We got home from Utah just in time for Jens to be really sick for a week. He had a stomach virus that wouldn't quit and spent the whole week lying sadly on the couch. We were all relieved when he finally recovered and went back to school. Mike and I were both still battling colds, and we had some rounds of pink eye, I caught Jens's stomach virus, and then allergy season kicked in to high gear resulting in 4 nights in a row of full body hives for Sylvie and a terrible sinus infection for me--I actually cried at the doctor's office when she told me she didn't think an antibiotic would help (first of all, she was completely wrong, and it helped a lot, second of all, I was very pregnant and not getting any sleep at night, so I couldn't help shedding a tear). Needless to say, April was not one of our better months. Feeling terrible does not stop life from moving on, however, and we had all sorts of things happening around here in spite of illness.
At school, Jens got to share a recipe--he chose Wookie Cookies from the Star Wars cookbook. He made a poster to present his project, wrote up the recipe, made the recipe to take and share, and presented the whole thing to his class. We took a bunch of pictures of him with the ingredients, which he used to make his poster. Here are a couple:
Along with allergies, spring brought green grass and beautiful weather. We finally pulled out the badminton set that Mike got for father's day a couple of years ago. The kids loved it and had a great time hitting (or trying to hit) back and forth. Jens actually got pretty good and he and Mike had a few good volleys.
Crinkly hair made a comeback at our house. I love these pictures because they make me think of magazine before/after pictures. She looks so grouchy in the before, and so radiant in the after.
April also brought STAR testing to Jens's school. He has been talking about it for a month, so I know they are stressing the importance at school, so we tried to make it a low stress thing from our end. Each day we tried to have a good breakfast and talk about doing our best. I was prepared for complaints, but he loved it. The first day he came running into the house and asked immediately "Do we have any fat milk?" I was very confused, and then he explained that during testing he read about an experiment you can do using milk, oil, and food coloring. He was very anxious to try it out. He clearly has great reading comprehension and recall--I just hope he answered the questions on the test! So this is what STAR testing looks like at our house:
One night the Harrisons dropped by with a wagon full of baby ducks. The ducks came on a field trip to our yard, and while they were here their owners had ice cream and played badminton. It is fun having friends live so close.
Sylvie is still enjoying her purple room. I think she is looking forward to having guests come so she can share it with them. This night she had a little too much fun going to bed.
We had Joy School at our house. It was all about creativity, which was a very fun unit to have. We painted, Play Doh-ed, danced, pretended, and did bubbles outside. I have one more week of Joy School to teach. The weeks I have had it have been a lot of work, but it has also been really fun. Sylvie has certainly loved doing it, and we have been lucky to have such a nice group of kids and moms.
The kids have been playing a lot of "house" lately, which is great because they play happily together. On the downside, they decided that part of playing house was going through the garbage and getting out trash to make their play more realistic. At first I thought they were just pulling boxes out of the inside recycling, but then I realized they had tipped over our big outdoor garbage cans, crawled inside, and ripped open the trash bags. I will admit that I threw up in my mouth a little bit when I realized what they had done and where they had gotten their new toys from. We immediately went through their "trash collection" and purged it and discussed how disgusting the big garbage cans are. I hope the message got through, but you never can be sure. This picture is actually while Jens is at school. Sylvie was playing house with Big Kitty instead. She wore this head piece to pick Jens up at school--it was Jamba Juice day, and we were going to get smoothies, but the line was so long we gave up and went to Juice It Up instead, which was less expensive and probably tasted much better. She kept her scarf on the whole time. Somehow she manages to pull it off.
One of the biggest things we spent time on in April was swimming. We signed Jens up for swim team this year and had a few months of panic when we realized he really can't swim. At all. He and I went to the pool three times a week the whole month of March and made little to no progress. When we got home from Utah, I immediately signed him up for swimming lessons. I signed Sylvie up, too, just so she would have something to do, although my expectations for her were very low. Ecen after lots of swimming last summer she still didn't put her face in the water and often cried when her hair was washed. We also arranged a couple of one-on-one lessons with one of the swim coaches. You have never seen a kid learn so fast. The private lessons paired with the daily practice really got him ready. His technique is pretty good and he has a strong freestyle and decent backstroke.
Sylvie, after spending the first week refusing to put her head under and barely blowing bubbles suddenly transformed the second week. She is the one with her head in the water.
Once she started putting her face in, she didn't want to stop. She now will dive down to get rings off the bottom step, kick and blow bubbles with a kick board, jump off the side and kick to you, and "supergirl" to the side as long as you give her a good push. You have never seen someone have such a huge change of heart so quickly. It was practically magic. She still isn't water safe, which drives me crazy because she is one of the most buoyant kids I have ever seen (sometimes it is really hard for her to get the rings from the bottom of the pool because her little hiney wants to float at the top), but she doesn't want to float by herself. Hopefully this summer it will happen.
I couldn't end without a little post of portraits from when my phone was hijacked:
And a couple of swimming lesson videos:
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