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...

You Can Lead a Horse to Water...

One thing that I have learned very clearly over the past several years is that if you need to be humbled, become a parent. Oh, how parenting continues to humble me in every possible way. In the past, if anybody had told me that they were still sleep deprived when their baby was four months old, or that their baby didn’t sleep through the night until they were 6 months or 8 months or a year or whatever, I would have outwardly sympathized with them, and inwardly I probably would have thought something along the lines of, “Well, I know how you can fix that. Do a little sleep training.” Jake and Addi were both incredible sleepers very early on, and I chalked that up to the consistent schedules that we kept them and the great “sleep training” that Jay and I did with them. Well, fast forward to now, and I am eating those thoughts. Tate has very different plans when it comes to sleeping. My philosophy of, Be consistent with them and they will sleep, is proving to not be a universal truth. Tate has sleep plans of his own, with no regard for what my plans might be. I simply never know what I am going to get with him. One night he may only be up once (even that would have been unheard of with Jake and Addi at this point, but is a “Hallelujah” night with Tate), and I will think that we have turned a corner and he is finally starting to get it. And then the next night, he is up what seems like most of the night. Or, one day he’ll go down for naps with a smile on his face and actually nap for more than 40 minutes at a time, and the next day he decides that naps are not on his agenda for the day.

Thankfully, I am a much more relaxed parent at this point. This would have stressed me out before and I would have thought that I was doing things all wrong. This time though, I really am enjoying and relishing this baby stage so much more, and I am able to actually be thankful for the time that I have with Tate in my arms...even if it is the middle of the night and I continue to be sleep deprived (despite the fact that my baby is over 4 months old). I am coming to the conclusion that he might just be one of those babies that doesn’t sleep through the night until...whenever. And I’m okay with that (at least I say that now). I’m just going to continue to be grateful for this miraculous, amazing, happy little person, regardless of how much sleep he deprives us of. Because, like they say about horses and water, I can lead my little Taters to his crib, but I can’t make him sleep!

Jay is probably giving him a pep talk before putting him down for the night (And I say, "putting him down for the night" very loosely. It would probably be more accurate to say that he's giving him a pep talk before putting him down for a couple hours!)

But really, how can you be frustrated with this little guy? Just look at that angelic face! :)

Tate comes with us wherever we go around the house and hangs out in his little chair. Here he's keeping Addi company while she washes the dishes.

Valentine's Day

We don't usually do much around here for Valentine's Day. Last year, the only thing on my mind was hearing one miraculous little heartbeat. This year, I decided that I wanted to do something to make it special for the kids. That probably had something to do with all the cute ideas that my sister kept sending me from her newfound Pinterest obsession, making me feel like an inadequate mom for not doing something of the sort! (Just kidding.) I had some very grandiose ideas in mind that never came to fruition, but I did manage to do a couple of things that were a big hit with the kids. One thing that Jay and I did was to write lots of reasons that we love them on individual little paper hearts. Then we hid those all around the house for the kids to collect and put in their Valentine jar. The idea was originally for me to sew all kinds of little fabric hearts together and stuff them. Ha. That didn't happen. Then, I was going to sew together the paper hearts and stuff them. That turned into me stuffing them with tissue paper and stapling them together, and then partway through that project saying, "Why did I think that puffy hearts would be so much better?" At that point, they became just construction paper hearts with no stuffing. Regardless, the kids LOVED this.

I also made some Valentine treat bags for them with s'mores and heart shaped rice krispy treats...

And, of course, no holiday would be complete without the Herron children tradition of wrapping up items of theirs from around the house and giving them to us. This time, we each made out with some homemade cards and a dollar in pennies, and I also got some fancy jewelry and a little pink notebook...

The Great Outdoors

I often dream about what it would be like to live somewhere in the middle of nowhere on a big piece of land. Our kids could run free in the outdoors, we could have some chickens and a dairy cow (that the kids would have to milk), and I could avoid people to my heart's content. There is a country song that starts out, "Well, I grew up wild and free, walkin' these fields in my barefeet. There wasn't no place I couldn't go, with a .22 rifle and a fishin' pole." I hear that and I want it for my kids and I wish that they could grow up like that. Don't get me wrong, I know that I romanticize the "country lifestyle" in my mind, but I still often think about how great it would be.

Sometimes, in my dreaming about how great it would be to live in wide open spaces somewhere, I forget about how great it is right here. Granted, we can't have a cow and I can't send Jake out to shoot us a wild turkey for dinner (which would give him tremendous pleasure), but we do live in such an amazing place. We just have to share it with a lot of other people. One of my favorite perks about our particular location is that if we walk a few houses down to the end of our street, we get to a trail that leads us directly into a wilderness park. Jay and the kids love to ride their bikes through there, and I like to take the kids there to just explore and enjoy nature. I don't take advantage of it nearly as much I should though. And, I can't exactly let the kids run free there - you know, on account of the occasional mountain lion, and the fact that it is not our personal property and, therefore, crazy people might also be running free there. But, whenever we spend time there, I always promise that we will do it more often. The latest activity of choice "down in the dirt" (as the kids refer to the area at the end of our street) is shooting practice...

Hopefully, they'll get good enough that if we do ever end up in the country somewhere, I can send them out to shoot me a little something for dinner.