Has it really been almost a year since one of these? That's even longer than I expected. I think the six month point rolled around and I didn't have enough motivation to put pen to paper, so to speak. Now I've got way too much to cover, so probably this will be an unsurprisingly long one.
Pandemic life, again
In our part of the USA, vaccinations have started approaching critical mass, so they've started lifting restrictions on people going back to work and wearing masks. Mommy and I are vaccinated now, which is a big relief, but we still exercise considerable caution, wear masks in any public indoor setting, and stick to only small gatherings.
One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic is showing companies how effective people can be at working from home. That has been the biggest boost to my overall well being during this time. I'm hoping never to go back to full time commuting to an office 5 days a week, and my work seems pretty supportive of that.
The schedule these days is not too different from last time. Maybe minor changes only.
- Wake up around 6:45, have a shower. G is usually already awake but just reads books or plays in his room for a while.
- At 7:30 I get both the kids up. Sometimes R sleeps in a bit, but not as much these days
- Kids brush teeth, do morning ablutions, and eat breakfast. Sometimes they try to run off and play during this time. Argh.
- On many days, I help pack the kids into the car for mommy to take them to a morning outing at a park or trail
- I shut myself into the computer room and work
- At around 11:30 they get back from the outing and I make and eat lunch with them
- At 12:45 R goes for a nap and G goes to "quiet time" in his room. I head back to work.
- At 3 PM G's quiet time is done, and R usually wakes up shortly after
- I finish working at 5 PM. I come out and play with the kids and/or make dinner
- I shoot for dinner at 6 PM
- Bedtime routine starts at 7:30. That's brushing teeth, bathroom, change into pajamas, and bedtime story
- Bedtime is about 8 PM
I still go out very little overall. I make a weekly trip to the grocery store and occasional trips to Costco for more supplies. On weekends sometimes we go meet up with family so the kids can play with their cousins.
Houses
Well, uh, we're moving! Not far, about 20 minutes south of where we live now. That's 20 minutes more commute from my work, too. Before the pandemic and the new work-from-home situation I never would have considered moving even farther away, but now it's a viable option. We already bought the new house and have been moving stuff in steadily ourselves.
The house we're currently in was never really intended to be the place we lived forever. When we bought it we expected to live here for about 5 years, but we ended up staying for twelve. It's funny, but I don't think I've ever lived in a single other place for this long in my life. We've certainly accumulated a lot of stuff we need to get rid of, what with having two kids here and all.
The new house, on the other hand, is our dream house, our "forever home". I'm hoping we can live there until we're old and feel like downsizing. Since our current house never felt permanent to me, I think I shied away from some home improvement stuff, but I'm hoping I won't hold back this time around.
The new house itself is gorgeous and huge on 2 acres of land. Plenty of room for the kids to play outside. We had a big open yard in the house I grew up in and it was an endless source of fun to play soccer and run around outside on nice days. It also comes with extra yard maintenance work, but we're ready for it. In the new house, both mommy and I will each have a room that is "ours". Mine will be my office where I'll work, and hers will be a sort of craft room. I didn't realize until recently that I haven't had a space all of my own since I moved out of my parents' house, like 20 years ago. I never really minded sharing space with my wife, but it will also be nice to customize my space exactly how I want to.
It's funny, we've been talking about buying a new house and moving for many years, and we always wanted to do it before G was in elementary school, but kept putting it off because it seemed like an insurmountable task. Then all of a sudden all of our neighbors sold their houses with minimal work done and with huge appreciation in value. My sister-in-law said the real estate market for selling in our price range is hot right now, so I called up the same guy who sold us this house, and we went from "starting the process" to "offer accepted" on the new house in about 2 weeks. Wild.
As odd as it sounds to say, the whole pandemic work from home situation was a major factor. I can't really imagine being able to go house hunting while also attempting to commute 2-3 hours a day 5 days a week. Basically, we have very little else going on in our lives right now, so it was the perfect time to do this, and I'm glad we pounced on the opportunity.
Speaking of updates
The younger one has had a lot of changes in the last year (obviously, at this stage of his life), but probably the most obvious stuff is his talking. The last time I wrote, he was doing individual words. That grew into short groups of words at maybe 18-20 months old and further to some whole sentences at around 21-22 months.
