With another tax season over, I’m breathing a sigh of relief and getting a bit of my life back. We must’ve been busy this year. I can’t remember another April 15th that I was so anxious for (except, perhaps, for the year the earthquake extended tax season to April 30). I didn’t realize just how stressed I felt as we neared the deadline, until Thursday April 16 when my office, the phone, and even email were silent. Friday I had my energy back again. Amazing. Anyway, it’s time for an overall update.
Christian is doing very well in baseball. If you’re not following Bill’s blog, why not? All of the details, including the schedule and results, are updated after every game. School is still a struggle, and we’re looking into tutoring for writing for the summer. He enjoys reading Geronimo Stilton books, and Yotsuba books (which are comic book format translated into English from Korean and are read from right to left). Christian’s really enjoying learning to cook. He’s great at pancakes and made us breakfast unexpectedly one Saturday morning recently. He followed directions to make brownies from a mix quite well (except I didn’t have the right oil out for him so they turned out weird – olive oil is not always an acceptable alternative to vegetable oil). Today he’s making fudge, yum!
The kids did a great job each of the six weeks leading up to Easter presenting a new symbol of the season each week during the church service. The boys read their lines slowly, clearly, with enviable poise. Alyson memorized her lines and said them loud and clear (the four weeks she decided to participate – two of the weeks BJ had to say her line for her). The last week, her line was really long, and we were really proud of her. The kids do so well up in front of people.
This summer, the kids will be attending Skyhawks sports camps again. They had a good time last year, and it’s an economical solution. BJ was adamant that he didn’t want to go, until I made him an offer. If they make it through the summer without whining, moaning, and complaining, we’ll spend a night at Great Wolf Lodge at the end of the summer. BJ changed his tune quite rapidly. I’d really like to manage a road trip to visit Angie in UT, but I haven’t figured that out yet. We’ll have a week of VBS in July, and Christian wants to go to Bible Camp. I’d love to go and take BJ and Alyson too, but I don’t think we can afford it. I’m proud of Christian for being willing to go to a week-long camp without us.
BJ is having a blast being Bat Boy for Christian’s baseball team. I think he enjoys being part of the team (particularly the snacks at the end of each game). He’s a smart kid and does his homework easily, when we can convince him to do it. He advised his brother to just rip it in half if he didn’t want to do it. *sigh* He’s become quite addicted to a computer game, so he frequently loses computer privileges. He does enjoy reading, though, and can freqently be found sitting in front of the heater in the living room, reading any book that’s handy. He’s into chapter books now, and is in the highest reading group in his class. He claims to have read all of the Junie B Jones books. He also likes Geronimo Stilton.
Alyson is still amazing me daily. She’s often trying to sound out words. She now writes Alyson, BJ, Mommy, Daddy, Christian, cat, dog, God and lovely without assistance. She sounded out Doctor the other day and it was readable. She called herself Doctor Alyson and said she wanted to be an eye doctor. Go figure. She can often be found sitting with a workbook and markers. Or dancing. Or playing with toys and games we had forgotten we had because the boys never played with such things. It’s the workbooks that amaze me. She can do word searches. She can do fill-in-the letter activities which require her to look at words/pictures on the back of the book to figure out what letter is missing, and go back to fill it in. She loves patterns and sees them in everything. Today she decided she wanted to learn to play piano and learned the first three notes of the random song we had music out for. She still loves to sing. Her current favorite band is Paramore (particularly because they have a couple of songs on Rock Band).
We haven’t heard back from her school yet, but I’ll give them a call soon to see when testing should be scheduled.
I’m sure there’s more to say, but for now, hope you enjoyed the update 🙂 I’ll see if I can find some new pictures to add later.
