Big week!

As I work on catching up the blog, I think I'm going to jump around in time a bit so I can blog about current things and also catch up on the past! We had a BIG week this week. It was the first week for preschool for R and S! Sunday night before R's first day, we reminded him that he had his first day of preschool the next day. I hadn't anticipated an nerves on his part or I would have talked to him more about it earlier, but when we started talking about it, he got really serious and it was clear he was worried. We talked and let him know that everybody gets nervous before the first day of school! I hadn't planned on staying for the day with him at school and had some work I needed to get done before a meeting I had on Monday afternoon, so I stayed up late doing my work so that I could stay with him if he needed it.

Monday morning he woke up and was really excited to go to school! He even insisted that I take his picture (above) which Gerry had mentioned the night before and Reed wasn't thrilled about. :) We left early to give him some time to settle in before the school was crowded with kids and parents. Once he got there, I could see he was getting more comfortable. I stayed for about a half hour after class started, and when I left, Reed was just fine! Whew! Aside from being proud of him for doing so well on his first morning of school, I had a proud moment just as I was leaving and Reed had a question for his teacher. She was doing something else and I heard him ask, "Excuse me, Miss Ellie?" I was so proud to hear such polite manners!

Spring had her first day of school the next day. Reed really wanted to take her picture before school so this was the one he took. I was volunteering in her class that day and got to stay for the day. She did great, but it's clear that she's quite a bit more advanced than the rest of the class which has a wide age variation. S was invited to join the next class up but I declined because it would have meant that R would have been on class on Mon, Tues, and Wed and she would have been in class on Thurs and Fri. It just would have been too much I think.

S with her teacher.

And the other big news for this week is that we took the training wheels of R's bike!! We had experimented with taking one training wheel off at a time, but he had gotten frustrated at how tippy the bike was. We had borrowed a balance bike from R's friend T and had been encouraging him to practice lots on the balance bike because it would make his peddle bike easier. He took our words to heart and spent a lot of time practicing on the balance bike. Then yesterday, R, S and friend T had ridden bikes down to the end of our cul de sac with Miss K (our friend, nanny and T's mom). R and S were riding balance bikes and T had his peddle bike. T didn't want to ride his bike back up the hill, so in R's words, "I did a very kind and noble thing. I told T that he could ride his balance bike and I would take his peddle bike." Apparently, he hopped right on and rode all the way up the hill! Wow!! We are all SO proud!! Miss K says that everybody did a happy dance for R when they got to the top of the hill!!!

S has been doing great on her balance bike. She's a real daredevil and seems to have no fear of falling!! She'll ride all the way down our hill without slowing down and will actually push herself to go faster! Sometimes I can hardly watch and to make things more scary, she'll wiggle her handle bars every so often so she it looks like she's about to crash!

Our favorite places to ride are in the neighbors' driveway...

...and at the end of the cul de sac. It looks like they're about to crash in this picture, but they avoided each other!

Here is some video of R and S at the neighbors'.