He went through a funny phase where he inserted "my own" in a lot of stuff. "I drank all of my own juice." "I bonked my own head." That phase seems to have ended, but it was funny while it lasted. He also liked to double up sounds. Our dog Laika ended up as "Lalai". The neighborhood kid named Mason turned into "May-may". His latest thing has been adding an "ee" sound to everything. "Trucky", "milky", "juicey", "sockies", "homey". I don't know why he started doing that but it's pretty cute. I guess we should go straight to the translation table, huh? He's already outgrown some of these pronunciations but they all showed up at some point, so I wanted to capture them for posterity.
| Words | Pronunciation |
|---|---|
| screwdriver | duwawa |
| helicopter | tatata |
| green | deen |
| orange | onyon (consistently) |
| croissant | cagan |
| Christmas tree | may may wee |
| lasagna | bo-anya |
| wheel | weeooo |
| open | nemnyeah |
| I'm okay | I ogogay |
| fish | wiff |
| octopus | bluh-bluh (extremely puzzing, extremely consistent) |
| raisin | wee-yu (again, highly consistently) |
| caterpillar | dadawowo |
| graham cracker | dadada (not to be confused with helicopter) |
| monster truck | mama duck |
| car | gao |
| water | aga |
| Easter bunny | eedy bunty |
| come see! | mum dee! |
An interesting difference between the kids is that G had trouble with his liquids (L's and R's) for quite a while. Only now, around age 4-5, has he sort of conquered them. But R already does a really great "r" sound at the ends of words. Words like "heart", "shirt", and "bark" have a really pronounced "r" sound that always reminds me of talking like a pirate.
Not so little one
Well, since I'm talking about the littlest one, I might as well keep going. Let's see what other kinds of changes he's been up to. For one, he eats at the table rather than a high chair now. I think that started when we had cousins over for a sleepover and I sat all four kids at the table for a meal. After that he sort of didn't want to go back to a high chair, and I liked having him sit next to me anyway. It was a bit challenging at times because he's both a messy eater and a bit of a wanderer (as kids tend to be), but I was able to instate mealtime rules and make things work. I also put a towel over his chair so I can easily put it in the wash when he gets too much food on it.
Though he's still in diapers, we don't use the changing table anymore. Honestly, he's sort of too tall for it now anyway. When we need to change him we just ask him to go lie down in his room, and he's usually happy to oblige. Even better, sometimes after his diaper is full he'll tell us he wants to be changed and will run in there and be lying down by the time we arrive. I hope this bodes well for when he does start toilet training.
Even his sleeping and bedtime routines changed at some point. A year ago we would put him in his crib and turn on his sound machine and his sleeper music mobile thingy. I'm not sure when it happened, but he started saying he didn't want his sound machine on. Then he didn't want his music on. I always worried at that point that he'd wake up too easily without the white noise going, but he still sleeps great. Now he gets a blanket on him and sometimes a book to look at and just night lights. Sometimes he wants his music, but not always.
He's always been very chill about going to bed. He rarely puts up a fight, and even if he protests a bit, after we get him into his crib he usually just makes himself comfortable. For a while when we would leave the room he would holler after us "BYE MOMMY" or "BYE DADDY" and just settle down to sleep. It was pretty funny, since it was in that deep bellowing voice that he has.
Oh, he got the rest of his baby teeth in at some point! They were pretty late compared to G, after 2 years old for the 2-year molars to arrive. What a difference it made being able to hand him something and ask him to take bites rather than having to cut everything up into tiny pieces. As I'm writing this he's using a spoon to eat some "macanoni" (and getting really angry every time it falls off the spoon--but he's trying!).
Once he has teeth he also needs them brushed, so I started doing that, once in the morning and once at night. I started off doing it just like I did with G, with a little toddler toothbrush. I had a rude awakening after his 1 year dentist appointment, when they pointed out that he had tartar buildup in a few spots. Turns out the kid has ultra strong lips and wasn't giving me good access to his gumline in certain spots, so I was never able to brush them properly. He was also very combative about opening up his lips and letting me get at them. Mommy to the rescue, found suggestions to use a "finger toothbrush" made of silicone that goes over the finger, so you stick your whole finger in their mouth to brush. It's a bit awkward but with the proper framing (his toothbrush is shaped like a monkey named Momo) he has gotten a lot better about relaxing his lips so I can brush properly.
