Kindergarten Graduate and Birthday Boys

First this happened:

Alex finished Kindergarten and is now, officially, in grade school.  Oh my.  It seems Kindergarten was great for him and he's learned a lot and has become more confident when trying to learn new things.  In the fall he was very resistant to reading, but now can read or sound out almost any word.  He's still very timid about it and if the word is too big or there are too many words on a page he whines and wants to give up, but we'll be working on that through summer and hopefully help him gain some confidence. 

When he wants to, he is pretty good at sounding things out as well:

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Then these two celebrated their birthdays:

For John we just did a lot of shopping.  He's lost a lot of weight and has recently started running and all of his clothes were just hanging off of him.  We took him to Red Robin for lunch and tried to be nice to him all day long :)

For Max, we threw him a birthday party with friends at a local play and pizza place complete with a Lego themed cake:

On his actual birthday Monday he requested to go to Chuck E. Cheese, so we went there, the boys (including John) played video games and earned something like 225 tickets (which, when redeemed earned them a balloon, 2 boxes of nerds and a small tub of playdough)

Then he wanted to go to his favorite store, Bricks and Minifigs, a Lego store, and we picked up 4 more Lego Dudes.

We ended the day with Happy Meals at McDonald's play land. 

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The festivities began on Friday and continuted through Monday and it was great to spend 4 days celebrating these three guys who I love so very, very much. 

Summer, BRING IT ON!

I am SO ready for summer to start!  While many of my other mom-friends are dreading the next three months, I Can. Not. WAIT!

Alex has been in afternoon Kindy because when he started school last Fall John was working nights and had Alex been in a daytime class, he'd never see his Daddy during the week.  So we opted for afternoons and it worked out great, except for the fact that Kindy was right in the middle of the day, 12:30-3:05, which meant we couldn't go anywhere in the mornings because there wasn't enough time before school, I couldn't go anywhere with Max in the afternoons because Alex was only in school for 2.5 hours, and by the time I picked Alex up from school, once we did homework and had snacks, it was the end of the day. 

Spending the entire school year chained to his afternoon Kindy schedule made me long for free summer days and I made the decision not to put either boy in any classes, camps or sports because I just wanted to be free!

However, last week the boys went with some friends to "buddy day" at their Taekwondo gym and the boys fell in love.  They BEGGED to go back the next two days, so I've decided to put both of the boys in Taekwondo.  The nice thing about this is that we can go to any of the classes during the week for their belt level. We can go every day, once a day, twice a day, once a week...as much or a little as we want, so we still have some freedom ;)

Then I signed the boys up for a summer of free bowling at the local bowling alley (just pay for shoe rental), but again, we can go or not go as many or as few times as we'd like.

Then I remembered that the school district provides free lunches throughout the summer (for kids only) and how Alex loved that last year and he plans to get hot lunch next year as a First Grader, so we'll probably go get lunches at the school a lot as well for both the practice and the free food.

My mom sent the boys some money for Max's birthday and Alex's Kindy graduation, so we went and bought the boys new bikes for the first time ever.  They were really excited, so I plan to put on my running shoes and chase the boys down bike paths with a box of bandaids a fair amount this summer as well.

Of course we'll also have playdates and berry picking and picnics and afternoons by the pool and building sandcastles on the bank of the Willamette and weekends at the beach poking at tidepool creatures.  And I've committed to running in a 5k with a few girlfriends this fall, so we'll spend time training for that (I can only run 1 mile at a slug's pace right now, so we have a LOOONG way to go before I'm ready to run a 5k!). My lazy summer is already looking pretty busy and it doesn't even start for 2 more days!!