Cultivating Childhood

Just a quick round-up of some of my favorite brother pictures in the last few months!

I do have good intentions.  At least I started this blog post in early March....  =) We began the month of February with Buddy's 5 year well-child exam.  Sadly, this came with his kindergarten vaccinations which were quite unwelcome.  We went to a new frozen yogurt place as a reward for his bravery! Our church had their Winter-Warm Up, and the boys loved the bouncy houses.  I'm so thankful that our church puts so much effort into building community with one another.  They do events like this every quarter. We have a new game to play in our home - UNO!  Finally, we have found a game that the whole family can enjoy together.  As an extra bonus, the boys have learned that they can play it by themselves! We also made and mailed Valentines for our family that don't live nearby. Button is getting so big that he outgrew his socks!  When I told him, we needed to throw away his old ones, he was adamant...

It's been a while since I've posted here, and we certainly have not been idle.  Our biggest change in the last month has been that we decided to put Buddy into a traditional preschool!!!  This may come quite as a surprise especially as one of my most recent posts was entitled " Why I Love Homeschooling ". It's true -- I adore homeschooling.  All the things that I wrote in that post are true - not excluding the reasons why I thought that traditional school would be difficult for us.  So, why have we made this dramatic change? First - We were having some behavioral issues at home.  The crazy thing is that I believe that I've connected this now with the lack of quality time we had been able to spend together.  The holidays were very out-of-routine and getting back into that was quite an adjustment.  However, I was feeling a bit at the end of my rope with him.  I also realized that I was crushing him by the harshness of my speaking to him abou...

Happy 2013!   January has been a month of getting back into our groove after the holidays.  We've had lots of fun outings, good books to read, swim lessons at the YMCA, and some home-preschool spontaneity. Buddy is reading more and more.  He's now grabbing books off the shelf and trying to read them on his own.  Button has actually starting bringing Buddy books to read to him.  I'm feeling that my position is beginning to get usurped!  It's exciting though to see Buddy enthralled with reading.  (He's not actually reading the Boxcar Children yet; he just discovered where we are keeping the chapter books since I've started reading Magic Tree House books to him). Button has started swim lessons at the YMCA.  We had been going to the pool about once a week in the fall, but this is the first time he's had regular lessons.  He's starting to get more comfortable with it although he wasn't so sure about the class to begin with...