A few updates on the kids:
Aria reads all the time, and especially loves to read with her special reading light (thank you Grandpa D.) before bed after the lights are out. It's amazing that I worried about her not wanting to read back in October. She is reading American Girl books by herself and loves them. Right now she is reading about McKenna. I told her that I would read the books too so that we can talk about the stories together. She told me that the one who inspired her love of reading is her fairy Leta. It makes me happy to know that my creative efforts paid off. Aria is doing private lessons with her music teacher. We are advancing her from Level 1 in Lets Play Music to Level 3 for the fall by having her study the music privately. This way she will be in a class with kids closer to her own age. Also, she seems to enjoy the quicker pass and picks up on the concepts so quickly that it hasn't been hard for her at all.
Zade is still loving legos. He also loves to think about all the things that he wants to buy. It's interesting because he will talk about something that he passionately wants to buy, and then the next week it will be something different and he will have forgotten about the thing from the previous week.
Ryzen likes to jump off everything. Aria and Zade are often tackling each other and Ryzen loves to jump on top of them, creating a big dog pile of flailing arms and legs. Ryzen still loves to watch nursery rhymes. His favorite nursery rhyme is "The Wheels on the Bus" and he always wants to sing it or watch it. He still calls movies his "goblies." "I wanna watch a goblie. I do. I wanna watch a goblie do!" Sometimes he drives me crazy with his request for "goblies" in the morning because I really try to limit t.v. time with the kids. Ryzen is pretty easy going, but you definitely have to keep an eye on him because you never know what he'll do next- like put yogurt on his head, or dump his entire glass of milk out just for fun.
One weekend this month we headed to Washington D.C. to go to the temple. It was a great experience, as usual, and while we were down there, we found a little shop where the kids could paint figurines. (Once they'd spent a while in a kiln they were shipped to our house.) Aria and Zade had a lot of fun painting.
Now that it's May, the weather is nice once more. We've been having a lot of fun playing in the yard, and the kids have been biking around the neighborhood. Zade has especially developed a love for biking. He can start on his own and likes to attempt little "tricks." Even Ryzen can sit on "big kid" swings.
We've spent a lot of time getting our garden ready. We've planted a lot of vegetables, herbs and strawberries. So far we've eaten some of our lettuce, cilantro and a couple strawberries. It's fun to go out into the garden and see what is ready to pick. We're currently growing a bunch of seeds indoors also, and hopefully soon we can plant some pumpkins, watermelons, more peas, lettuce, spinach and carrots. Zade made his own stepping stone with his name on it that we plan to put in the garden.
Since Ryzen is not quite up to such challenging tasks, he just played with play dough. :)
This past weekend we took the kids to Del Grosso's Amusement Park. Most of the rides were just right for their ages, so they had a blast.
At first, Ryzen was not comfortable going on any rides.
We then had Aria sit next to him on almost all the rest of the rides and he then began to have fun. She's a great big sister.
I really wanted to take the kids on the train ride. It started to sprinkle, and Dane told me he wasn't interested in going. Zade said he wanted to stay with me, so they hung out in the covered train station. As the train headed out, a major downpour began and I, Aria, and Ryzen got soaked! :)
Once we got back, we hung out in the Bumper Car area until the rain left. Since their legs were too short, Dane had to handle the gas pedal, and they did the steering. They had a great time.
Probably Aria and Zade's favorite ride was the mini-roller coaster. At first they were too scared to go on it, but I talked them into it, and assured them that I wouldn't suggest anything that I thought was too scary for them (which is true). After their first ride ended they raced to get back in line to do it again. Since we had all day passes for them, they probably rode that roller coaster over a dozen times.
