had him doing chin-ups on the uneven bars and he was walking himself across the parallel bars using his arms.  Made my shoulders burn just to watch him!  Meanwhile, Addie learned to hop across the balance beam and was a mighty jumper on the trampoline.  That girl can fly all over the place (they were supposed to jump up and down in one spot...).  She really liked jumping down into the pit filled with foam blocks.  She was just so stinkin' cute in her leotard and with pigtails in her hair.  When the class was done she complained that she wanted to stay all night.  I imagine tomorrow Addie will ask me how many more sleeps before she gets to go back to gymnastics.

Smooth Rider

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately. We got home in the middle of the week, and except for a fever Ellary developed yesterday, everyone has been healthy. A nice change from the last 2 weeks! We spent lots of time outside in March, giving Addie and Kellen lots of time with their bikes and scooters. Even Ellary loves to ride in the wagon. Kellen, while not a big team sports guy yet, LOVES biking and scootering. I guess he comes by it honestly since his dad loves biking and his uncle is training to be a professional mountain biker. He learned to ride his 2-wheeler without training wheels when he was 3, and now he's becoming quite accomplished on the scooter he got for Christmas. Here's a little clip of his latest scooter trick (can you imagine he's excited that his gymnastics classes begin again tonight?!).

smooth rider

Tommy's Replacement

Last night we went back to the pet store to pick out a new betta fish. The kids were anxious to have a new inhabitant for their fish bowl. They decided on a blue betta this time, and rather than name him Tommy again, they decided to name him Timmy Thomas. So welcome Timmy Thomas. We have him on a regimen of a little less food and more time under the warm under-cabinet light. Hopefully Timmy Thomas will be with us much longer than poor Tommy was. :)

CW Round Up

Below is a slide show of a series of pictures from our 2 days in Colonial Williamsburg. Over the 2 days, Kellen and Addie got to see the Governor's Palace, the Palace Maze, the Palace pond, the Palace kitchen, chickens that were colored like Zebras, the Powder Magazine, the George Wythe House, the blacksmith, the silversmith, the gunsmith, the bakery, horses and carriages, cannons, the stocks and pillary, the windmill, and lots of animals. There were fences and trees and carriage steps to climb, mazes to explore and hedges to crawl through, spiral staircases, new ways too learn letters, cookies to eat, wildflowers to pick, hats to try on, and stages to dance on. Addie asked questions and learned that cookies at the Governor's Palace were called common biscuits and the 8-stringed instrument we enjoyed hearing while eating cookies and cider was called a mandolin. She even climbed up next to the mandolin player and sang Twinkle Twinkle for everyone who was listening. In the George Wythe house there was a basket of blocks that showed how to make letters using your body - Kellen and Addie went through each block trying to imitate the colonial figure to make each letter. Addie mastered "A" and Kellen mastered "K." We still need to go back to ride the carriage and there are lots more houses to visit. It's fun that the 2 big kids are getting to an age where stuff like this is fun for them!

Go Climb a Tree

While we were in Williamsburg visiting family, we decided to be tourists and actually purchase passes to take the kids into some of the historic buildings. Kellen was most interested in the Powder Magazine, the octagonal building where the colonial militia's powder and ammunitions were stored. He also wanted to see the gunsmith, but he was a little unsure of going inside and was happy to stay on the porch. Addie's main interest was the "bakering ship," her words for the bake shop that sold delicious ginger and chocolate chip cookies. She was not interested in any of the sites until we first stopped in the bakering ship to get her a cookie. :) I will have a series of pictures to post, but rather than litter the blog with tons of pics, I decided to make a few slide shows. The first slide show is of Kellen and Addie climbing a fantastic old tree that I remember climbing as a kid. Kellen and Addie were very brave exploring the old gnarled branches. My family used to have picnics under the tree and then we'd climb and climb. It's located right next to the building where I worked as a child interpreter when I was about 10. I think we could have foregone the passes and just stayed at the tree all day!

Home

We got home around 10:00 last night after a rather smooth ride down from Virginia. Kellen rode with me in the Honda, following Geof and the girls in the van. Kellen was quite happy to occupy himself in the back seat with the ipod, and for the last hour we talked about me learning to ride a bike, why there are special parking lots for school buses, what it would be like to ride in a car with no windows, and then we took turns naming the silliest towns we could think of that would be fun to drive to ("Big Fat Thumb-ville," "Ice-cream-ville," "hot oven-ville," - it was all very kooky, and Kellen was HOWLING with laughter for about 45 minutes).

We did have a bit of sad news over the weekend that we knew we would have to address when we got home. We got a call from our neighbor that our fish Tommy died over the weekend (I think thanks to me forgetting to tell Geof to leave his light on all weekend). Addie noticed that he was gone this morning, and she had a VERY hard lesson to learn. At first she was inconsolable, wanting Tommy back. Then she wanted to know where he was. Then she wanted to get a new red fish and name it Tammy. Then she and I worked together to draw pictures of Tommy and make cards for him. That seemed to make her feel better, and now she is looking forward to going back to the pet store to get a new red fish and she wants to call him Tommy after all. "That way it will be just like having Tommy again," she says.