All the News...

There's been so much going on lately. Now that the dust is beginning to settle I can start to catch up on my blog again. Holiday has ended her school year as a kindergartner and now declares everywhere she goes that she's a first grader. She has also had her dance recital, which turned out to be fantastic. A whole lot of work to get to that end of the year moment. The theme was summer blockbuster so everything was a song or scoring from a summer movie. Her songs were a tap number to Chim-Chim-e-nee from Mary Poppins and her ballet number was from scoring from the Harry Potter movies, called Hedwig's theme. I really enjoyed the other numbers as well. The cow girls from Footloose, the two tappers from Happy, the hip-hop class's 'stanky leg', the glow-in-dark tappers (that was really awesome), the 9-to-5 girls, the Pink Panthers, the Great Gatsby's flapper girls and on and on. Now Holiday is going to summer camp with her same Kids Co group. So she's been enjoying the sprinkler days and bring your bike days. The field trips start this week. She's so tired by the time we get home. My office moved to Ballard last week. Not all our systems are up and running yet and the building is not even close to being finished either. The interiors are done we just have to wait till they get the phones and internet up and running. It'll be great when they finish the bathroom on our floor too. I'm thinking in the next month a lot of that stuff will get finished up. I have all sorts of places to check out on my walks now and have real amenities in the area that I haven't had in years. Johnny's daycare is two blocks from work so David drops Johnny and me off at the same time and I just meet him there after work, so that works out pretty good. It will take me about 20 minutes to walk to Holiday's school, so that works out pretty good too. Johnny has been working on potty training and we had a breakthrough over the weekend. There was a couple times yesterday morning when he was in just undies that he peed a little, stopped, told me that he had an accident and then I put him on the potty to finish. He would say he can't over and over, so I left him there to try while I got a clean pair of undies. About 15 seconds later I'd hear him yell that he did it and sure enough he did. So I told David that when he got home and we've been just getting him on the potty and leave for a minute and he'll do it. So apparently he likes privacy (which is not a bad thing). I told his daycare that today so we'll see how he does. He really wants to go to Holiday's summer camp but he has to be potty trained in order to do so. So we're using that as motivation. We tried pull-ups for a while but he would just pee in them and not say anything so we use undies at home now. We'll extend the use of undies as he improves. I've also got loads of pictures to post so I will get to that when I can.

Odds and Ends

We're definitely getting to the end of the school year stuff now. We already did pictures for dance class. The kids and I rode the bus there and back. They don't get to do that very often so they're usually really good when it does happen. But since everyone was on time we got the pictures done before our time slot was up so we got home fairly timely. We had the annual carnival at Holiday's school. They got to hold little bunnies at the petting farm section. Holiday had a baby bunny (that she named Fluffy) and Johnny had a much larger and hairier bunny. They enjoyed the free popcorn. Holiday won cupcakes during the cake walk. The young lady assisting that activity was all business, telling everyone where to stand, stamping hands and making sure the winner got their winnings. I'd guess about age 8-9. Holiday's art club has come to a close and she's bringing all sorts of completed school work home so I need to sort all that out. She's had her combination dance class with some of the younger classes so they can get used to the idea of taking turns on stage and being quiet while watching another class. I swear both of them are taller. They both play so hard that they wear out their shoes on a regular basis, but I'm okay with that. Johnny can recognize letters pretty well now and at least can count 1-12 but then gets lost in the teens but still ends with 20. He's getting there. Holiday has learned so much this year.  They both like educational activity books so we'll probably keep going with that during the summer. We'll keep going to the library and focus back on reading as much as we can. Once dance class comes to a close swim lessons will start up which will be a nice change of pace. We will also need to focus on getting Johnny potty trained too. He's starting to tell us when he needs to go, but only does that half the time. Most of the time when we set him on the potty nothing happens. Every kid is different and Holiday was not like that. I think Johnny will be more of a challenge. David's work has been pretty busy but has been able to break out the skateboard a little now that it's warmed up. He still goes golfing every weekend provided that The First Tee isn't impeding his round. I've been working on fitness lately and have managed to drop around 5 pounds. I've also been working in the garden a lot and man alive...I'm going to have grapes. I'll have to look through my recipe books for stuff, maybe grape leaves too. I spent 15 minutes last night just weaving the vines back into the arbor so they aren't blocking the sun for the peppers and David can mow around it now. I just transplanted the pumpkins and Johnny helped. He helped with leveling the new soil, making little mounds, digging little holes, and then planting the pumpkins. Holiday and Johnny helped with all the new flowers we planted. They both like helping with the watering too. It's seems every year something different does remarkably well (like the grapes) and then other things slack off. We'll see how the pumpkins and zucchini do, they seemed to be late starters this year. The basil and romaine are good. The peppers are kind of "iffy" too.