One of the skills that babies and toddlers work on is fitting shapes into receptacles, like puzzles. Just like G at one point, R was painfully bad at this for a long time. Even the simplest puzzles with four pieces and pictures backing the pieces to show how to put them were beyond him. He had a sort of breakthrough at one point and really focused on a single simple puzzle for basically a whole evening, solving the same four pieces over and over again. After that I feel like he suddenly "got it" and had an easier time doing other puzzle type activities.
I've seen it lots of times with my kids when they suddenly discover some new skill and then have to "max it out" by repeating it for a long time. Another instance I remember is R practicing stepping up and down from a single stair step over and over, I guess trying to figure out his newfound balance. In cases like that we try not to interrupt them so they can maintain their focus.
Speaking of learning new things, R's constant cry these days is "I want to do it MYDELF!" Buckle himself into his carseat? Do it mydelf. Unbuckle from the carseat? Do it mydelf. Open the package of food to eat? Do it mydelf. Climb into or out of the car seat? Do it mydelf. Put on or take off shoes? Do it mydelf. Climb into crib, climb out of crib, wash hands, put on diaper, change clothes, read a book... the list goes on. The best part is he can pretty much do almost none of these things by himdelf, but he sure wishes he could. When we try to assist him, he gets mad and yells. If we don't help him, he tries and gets understandably frustrated and then yells. There's no winning here, but I guess I admire the attitude.
On the topic of capabilities, I realized the other day that a lot of everyday things that kids can and can't do just comes down to sheer strength. Stuff like turning a doorknob or opening the fridge door or pulling on your shoes or slamming a car door shut or poking a piece of food or ripping open a food package all have a big strength component. Sure, there's some dexterity needed, but in large part there's a certain amount of strength required, and you either have it or you don't. So once a kid gets strong enough to do it, it becomes easy for them. Sometimes teaching a kid how to do something by themselves is less a matter of demonstrating the technique and more a matter of just waiting till they're strong enough. For the kid, it's got to be frustrating to have to wait, though.
I don't want to forget one of the funniest things R started doing. We got him this puffy vest, and he started sticking his hands in the vest pockets and walking around outside like an old man out on a constitutional. It made him look so old and hilarious. He carried that over to being obsessed with pockets in any clothes he had. For a while his favorite thing to do was stick his hands in his pockets and walk up and down the driveway over and over. G never had this kind of pockets obsession. It's really funny to watch.
A quick mention about winter: we had snow briefly, and a decent amount. G remembered it, but R of course didn't, since he was less than 1 year old the last time it came around. I want to share an anecdote about how snow went this year for the two kids. I got them both bundled up nicely: layers, snow pants, boots, mittens, hats, the whole deal. G was ready quicker and went on out while I finished bundling R (he ended up looking like the kid from A Christmas Story). I went out with R and was helping him walk through the deep snow. Within 30 seconds he started crying and I had to take him back inside.
In extreme contrast, I come back out and G has taken off his mittens and lost them somewhere in the snow after sprinting all around the yard a bunch. He's bare-hand scooping up snow and eating it and has been for the last 10 minutes. His hands are so cold he cannot even feel or move them anymore, so I need to take him back inside immediately to warm them up with cool water. We then found his mittens (soaked) and got him some spare ones to have proper snow fun in after. I just love this anecdote as an example of what kind of total polar opposites (so to speak) I'm dealing with here sometimes.
Additions and Subtractions
Somewhere in here I wanted to insert a note that our old dog Poppy finally died a little while ago, at 16 years old. We got her as an adult, when she was 2-3 years old and had already gone through multiple families. She had some weird anxieties her whole life and was generally a bit nervous for most of it, but we tried to give her a comfortable place to live where not a ton was required of her. She was extremely sweet and gentle with the kids and was just a great family dog. Her presence in our life has been missed. She was a good old dog.
On a brighter note, my sister just had a baby! I'm so excited to be an uncle (again)! It's been so much fun to see all the pics of a tiny baby again, now that we don't have one anymore. It's funny how much stuff we just page out of our brains when we don't use it anymore. That's one of the main reasons I write this: so that I can go back and remember the kinds of things that were going on during different eras of my life and the kids' lives. I can't wait to see how the newest little one grows and develops her personality and capabilities. We've been sharing that sort of stuff from our kids for years now, I can't wait to be the recipient of "look what she just did!" kind of stuff.
Older kid stuff... like riding bikes!
