Caden’s been such a sweetheart lately. He has always given the BEST hugs, but he’s taking it to a new level now. He has started giving 20 hugs at bed time. What could be sweeter? He is so cuddly and makes you feel loved all the time. One of their newest friends is Emma, another girl from dance who lives just down the road. She’s also homeschooled, so we’ve had a lot of fun with play dates, including frozen yogurt!
Caden likes his swim class. Their coach, Mr. Eric, is great with the kids and pushes each one individually. I really like that they happened to be the only kids in the class, so it is basically a private lesson. The kids are worn out by the time class is over. Caden is getting more confident at swimming and will hopefully have it figured out soon.
Keller finally got his hands on the new Vive VR headset that came out this month. He was super excited, and of course the kids were excited too! Caden loves doing the tutorial and blowing up balloons. He also likes to draw with swirls and sparkles in TiltBrush. He’s so little!
Someone is such a monkey! He loves to climb trees, and he has two in particular that he climbs constantly. He is such a little guy that he can climb WAAAAY up in the trees. Kamy isn’t quite as daring as he is, so she is more likely to push herself beyond her comfort level. With the confidence he has earned from gymnastics, Caden has a good grasp on his abilities and I’m not too worried about him. He’ll inevitably get hurt, but I don’t think it will be from being reckless. I did nix walking across the back tailgate of the truck in rain boots while parked on the driveway. Let’s not fall on the concrete and bust our head. =/ So far so good! (There is a boy in the tree below — about 70% of the way up!)
We’re working on washing hands. Apparently that still hasn’t sunk in yet, so every time he comes out of the bathroom we ask if he washed his hands. We have also told him he needs to sing the ABCs song while washing his hands. Otherwise, it’s likely to involve no soap and take about 0.3 seconds. Our questions are now, “Did you wash your hands? Did you use soap? Did you sing the ABCs? Did you turn off the light?” Repetition repetition repetition. LOL.
One of our projects this month is preparing to get chickens! Our neighbor-to-be behind us raises chickens (and birds of all kinds), so he offered to give us a couple of laying hens in return for Keller’s opinion on setting the house up for wireless internet. Before we could get chickens though, we needed a coop! I found one and got it home and then it was time to paint. Of course I had two helpers. They were allowed to paint the inside of the coop — they fit a lot better than I do! They did eventually get it mostly painted, but there was a fair amount of paint on them too! They had a blast and now ask when they get to paint again. I don’t think they’re ready for contract jobs yet though …
Caden was also told he could advance to the boys gymnastics class over the summer! Typically they keep the kids in the preschool 2 class until they are 5, but his coaches said that he was ready. He is super excited to start going to the boys class and spending all his time in the “big gym” instead of the “baby gym.”
As mentioned in Kamy’s post, the kids have been playing Sleeping Queens a lot lately. It has been great for practicing addition and Caden is getting much quicker with mental math. Caden also almost always wins! I don’t know how he does it, but he usually gets the right cards to win anyway.
While Oma and Opa were here visiting, we took the kids to the Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens. The kids loved seeing the big aquariums and feeding the fish. They also enjoyed trying to catch fish in the pond. We were successful and actually caught two, despite these being the most heavily fished fish of all time. Opa is a master fisherman and the kids always love watching him fish.
He loves to sit and “read” on the couch by himself. The kids get to choose up to 15 books from the library at a time, so Caden typically picks the easy reader books. He hasn’t asked to learn to read, but he is getting much better at phonics and is picking up on more sight words as we progress.
School is going great! Caden usually has one worksheet of schoolwork daily and then participates and listens to our geography and world culture curriculum. We’re really enjoying Build Your Library and the kids have gotten much better at world geography. He’s about a quarter of the way through the kindergarten math curriculum and has been learning about addition, measuring with a ruler, counting, basic time, and patterns. He can also do basic word searches and his writing is getting much clearer and more consistent. It’s legible too! We also subscribed to the Kiwi Crate program which sends a STEM based activity box monthly. The kids love building things together and playing with the finished project.
