Holiday Pictures

This is her official Pre-Ballet picture.

They did more Pre-K school pictures mid-year.  We weren't going to get more, but how could we not get the cute picture of our daughter.  It's a racket I tell ya!  No one can resist the power of cuteness.

Summer Stuff

Well guess who learned how to ride a bike without training wheels?  Yup, Miss Holiday did.  She's had balance bikes to play with all year at Pre-K.  Now in summer camp since she's too short and too young to go to the swimming on Thursdays, her group gets to bring bikes or scooters instead. David took off the training wheels last week.  Holiday gets to go everywhere.  The zoo, science center, children's museum, and a Seattle Storm game so far this summer.  Her class goes to a local spray park occasionally.  She's been having a blast.  Now that Independence Day has come and gone, the seasonal section at our local Fred Meyer is in between summer stuff and back to school stuff.  To think that when school starts in September, Holiday will be going to Kindergarten.  I'm sure there will be all sorts of differences since I was in Kindergarten the first being that Holiday's Kindergarten experience will be full time whereas mine was half time.  But she's used to full time Pre-K so I don't think that will be a problem for her.  Johnny started the new preschool this week.  He seems to be getting on alright.  At least he eats and sleeps good.  It's a little hard to tell because he's knee deep into the terrible two's.  It mostly keeps us on our toes when it comes to our level of creativity to get Johnny to cooperate sometimes.  David's been busy at work and keeps occupied with his skateboard and organizing his games.  I've been squeezing in yard work after the kids go to bed.  I have about a half an hour of daylight to work with.  It seems like the only good time to do it since it's been so hot lately.  I'm about halfway done with getting the weeding and trimming respectable in the back yard.  I still have to do the front yard and the butterfly bush is officially on the to-do now that it's all leafed out and blooms spent.  It's so big it's more like a butterfly tree, hence the reason for needing to get it trimmed up again.  We went to a birthday party last weekend that had all sorts of fun stuff for the kids and then we went to a wading pool.  We're thinking of going to the King County Fair this weekend.  I've never been to that before.  I'm hoping for an experience similar to the Puyallup Fair but scaled back.  So the kids can see all the 4-H stuff, check out the artisan exhibits and maybe do some rides but without massive crowds.  We'll see how it goes.

The big 3-8

We went to Ocean Shores for 4th of July and my birthday and had a great time.  That's probably the best fireworks show I've ever seen and it was just the locals.  There was a lot of people, cars, and tents on the beach and hundreds of dollars of fireworks going off every minute.  We probably could have crashed someone's party but we chose to be about 50 yards away.  The kids liked being in the hotel room.  By the second night Johnny had adjusted pretty well and kept saying, "Good ni-ght, Mommy.  Good ni-ght, Daddy," in his sing-songy way.  It got to the point that even Holiday told that was enough and to go to sleep.  We even stopped by Grandpa and Grandma's house on the way home and ate up all Grandma's blueberries that were ripe.  Johnny recently got a hair cut, all buzzed short.  It makes him look like a baby.  We decided to hold the pull-ups idea for Johnny, he's simply not ready yet.  But he is going to start a new daycare next week.  It's a daycare/pre-school and we wanted something with a more educational component to it for him.  He gets bored easily and needs to be challenged.  It's around the same amount of money, a little closer to Holiday's school and a similar vacation/holiday schedule to Holiday's school and before/after school care.  So all those things will help our schedule and finances quite a bit.

Goings-on

Well we had our first free weekend without anything major happening but still somehow remained busy.  I guess there's always chores and work to do on the house and the yard.  The pumpkins are going crazy right now.  That's crazy in a good way.  I stay busy at work this time of year since there's usually a big uptick in construction.  David's been busy at work too.  Sometimes it's because one of his co-workers is on vacation and they all have to pick up the slack.  But right now it seems that a bunch of people are on boating vacations so they get calls saying the "fill-in-the-blank" broke and they need a new one or a new part right away or their vacation will be ruined.  For a business that specializes in heaters for boats it's great they can keep busy over the summer.  We have found a new daycare/pre-school for Johnny that seems better suited for his needs.  Specifically we wanted a place that had some kind of curriculum geared for his age.  Nothing ivy league mind you, but at least letters and numbers.  He has a good start on colors and shapes and has a pretty good vocabulary.  He still likes to work through the pre-school work book with me.  I've found he does pretty good with patterns as well.  Johnny has been just plowing through books lately.  Not literally thankfully, the book casualty rate has gone down in our house.