March 19, 2008

We are having a gloomy, chilly day here today but we were ready for it. Much to everyone's delight, we made cookies. Yum! The boys enjoyed helping and I did very well with their help most of the time but after a while, I was ready to finish up on my own:). We all enjoyed nice hot cookies, straight from the oven though.

They (doctors) say that sugar does not affect the way children behave but I beg to differ. Nick most especially is sometimes very impacted by sweets. I was a little late in getting the boys to nap and they are really having a hard time getting to sleep. Nick has not been able to calm himself or be still since he had his cookies.

Potty training is going very well. Yesterday Nick had only one accident all day and Ben had none. Today Nick has not had any and Ben has had one. Ben is a bit of a difficult one to read sometimes. I know all kids have accidents but this little boy seems to have great control and then, when he does have an accident, he sometimes tells me with a big grin on his face, as if he is happy about it...which leads me to believe it really was not an accident after all. There have been times when he had an accident and was upset about it and I knew, without a doubt, that it was indeed an accident.

The boys have both really missed their daddy over the past two weeks of him having to work so many hours. This morning when Nick came downstairs, he look at me with sleepy eyes and said "where's daddy?". I told him that daddy was at work and he immediately started crying and said he didn't want daddy to be at work anymore. I am thankful that tomorrow is Friday and then we will have a normal weekend where they will get to spend lots of time with daddy.

We had another first yesterday: Our first GRASS STAINS! Nick came in with grass stains on his jeans after playing in the yard. I saw them when I was helping him get ready for bed and I just smiled a big smile. There is just something all American about a little boy getting grass stains on the knees of his jeans.

I am working on taking more pics and will post some soon:).

Between yesterday and today, I have been asked three times if the boys have started school or are getting ready to or something along those lines. I guess their little back packs make people think they are going to school or something because that's when it started. I find it interesting that pretty much all kids go to preschool these days. I didn't even go to Kindergarten and I think I came out OK:). As for the boys, I think they are pretty much on target for their ages. I think their main focus right now should be playing and pretending. We have educational toys for them too so they learn about letters, numbers, shapes and stuff like that while playing. They can almost count to 20, although they still seem to miss 15 and sometimes maybe 16 too. They can count items up to at least 14. They know the alphabet and have really become interested in what letter words begin with. Ben usually instigates this game but they both enjoy sounding out the first letter of a word and trying to figure out what letter it starts with. Ben is very good at it already. They know the basic shapes and colors. We have not worked on our "school work" in a while though. We have done more cutting and pasting lately than anything else and just lots of reading books.

We'll keep doing what we are doing and, at some point, we will start being a bit more formal about it but not yet. Not sure when we will start that but definitely not yet. It will either be in the fall or maybe the next fall. Age-wise, we don't have to start anything formal for a while yet though so we will enjoy our freedom while it lasts. I especially enjoy the days when we have nothing planned and we can just do whatever we feel like doing, like today:).