A few pictures from Santa Fe

I think Zack is having an OK time with Grandma and Papa.

Blue skies in Santa Fe

Rob, Mark, Judy, and I are having a wonderful time. By all accounts Zack is having an awesome time with Grandma and Papa, which makes it easier for us to have a good time.

Artist at work

You may not be able to see it, but he even had his (battery-operated) candle lit, too.

The boy

He was showing me how he could curl his tongue up to the roof of his mouth.

Totally unrelated, Zack is really good at describing what object he's talking about even if he doesn't know the word for it. We usually get the point pretty quickly. Some of his descriptions are particularly notable. So from now on. we're going to refer we are going to refer to Rob's razor as a "cutting spiky hair off thing".

Hey, Mom and Dad...

...remember these?

(For the rest of you, these were my cards when I was about Zack's age. They're really for playing Old Maid, but they work just as well for the "rememory" game. At which he is quite good. It took him about a minute to figure out that you win by finding more pairs, yet he's also quick to help me out if I hesitate about turning over a card. This is our new pre-bedtime activity).

Happy Mother's Day!

Optimism

Ah, the possibilities that a garden center holds! Hopefully most of the dreams that we put in our cart this morning will grow.

A few pics

Here are a few recent pictures of the boy. From top to bottom:

Hanging with me in the office, snuggled in his chair watching Scooby Doo on the iPad.

Searching for shells and mica over at the trail. About 5 minutes after this pictures was taken, he stepped wrong, his knee landed on a rock, there was blood, and I had to carry him back to the car (piggy back, but still, dude is getting heavy!).

Chilling out with his buddy, Boden, during a recent play date. Don't they look so grown-up???

Catching up

We're still here, still doing well. I'll give you a quick update, and hopefully I'll be back to posting on a regular basis again.

Hopefully.

Zack did not get a place in the language immersion program that our public schools have. It's a lottery, so we knew that was likely. We were a bit disappointed, but after going to his kindergarten orientation last Friday, we've pretty much gotten over it. We've heard great things about this school, and our brief introduction seemed to bear that out. He'll be in a small classroom (15 kids), and have a lot of great opportunities throughout his elementary school career. The art and music programs seem great, he'll get a lot of individualized math and reading instruction, and the staff seems great about helping the kids transition to the newness of kindergarten. In the coming years, he'll be able to join clubs like the fishing club, which should be great for him. It's full day kindergarten, but that only means 8:50 to 3-ish pm, so he'll be going to an aftercare program there at the school, and that seems like a lot of fun for him, too. The kindergarteners aren't mixed with the older kids for aftercare, which will help with the transition, and again, as he gets older there will be all kids of afterschool clubs and activities. Zack was a bit wary at first, but he said that he's looking forward to it. The downside to living here is that it's so densely populated that he and all his friends will be going to different schools. He's mentioned a few times that he won't know anyone, but we keep reminding him that everyone else will be in the same boat, and that when he started daycare he didn't know anyone either.

The other exciting thing for Zack this summer is that he'll be leaving his current daycare in the middle to June to go to a summer day camp with his best bud, Boden. We made this decision for several reasons, not the least of which was our disagreement with his current daycare on how to handle naptime for pre-K kids. We have been assured by the director of the summer camp that he will come home dirty and tired, so Rob and I are pretty psyched about that. He'll get to hang out with Boden all summer, go swimming twice a week, go on field trips, and do all kinds of other exciting stuff. He's very excited (though I think he's envisioning tents and campfires, but we'll work on that), we think it'll be a good transition to kindergarten, and it will start getting Rob and I used to packing his lunch (we don't have to do that at his current location).

The other big news is that Kelly is buying her own condo, closing this coming Wednesday! She'll be about 1.5 miles from our house, so we'll still see a lot of her, I suspect, but it will take a lot of getting used to not having her around all the time. We've been telling Zack that she'll be moving out, and he keeps asking about it, saying he'll miss her. Having her stay with us has been great, and I'm so glad that Zack has gotten to know his cool Auntie Kelly so well.

As for Zack himself, he's still growing. Shocker, I know. It's amazing to watch him developing so quickly. He's doing some single-digit addition. Some he knows off the top of his head, but he also knows how to add on his fingers. He's got all his letters down, and is doing all sorts of pre-reading behaviors--he seems sooooo close to actually reading. His art skills have also developed a lot. He's getting into dinosaurs, and he drew a T Rex head the other day, and it was pretty obvious what it was. He was also making things out of clay this weekend, and they looked really good. After they dried, some arms fell off, and he had the patience to sit there and try to fix them, doing a good job.

And of course now that it's (sort of) getting warmer outside, he wants to be out as much as possible. There is the standard activity of looking for bugs (I'm quite sure the entire insect community puts out an alert as soon as they hear he's coming out that door), but he's also been very eager to volunteer to help me garden---weeding, picking out flowers, asking the names of plants, planting seeds, helping Rob put the weed barrier on the garden. He helps me pick out plants to buy, and wanted to plant some seeds. He picked out carrots and "pickles." It's definitely much easier and more enjoyable to be out in the garden with him now that I don't have to worry about him eating something he shouldn't.

He's just generally a very happy, goofy, sweet kid. He's become very generous, voluntarily sharing things with us, telling us he loves us, giving us hugs. They've been working on their manners at school, and it really shows--he's very good with please and thank you, and asking nicely. He loves his friends and thinks about them--for example, he had to take a particular green toy to school because Emiliano likes green. He's gotten so much better with Georgia, and is super sweet with her now. And in return, she'll curl up with him in bed, or give him kisses as soon as she sees that he's waking up in the morning.

I'm sure in a month or so we'll be complaining about how hot it is, but for now we're just waiting for it to get a bit warmer. Just a smidge.