Kamy — April

After a great experience at the FRESH 5K in March, Kamy and Keller were ready to keep going!  There was another local race, the Tyler Azalea 5K, a few weeks later.  It was a last minute decision, but since we didn’t have any other plans for the day, it was easy to add in.  It was a much smaller race than the FRESH 5K, so it was certainly less organized and felt more haphazard.  However, they both had a great run!  They finished in 39:55 and Kamy even placed in her “division!”  Again, Miss Competitive was all over THAT IDEA, so she was thrilled to get second place in the female 8 and under group.  She received a little jar with wildflower seeds and a lot of confidence.  =)

The kids started taking swim lessons at the YMCA this month.  They are taking it together but they are also the only kids in the class, so it worked out great!  They’re making good progress, but Kamy does NOT want to put her head under the water.

Oma and Opa came down to Texas in early April to enjoy the warm weather and celebrate Kamy’s birthday.  They also took us out to the Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens one afternoon.  The kids liked looking at all the fish in the large tanks and especially liked trying to catch fish in the pond.  We managed to catch two, so that was definitely a victory!  Those are smart fish!

One of the games Kamy received at her birthday was Sleeping Queens.  It’s a card game and the kids love playing it.  It’s even better when they can work together to beat me!  At one point they pushed it too far and, instead of trying to win, the challenge was to make me end with zero points.  I had to explain to them that they wouldn’t have anyone to play with if they kept that up.  We added a new house rule too, so that has helped to moderate the attacks.

Speaking of teams, the kids have been on the same “team” for many things lately.  They’ll play Wii games together, play against someone else and work together, or just pretend that they are a team.  I love when they play with each other and am so appreciative that they have a positive relationship.

One afternoon we drove up to Pittsburg to a UPick strawberry place.  We’d been there several times before when we were living in Lone Star, so we knew it would be worth the drive.  We extended the invitation to our local homeschool group too and had a great time.  Kamy was super helpful picking strawberries too — she filled one and a half baskets!  Considering she only filled half last year, it was a big increase!  I can’t say the same for Caden though — I think his net was about 10 berries.  We brought about 7 baskets home, full of strawberries, to make into strawberry jam and to freeze for muffins throughout the year.

Kamy and Daddy finished reading “The Magician’s Nephew,” the first book in the Chronicles of Narnia.  They both seemed to like the book, enough that Kamy asked to go on to reading the next book in the series, “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.”

The end of April also brought her dance recital!  Kamy has enjoyed taking dance all year and was super excited for her recital.  Last year, she was at a different dance studio that only does a big production and costumes every other year (not 2015), so this was her first chance to be a part of something big.  Plus she LOVED her costume!  They did a tap dance routine to a medley of Shirley Temple songs.  It was really cute and Kamy tried so hard.  Both Min and Granpops were able to come to the recital and Kamy loved all the attention.  Granpops even brought her flowers!

Dance doesn’t run through the summer, however, so she signed up for gymnastics classes until the fall session.  We are sticking with “one activity at a time,” so we’ll give her the choice at the end of the summer session to see if she’d rather do dance or gymnastics.  (Spoiler, we already know since this blog post is delayed.  LOL!)

School is still going great.  The kids are all about routine, so as long as we stick to the expectations, we all have a pretty good day.  We started a new curriculum too — Build Your Library.  We are doing the kindergarten level with both kids together, which was been working really well.  This level is focused on world geography and exposing the kids to different cultures, stories, and landscapes from around the world.  They have liked reading stories from around the world and this month we were reading Little House in the Big Woods.  Kamy is about half way through the All About Reading curriculum we started too.  She doesn’t like it that much, but we’re going to finish AAR level 1 and go from there.  It’s mostly reinforcing the basics that she learned over the winter.  For math we’re working on double digit addition, fractions, graphing, KenKen, and word problems for both telling time and reading the calendar.  She’s doing great and I couldn’t be more proud of what she’s learning.