Sweet Siblings

Yesterday, we had Brody's 4 month well checkup! Brody is 15lbs, 12oz and in the 55% for his weight, is 25 inches long and in the 60% for height and is in the 90% for his head. Perfect little man. Usually they suggest trying rice cereal at 4 months, but B is eating well during the day and is sleeping 10+ hours a night so we're going to keep doing what works doing for a little while longer. Other than that, he's meeting all of his milestones and is a healthy, very happy boy! Except right now...he's a little sore from his vaccinations.

Big sister accompanied us to the appointment and kept asking "Where's Mimi?" Because she knows that Mimi is a nurse who works with doctors.

My favorite time of the day right now is in the morning, after we've gotten breakfast all cleaned up, the kids and I sit on the floor and play for a while.

Such sweet times with my babies, I'm so blessed to get to see every second of it!

Swimming Lessons

After spending 5 weeks in the pool in Miami and seeing how fearless Logan became, we decided to go ahead and get her in some swimming lessons this summer so she can start learning the basics of water safety. The local Y here has a great program that starts with moms and tots which B will actually be able to start next year while Logan swims in a preschool class.

It's a three week program that has two, hour long classes a week. So, we go M-W from 9:30-10:30. Here's L getting ready for day one on Monday:

She has two instructors but they mostly facilitate and instruct the parents and then grab the kiddos to do things every once and a while. Mondays class helped acclimate the kids to the water (which is frigid, by the way and is indoors so there's no help from the sun). They learned the buoyancy of their own bodies.

Today she learned how to kick her legs while only holding on to two of my fingers. She was SO proud of herself when she got it! She did so well with it that the instructor went ahead and gave her a kick board to practice her kicking. I think the next class we will be working on submersion...which Logan already has nightmares about--she came into the room last night around 2:30a and woke me to tell me she didn't want to go underwater at swimming lessons. Oh boy. They don't push them, though, so we'll wait until she's comfortable and then try it.

Of course, we love a chance to show off our fun bathing suits. :)

She's so worn out when she gets home that I practically have to beg her to stay awake until naptime. Today we got home, worked on her school activities for the day and then turned the TV on to keep her awake. Hopefully she takes a good nap!

We have B's 4 month checkup this afternoon, so I'm sure we'll have a post later!

4 Months Old!

Brody is FOUR months old today!

Time is FLYING by!

Brody is a wonderful sleeper! He sleeps 12 hours a night with maybe 1 interruption around 10p to get a quick snack and then goes down until about 7a. It's amazing. I think time is flying with him because of how much sleep I'm getting! Time dragged a little with Logan because she. hated. to. sleep. Still does. So, for those that hate me because he sleeps so well-- I promise, I paid my dues with #1 who didn't sleep all the way through the night until she was 2 years old.

Brody is crazy about his hands. I think if he could fit both fists in his mouth at the same time and just live like that, he'd be happy as a clam. For now, he's sticking with sucking on a finger or two at a time. He takes a pacifier at night and when he naps, but otherwise he wants his fingers in his mouth as a soother, instead.

He is not a big roller yet. He has gone from back to tummy a few times, but almost flat out refuses to roll the other way unless I leave him on his tummy until he screams bloody murder and flips out of sheer distaste for that state of being.

He loves his big sister. They are seriously best buds. She comes in the room and he lights up, and he especially loves it when she lays down next to him and holds his hand. They hold hands in the car all the time and it melts my heart when I look back at them and see the two little hands clasped together.

Brody is one of the most content babies I have ever been around. He's been in the nursery the last two weeks at church and both weeks we've gotten several comments on how happy, smiley and calm he is all the time. Though, I think he does show off a bit for them since big sister isn't around to steal the show.

He likes to hear his voice and frequently you'll hear him just singing away.

Sometimes he feels like he's bigger than Logan was, but then I see pictures and compare and realize he's not all THAT big. We have his 4 month check up on Wednesday and we'll see how he compares then.

