Checking email posting with a little update

Jacob finished Kindergarten on Wednesday.  Now he is very excited about summer home school (whatever that is).

 

Ryan is done with his first year of preschool and is a surprisingly good reader.  Jacob and he check out all the magic tree house books and pour over them.  Ryan reads a lot of words but is still working on sounding out words he doesn’t know.  He wouldn’t be as far along if he didn’t read with Jacob.

 

Allison is not as far along with the walking idea as the boys were at this age.  She makes up for it in her screaming development.  She is farther along than either of the boys is even today.  The girl screams/squeals all day for any reason as well as no reason at all.

 

Suzy is sinking money into a garden that perplexes her.  The Square Foot Garden is not living up to the hype.  Each square foot cost us about $7.50 so needless to say I’m expecting either a truckload of produce or the most luscious tomatoes corn etc known to man.  It keeps Suzy sane so it’s worth the money.

 

I’m working.  Job is better than the old one but more like herding cats.  Investments (other than the house) are doing well.  I’m eyeballing the rental property game.  On the advice of Tony Hawk on twitter, I’m trying to be more “present”.

 

Enjoy this post…who knows when the next will be.

 

Young kids on Easter

Here are a few pictures of the kids on Easter. They were a little disappointed with the small amount of candy the Easter Bunny left for them. My friend's kids had the same experience with their Easter goodies. As parents, all we could do was shrug our shoulders and tell them, "It must be because of the recession".

A few recent events

It is Friday night and as I sit down to write a blog I realize that I have nothing to say. I think I had something to say but by Friday evenings I tend to not be able to access at least half of my brain. I guess that goes along with the "half" things around here: half-done dishes, partially-put-away laundry, picked-up rooms except for the few piles here and there, the garden waiting to be planted, half-baked sharing time, and a work project that I have thought about doing but have not yet started. I realize no one looks at our blog for the written content so I will just get to the pictures and then go do something productive like watch TV.

Ryan had a birthday over a month ago. He turned 4 years old and had a fun birthday with his Young cousins. I made the birthday cake which had a "dinosaur on land and sea" theme. Ryan liked it so that was all the mattered. Of course, it had to be chocolate. He is definitely my child. Now that Ryan is 4, he has started acting like he is 14. He wonders why parents are so bossy. He gets mad when we tell him what to do. He tells us that he can't wait to be an adult so he can be bossy and eat candy for breakfast and not healthy food for dinner. We have power struggles. I thought that was part of being 3 but apparently we are having a resurgence. Ryan also likes to tell us how much he loves us and even gives random hugs and kisses. I am pretty sure he is trying to manipulate me when he does this, but I am trying to accept it as a sweet act with honest intent. Here is a picture.

Ryan got to go on a field trip to Raley's with his Tiny Tot class. Now for the rest of the pictures. This next one is of Alison's first ride in the bike trailer. It was a very short family bike ride but Grandpa S. even came along for the occasion. We rode to a park less than 1 mile from our house but Alison still cried all the way home. We have not gone out on a bike ride since.
Alison is going from baby to toddler right before our eyes. She loves to play with toys and interact with her brothers. She crawls everywhere and is the human vacuum cleaner. I can put her on the ground and she can spot a small clear something and I have to race her for it. Sometimes, I don't win. I think she is getting into the "I only want mommy" phase which is not my favorite. She got her first top tooth today.


Last week was spring break and I took the kids to one of our favorite stomping grounds, the Oakland zoo. Here is a picture of my monkeys at the zoo.

Jacob's Talent show

Here is a poor video of Jacob's first stand up comedy.

3 pictures

Jacob, Ryan, Alison and I are sitting at the computer this afternoon (in the same chair, mind you - lots of fun) and we are inspired that my sister Donna is back at her blog so we decided to post a picture of each child to try and get back to the blogging world as well.

Ryan and Santa. He told me that he was nervous and that is the reason for the plastic man face.



Jacob with Nicki and Mia (his Stovall cousins that also started kindergarten this year). I think we will need to re-create this one in 12 years at HS graduation.



Here is one of the pictures from Alison's first trip to the photo studio. It was taken at 6 months. (We copied this from the studio website so the quality is probably not great. )

Videos?

Since last Friday, I have been the beneficiary of some much needed work-life balance. As a result of said balance, I am attempting to deepen my "blogging skills" (Not to be confused with computer hacking skills or other such Napoleonic achievements).

Anyway, this first video was taken shortly after Halloween and documents my sadistic amusement at the expense of my child's innocence.


This next one is from back in October and documents Jacob's second day on a two wheeler. We sort of borrowed a play from Suzy's brother John and converted the bike you see here to a "Like-a-Like-a-bike" by removing the pedals. After about a week of tooling around without pedals, Suzy slapped them back on and Jacob was rolling in a few tries. He has since moved from this ridiculously small bike to a 16" bike. We never had to do the hold the seat, chase the kid routine.

Election 2008

Well, my children were very excited to see Barack Obama win the election tonight. They had both decided several weeks ago that they were going to 'vote' for Obama. Here is an excerpt of the conversation when I asked Jacob why he wanted Obama to be the next president:

"Why do you want Obama to win? What do you know about him that makes you think he will be a good president?"
"I like the way he looks."
"You like the way he looks?"
"I like his hair and his skin color. He looks good."

So Jacob was an Obama supporter based on physical appearance but apparently he talked about it at kindergarten (on the playground, I think) and would ask me almost everyday if I had decided who I was going to vote for. Last Friday he was very worried because I only had a few days left and I HAD to decide soon.

Ryan would flip-flop. He started out being an Obama supporter because he thought Obama's first name was "the Rock" and how cool would it be to have a president named "the Rock Obama". However, being the little brother that he is, in recent days he started professing loyalty to John McCain just to disagree with his older brother. Like many, seeing the excitement and energy of election night, Ryan wanted to be part of the action and is once again a blue child.

To give them credit, Jacob and Ryan tried to follow the campaign as much as their attention spans would allow. They would watch parts of the debates with John and whenever they saw pictures of either candidate in the newspaper they would get very excited.

I wish I had a good picture to post for this but I will just put a few random ones up: the kids with Grandpa Y; the boys in the garage putting on a show (after seeing the Blue's Clue's movie where they put on a show), and two pictures from a field trip to the pumpkin patch that John chaperoned for Jacob's class.