Kindergarten Time

Milo started Kindergarten a little over a week ago. Most mornings he wakes up not ready to go to school that day (especially on Mondays!), but Evan tells us that once he is at school he is a-ok fine. Steve has been doing the walk to the bus most mornings and it has been about 50/50 whether he needs to drag him to the bus or he happily walks on. Evan has been a huge helper with getting his little brother on the bus. Thank goodness Evan is over his morning blues, he pretty much takes care of himself when it comes to getting up in the morning - and he always happily trots off toward the bus. He is clearly enjoying being a fifth grader and being at the top of the food chain at school. The boys adore each other, though they often argue, coming to blows in some cases. But, they get over it quickly - usually before we do... Milo recently learned to love Minecraft, and after homework is done, that is what tends to occupy the hours between school ending and our workday ending. Of all the games they could be playing, at least Minecraft has a creative element, where they build houses, ships, or other structures. Facebook has become a hog in terms of my kid updates, but I love reading these so much as the years go by, I really need to try and update more often.

Been Forever

I can't believe it has been over a year since I have last written. I think facebook has started to replace a blog for updates, but it is not as good due to the limited searching. This is great to have as a record.

Evan is in 4th Grade. He had a few rocky moments with a teacher switch at the start, but has seemed to settle into the new teacher's style. He seems to really be enjoying himself. He started taking Skateboarding lessons, and has been practicing, trying to improve. I need to set up another couple of lessons for him, he is really into it. He is also loving being in the Math Olympiad group. They meet every Thursday after school and get challenge problems. Evan is still huge into computer games, loves Minecraft. He is looking forward to going to computer game camp this summer.

Milo is in his last year of Pre-school, just finished filling out his Kindergarten enrollment form - Yikes!!!! He could care less about the computer, but enjoys playing on the ipad, mostly watching shows or listening to stories. He is a lego fanatic, he loves building sets "all by himself!" but right now, they need to be fairly small for him to feel confident doing it solo. Milo loves the hot tub, and we enjoy playing spy games with his playmobil dudes and boats. Milo has a lot of good friends at Beginnings and has started having afterschool play dates. He is very much looking forward to celebrating his birthday with them.

Fully Potty Trained!

Milo has stopped wearing night time diapers and no accidents! He gets up to pee at night when he needs to. So great! So crazy that we are DONE with diapers. He stopped drinking out of a bottle late - just this year, and of course just like Evan and like Steve before him, take away the bottle and his love of Meee-ilk goes with it. So weird! Milo and Evan both are more picky eaters than I'd like - especially Milo. I can probably the count the items he does eat more easily than the items he doesn't. He does like more veggies than Evan does though - but he will not eat any meat or fish other than Chicken.

Evan is LOVING his third grade teacher Mrs. Mirabito, and Milo seems happy at Beginnings too. Milo still gets bummed out every morning when we leave him at school, but complains that he wants to stay longer when we pick him up too.

They still get along pretty well - Evan is usually really sweet to him, and takes great care of him in the mornings (before we are up!). But they also know exactly how to push each other's buttons. Evan can often be heard shouting "MYYY-LOWWW!"

Evan has gotten crazy independent - the other day - Steve had his alarm set wrong, and Evan got up, had breakfast, got dressed, put on a show for Milo, left us a note, and walked down the hill to the bus stop on his own. CRAZY!!!

Even more potty training!

Went to a school conference today for mymy. His teachers are so sweet, they say such nice stuff about him. He is doing well, yay!

Tonight he Pooped for the first time at home on the potty. He is really starting to get the hang of it now! Woo hoo!

Beginning Potty Training

Milo has just started potty training at school... For the longest time he said "I am NOT a big boy - I am a Baby!" Milo is big on this baby stuff, as evidenced by his love of a bottle of milk in the morning, and his adoration with his thumb. All of a sudden at school though, he has started peeing on the potty. Today he did it all by himself, with no prompting. He isn't as enthusiastic at home, but it feels like it will be soon. Evan gave Milo a pair of Superman underpants to commemorate the occasion.

Evan is headed off to sleep-away camp for a few weeks this summer. He could not be more excited - he claims he will not be homesick at all, will be interesting to see how it goes.

Evan has proclaimed we must go to Niagara Falls every year, so we're gonna make it happen again this year.

Brothers

Evan and Milo lately have been sooo cute. Every morning Evan heads to his door when he hears him waking up and chats with him through the closed door. Then he comes and asks if he can go and get him, which he does, and they play for a while in Milo's room in the crib. They basically adore each other - we are so lucky.

Milo has continued with his awesome sleep habits lately. He is chatting up a storm, most of it you need to understand his strange language to understand. lankee = blanket, Edoh = Evan, waff waff = Waffle or Pancake, Off = either off or on. So funny, Evan's language at 2 was off the charts, Milo's feels slightly behind, we hypothesize that it is because he sleeps so much he doesn't get a chance to practice language that much :-).

Evan has been doing well, aside from his awful run in with a huge column at school there haven't been any incidents lately. He has been really into doing his monthly homework assignment from school. He has about 30 things to do or work on during the month, if he completes them all he gets a no homework night certificate. So far he has finished them all by the end of the first week of the month. He takes after his mother with the handwriting unfortunately, but his teacher is doing a good job of harping on his to be neater.

Both kids have been loving the new TV and Evan has mastered the dvr, he will often put on the Shrek segment of the View that we have saved and the two of them laugh hysterically at the farting and burping. It is super funny.

Winter

Milo is upstairs taking a nap,and Steve is out of town, so while the house is quiet, I figured now would be a good time to catch up on the blog. Milo is basically super funny - he somehow, even though he barely talks is able to communicate - and when he does, most of the time, it is just funny. He will often mischievously walk over to something, like the tv, look at Evan, and casually turn it off. This is not Evan's favorite thing that he does, but most of the time, will end up saying "MILO!!!" and getting up to turn it back on. Milo will always wait until Evan is back in his seat, sitting quietly, before he will go over casually to the tv again. His face is hysterical.. like hmmm, wonder what will happen if I turn this off - Click! Evan is really great about not losing his temper most of the time. Drop offs for Mymy at school have been easy, mainly asks to be put down and says "bye bye". Every once and a while he would rather be help by one of his teachers when we leave. He is a huge stuffed animal fan, loves his Puppies, and Elmos. He is still a big thumb sucker, in fact he sucks so voiciferously that he is sucking off his thumbnail... eewwwww.

Evan has been good also lately, school is going fairly well - it is clear he is above level in most of the subjects. His main issue is that he puts in the absolute minimum effort possible. In fact he will spend twice the time figuring out how to cut corners - for example - he needs to write his spelling words once a week 3 times each, so what does he do? He figures out what letter each word has in common... they all have an I, and will go through all the words writing the i's first... then he will fill in the other letters of the word around it. He is not a huge fan of being corrected - often shouting "I DON"T CAAAARE". But for the most part, he sits down when told, does his homework, and doesn't complain. Yesterday was his holiday concert at school, Momo joined us there, he sang 2 cute songs. Was certainly more into it than he was last year. All in all things are good with the two kids, and getting even better every day.