So far I've spent the whole time talking about our littlest one, but our eldest has been busy with his own stuff too, of course. Hey, here's a wild thing: I taught him how to ride a bike! It's every dad's dream and/or job to teach his kid to ride a bike, and I'm just pleased as punch to be living out the cliche. It's been years since I mentioned our last attempts to teach him to ride a balance bike. Well, that's because he didn't show much interest and so we didn't push him to try. I always figured he'd eventually want to try again, and he got big enough that I thought it was time to give it another attempt.
We started out with the balance bike again, but also had a kid's pedal bike handy. He really wanted to go straight to the pedal bike, but we told him he had to try practicing a bit with the balance bike first. We tried it in the back yard, which was bumpy and not easy to ride on. Once again he was not interested in the balance bike. Then we let him try the pedal bike in the back yard. Despite being incredibly difficult to pedal on grass, he kept wanting to try over and over. Somehow the allure of a pedal bike was extremely strong and motivating.
We moved down to the cul-de-sac next. The key piece of advice I got online was not to hold the bike, but instead to support the child. That makes them negotiate the balance between their body and their bike without some external force holding the bike up. It's the same reason why training wheels, while great for getting kids interested in bikes and motivating them, don't really teach balance. Then I told him the same advice I got from my dad when I learned to ride: look where you want to go and just pedal. The faster you go, the easier it is to balance, so there's a strength component here too, to be able to pedal to get that speed.
We had 6 or 7 sessions in the cul-de-sac with me just supporting under his arms while he pedaled around. We practiced doing loops in both directions and doing different turns. With shockingly little practice he was starting to go faster than I could keep up with while holding. I went from having two hands under his arms to having one hand just touching his shoulder for comfort. Then we upgraded our location to the school parking lot down the street. It had a bit of uphill and downhill and a few long, flat straightaways. Here I weaned him off of that comfort hand and only helped hold him on the uphill part. This is basically where we are now: he can bike on flat surfaces and downhills a bit, but is still learning the balance and getting the strength needed to pedal uphill and pedal while standing for extra power. All in all it took about a month. It was a lot of work, jogging alongside him in the hot sun, but a lot of fun and really worth it.
It's worth mentioning that R has started trying out the old balance bike, too. He mainly likes to straddle the seat and walk slowly. That's a good enough start for now. I'm sure we'll spend more time on it later as he grows more.
Older kid stuff... like soccer!
Before we get to the soccer part, I wanted to talk about how G has changed when going to playgrounds. We've only recently started letting the kids go back to playgrounds due to COVID, but with vaccination rates going up and the fact that it's outdoor play, we felt the risk is low enough now. Anyway, in the last few months, he's really shown a willingness to play with rando kids at the playground. Before, most of the time he would be too shy to approach; now he will randomly chat up some kid and they'll run off together. He'll even end up in small groups of kids sometimes.
For the last few years we've discussed and mentally evaluated whether we thought G was ready for an organized sport like soccer. In previous years we felt he wasn't going to have fun, because he didn't seem to enjoy big groups of kids, but this year we saw those signs of willingness to play with kids he doesn't know super well, so we felt he was ready and enrolled him. I'm lucky to be working from home, so that I could take him to all his practices and games (often mommy and R come along too for the games).
The "season" started off with practice twice a week for 2 weeks or so, then those practices switched to be games. 5 vs 5 kids, two 12-minute halves. At practices the coach had him doing basic drills like passing, shooting, and dribbling. He also taught about throw-ins and spent a lot of time reminding them which goal they want to kick it in and which one they want to keep it away from. Not surprisingly, in the frenzy of the game kids aren't always good at remembering which way to go. Probably a third of the goals I've witnessed so far were own-goals. Oops.
In terms of how he plays, G is happy to just be on the field but seems to strongly avoid getting into any sort of conflicts. He'll sometimes chase down a ball that strays too far away from another kid but doesn't really try to take the ball away from anyone. Not that they have "positions" at this point, but he seems to enjoy defense-type activities, so we did some practice kicking the ball out of the way if it's heading towards the goal. He's managed to put it into action a few times. In any case, it's a success in my book if he comes away happy and having fun. This year isn't really about learning to play soccer; it's about learning to play with a group of kids in a somewhat chaotic environment.
Older kid stuff... like reading!
