Smarty Pants

There is no denying that our little Addi girl is one smart cookie. Just like with Jake, I never really did much to teach her how to read, outside of constantly reading to her, but she has become quite an amazing reader at 5 years old. I honestly believe that reading is a developmental thing that kids will just get when they are ready, and it really doesn't matter much when a child starts reading (as long as they eventually start reading). I wouldn't even mention it on here except that this is the only place that I record things about the kids, and I want to remember when they accomplish certain things. She has started devouring books and absolutely blows me away at what she can read. She doesn't hesitate or have to sound words out - she just reads. She has been getting into American Girl lately and received the 6 book set of the American Girl, Josefina, for Christmas. Those books are probably at about a 3rd grade reading level, and I thought that we would read through them together. Nope. She whizzed through them on her own and finished them up shortly after receiving them. When she told some friends of ours that she was reading them, they were convinced that she couldn't possibly be comprehending what she was reading...so she told them exactly what was happening in the stories. She can be quite a talker when she gets going, not leaving out any details, and I'm pretty sure that they were sorry they asked. They then proceeded to ask me again when in the world I was going to put the kids in school (you know, since they're obviously falling so far behind at home! :)). Go figure.

One Cute Kid

I told Jay today that I'm quite certain that this little munchkin is never going to frustrate us or cause us any grief (Ha!). He's just too darn cute...

For some reason, he decided that he did not want his feet in the water!

Lounging

(Jay is not a fan of naked baby pictures, but hopefully this one is tame enough and, again, just too cute not to post. If it's deleted tomorrow though, you'll know why.)

Check out those rolls!

Have I mentioned that I kind of like this kid? :)

(Update on the sleep situation: He has greatly improved over the last couple of weeks in the sleep department. He is now going about 9-10 hours at night fairly consistently. So things are looking up!)

Touchdown!

Jake has been dying to play football on a team, so we signed him up for flag football through our community recreation department. It is only a 7 week commitment, with "games" immediately following practices on Saturday mornings. Jake's first practice/game was this past Saturday. It is just designed to introduce kids to the sport, so there is no score kept and nobody takes it too seriously...unless of course you count the coach's older son, who is probably 10 or so, and takes his role as assistant very seriously. The entire time on Saturday, he was out on the field shouting things to the team like, "I wanna see some flags pulled." Or (Jay's personal favorite), "Contain him. Get him to the middle and then sandwich him!" I'm serious. The entire time. Here he is giving Jake some pointers.

Jake had a great time, as he does anytime he can just be rowdy and physical with a group of boys. Here he is running for a touchdown, but alas, he still has trouble staying on his feet...

More successful second attempt...Woohoo! Touchdown!

And, as always, our ever-faithful fans coming to cheer Jake on...

Creativity in Action

I will admit that our kids have a lot of unstructured time. I am not a believer in the over-scheduling of children and carting them off from one activity to another. It seems like the typical family anymore just goes from one thing to the next. It's very normal for the parents to always have to split themselves between the kids and go from soccer to baseball to karate to dance to boy scouts and on and on. The kids hardly have time to get home and grab a bite to eat before heading out to the next scheduled activity, if they even eat at home at all. Then, after all that, they come home and have to do their homework. I don't think that any of those activities are bad in and of themselves, but I also don't believe in the benefit of having so much going on at one time all the time. There are several reasons why I'm not a fan of it, but the one that comes to mind right now is that I don't think that kids have enough opportunities to be bored...and, therefore, to be creative. I don't mean that it's good for kids to sit around saying that they don't have anything to do. I mean that when they don't have anything to do, that's when they use their imaginations and come up with amazing things.

Jake and Addi are constantly coming up with new games to play and new things to do...things that I shake my head at and wonder where in the world they possibly got the idea. The majority of our time is spent at home, but they don't have TV to watch and hardly any computer time, so they really don't have a choice but to be creative. They argue a lot in the process, but they also have a great time together. This afternoon, they decided that they were going to try to create invisible ink using lemons and I'm not sure what else. This then turned into them attempting to create natural dyes (their words, not mine) from flowers and plants and anything they could find in nature. They kept running in and out of the house getting hot water and various "tools" to pound up their flowers and create their dye. The next thing I knew they were finding old t-shirts to dye, white yarn, and whatever else they could come up with that they thought I would allow them to use. This went on for at least a couple of hours and the whole time they were laughing, creating, and having a great time together. They would never get the opportunity to do things like that though if we constantly had places to be, and they would miss out on what I think is such an important part of childhood.

Here are a few snapshots of their creative afternoon...