Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Curve balls in life!

These past few weeks have been very busy for my family. Our 4 year old has had two concerts, one at school and one at church. That took up a lot of time for practice and then the performances. He is such a wonderful performer, he still "dances" (more like jumps!) around the house to his songs. We told him where he would be playing soccer in the fall and he asked us if he was going to be putting on a show! That made us both laugh, because I think he will be putting on a show! This is the first year for him to be doing anything organized and I am realizing how much he is growing up. For his performance at church they had a Saturday practice and I dropped him off and left and later that morning I realized that I don't do that very often. It really hit me then how much he is growing up. I think up until that point they are still very much under our (as parents) supervision. Since he has a later birthday he will not go to Kindergarten this year, I was sad at first because I thought he would be ready. But as this year has gone I realize that he will greatly benefit from another year of pre-school.

As for the 16 month old... I can't believe he is 16 months!! He has definitely thrown us some curve balls these past few weeks. He has recently learned that he can tell us his "opinion. Which is usually a shake of his head "NO". He has also recently began hitting, at first he did it just to see the reaction and now he knows he gets a reaction. Our method of dealing with this is not yet working. We have just been telling him "No hitting", but I think we are going to have to start some time-outs. With our older one he didn't really show us his opinionated side until about age 2. So this is really early for us.

Both of my boys are such a joy and do such funny things all the time. I think I will share a cute story about each of them.

The 4 Year old: Last night was sloppy joe night. He is very confused by this, because he has a friend named Joe. So I was trying to help him to understand that they are messy so we call it sloppy and then I didn't know why they called it joe. So his conclusion was "Sloppy is the bun and Joe is the meat". That just cracked me up!!

The 16 month old: Yesterday he was playing with his cookie jar shape sorter. He was putting his "Tigger" blanket in and then yanking it out and laughing. Then he would turn on the music and start to dance. He found a plastic fork inside it and started to pretend he was eating out of it. Then he came walking into the hallway dragging the cookie jar and runting at it. I didn't know what he was doing. I walked over to him and realized that his "Tigger" blanket was stuck in one of the holes and he couldn't get it out. He was getting a little frustrated with it, but I was impressed that he knew to bring it to me so I could help him.

Even though I get frustrated and upset at times, I am just so thankful for my two beautiful, rambuctious boys! I would like to end on this verse: Psalm 127:3 "Behold, children are a gift of the Lord; The fruit of the womb is a reward."