He definitely got very distinct things from both mommy and daddy but I think he looks JUST like my brother when he was a baby. I'm going to get pictures to compare but B could definitely double for John.

He is not a clingy baby. He loves mama and at the end of the day just wants me to snuggle him, but has no problem being passed around so long as he's not tired or hungry.

He is just the sweetest thing and we are so glad that he belongs to us. We love to watch him grow, but it would be wonderful if someone would tell him to stop doing it so quickly.

Preschool In Review: Week 1

So, today we officially finished week one of our in home preschool. Logan loves it. The second Brody gets put in bed she's asking to do "some school now." I've had to come up with several extra activities that go along with our weekly themes because I only intended it to be 30 minutes or so a day!

Here she is gluing squares onto a piece of paper. Practicing fine motor skills, her shape of the week, picking out her color of the week...and sticking her fingers together (just kidding).

I'm using lapbooks with her to help her really understand concepts and be able to review them constantly. I used these a LOT when I was teaching. You take a file folder and glue important pieces of units into them so you can review them. I've had kids do book reports like this, learn to take notes like this, etc. They are wonderful! This way, we can keep all of her weekly units in a portfolio box and go through them regularly so she doesn't forget past weeks.

Here's our lapbook for the week:

(rough picture) But we learned big and little A, about the square shape, the color red, about cows, the number one, apples and we learned Genesis 1:1. Logan went through and scribbled under underlined all of the A's.

She was SO proud of herself, as are we! She's a fantastic little learner and we're ready to dive into week two starting Monday!

Happy 4th!

It's a few days late, but better late than never, right?

We had a fantastic 4th of July! It was the first day Mike's been free from work and school since January so we planned to just enjoy it as a family.

We picked up a little splash pool to set on our porch for those crazy hot afternoons. Brody loves it...Logan is fickle about it. Some days she's crazy about it and others she says she doesn't like swimming at all. This better change since next week we head off to swimming lessons and she'll have no choice but to swim.

These pictures weren't from the fourth, but he just looks so sweet in his baseball pj's I had to throw them in:

Back to the fourth. We went shopping in the morning, came home, rested and then had a BBQ with some friends from church. Nothing major, no fireworks (started way past bedtimes), but we enjoyed a quiet day together.

Proof that when you've got two only one will cooperate for a picture at a time. Never together.

This little girl is growing up way too fast. She's really gone from a baby faced toddler to a little girl in the last year!

Preschool

I admit it...the teacher in me couldn't take it another day and so I've decided to start doing some more structured preschool activities with Logan. Actually, the girl thrives on structured activities and behaves better, sleeps better and even eats better when we've got a schedule going. She's got her alphabet down, recognizes most capital letters, can count to 10 by herself and can count from 4 down backwards, spells her name, recognizes her brother's name, knows her colors, several shapes, etc. Anyway, all this to say I think she's ready and I'm going to really let her take the lead on this one and jump right in!

(here she is doing just that)

I looked into different curriculums and kind of put together my own from a compilation of several ideas. We're going to go through a different letter/number/animal/shape/color each week and learn them really well. The letter we'll learn both upper and lower case so she can recognize them all the time.

We've talked about how we're going to have special mommy and Logan time while baby brother naps in the morning. This made her so excited! Not that we haven't had special alone time while he naps, already, anyway...but now that it's got a fancy name (preschool...or pee school in Loganese) it's much more exciting.

Today we worked on the letter A(a) and also colored our animal of the week, a cow. I'm not going to push to hard to have animals that start with the letter we're learning since we're just doing letter recognition. Once we've got the letters down we'll get into a unit with letter sounds and then we'll learn animals with those letters. She was thrilled to get to use the glue sticks that we picked up at Target yesterday!

Brody woke up just as we were finishing. He wants to know when it's his turn to have special mommy time. How about when you're going through growth spurts and waking me up five times a night, bud? ;)

Then daddy came home from his final and we all shouted hip-hip-horray because he's D-O-N-E for the summer!

Brody is loving the attention from daddy. He looks SO BIG to me in this picture!

Happy weekend!