A year ago with the last post, G was just starting to read and could do some three letter words. To give you some indication of how that's progressed... hey, quit trying to read my laptop! Yes, I'm talking about you. Go find something else to do and I'll be done in a little bit. OK, sorry, I'm back now. So yeah, he can read a lot. He progressed from those 3 letter words to slightly longer words and sounding out the letters to simple short sentences. Now he can do short chapter books, but prefers ones that are shorter with more pictures.
Mommy deserves almost all the credit here for basically teaching him how to read and supplying him with a constant stream of level-appropriate material to stretch his capabilities just enough. She did a ton of reading with him, and her endless patience and steady teacher demeanor helped him grow a lot and build up his confidence. When he was just learning he was really hesitant to try pages with too many words or words that looked long or complicated. By now he will attempt to read basically anything: yesterday he was reading us a kids' book about different types of clouds (cirrus, cumulous, etc.) and mispronounced basically every cloud term but still charged through and at least attempted to say them all. I love that he's trying even if it's wrong. It's much better than not having enough confidence to even try.
An interesting thing about reading that I hadn't thought about is that it's mostly memorization. When you're just starting out and when you encounter an unfamiliar or especially difficult word, sure, you slow down to sound it out, but other than that, reading at any noticeable speed is simply recognizing memorized words very quickly. You can really see that in action with the trajectory a kid takes when learning to read. Eventually they aren't sounding out certain words and instead just saying them since they remember their shape. The method of reading we used was a mix of phonics and memorization. Phonics was used for most words, but they supplemented it with memorizing certain "sight words", basically those tiny connective words that show up frequently and have strange pronunciations, like "is", "the", "and", etc..
In case people are curious, a lot of his early reading practice used Bob Books. They have a great, gradual ramp up from super simple books with just a few words on the page to ones with a few sentences on the page. After a certain point we supplemented with other kids early reading books from the library, too.
Another interesting thing is G's "reading voice" that he switches into whenever he starts reading. I guess everyone has one, but his is very pronounced and distinctive. His pitch goes up a little and his speaking cadence changes. It's cute and I love it. Can't wait to see what R sounds like someday when he learns to read too.
Reading, by the way, is a fantastic activity for groups of kids. G's reading skills have helped make him the star of sleepovers sometimes because he can read books to the kids who come over (those kids just being his cousins, really). Sometimes they'll run off to play by themselves and I'll peek in to see G reading to a group of three kids with rapt attention. Likewise at night time during sleepovers he usually reads to himself and the others as they go to sleep. Reading is super useful and fun.
Older kid stuff... like building stuff!
Over the last couple years G has gotten a few Lego sets. For a while they were mostly a curiosity, but he got some for his birthday and Christmas and, with a little coaching, turned out to have quite the aptitude for building. We helped walk him through the instructions the first few times, teaching him how to interpret what they're showing in the diagrams. Now he can fully assemble fairly complicated sets by himself, usually without any assistance. His spatial reasoning is pretty good and he seems to really enjoy the process and the end result.
Recently my dad got him a Meccano set, similar to Legos but uses different types of parts. We've put together a few of those too. He needs more practice there since the instructions aren't familiar yet, but when we did them I tried to have him do most of the interpreting and I just helped hold pieces together to assist.
Another great construction type toy we have is a cool fort-building kit that his aunt and uncle gave him. It's got about 45 poles and 25 connectors, which you can connect at various angles to make all sorts of cool structures. It comes with an instruction book with the full steps to some of them and just pictures of others for ideas. At first he wasn't strong enough to connect the pieces together and take them apart, but now he is and combined with his instruction-following skills can make basically whatever he wants on his own. Then he has fun decorating it with various accoutrements and playing in it for a few days before it inevitably feels like it's taking up too much room, and we take it down until later.
Together
This section is supposed to be about kids playing together, but I would remiss if I didn't mention G's latest stuffed animal/imaginary friend, Hilda, from the eponymous kids' TV show. He's currently obssessed with the show and loves the main character. Mommy had a brilliant idea to get him a stuffed version of her as a present and right now they're inseparable. He also has the graphic novels and at least one book from the show, which he's read many times. He draws fan art of characters and scenes from it and recites the plot to me whenever he can. It's fun seeing how much he loves it and how much he gets into it and how much joy he derives from it.
One of the things that has always been funniest is how much R copies his older brother. He copies everything: things he says, things he does, sounds he's making, wherever he's going, and he wants the same things he has. An especially weird one I remember is that they were both building something with Legos. G accidentally broke his creation and started crying, so of course R then also deliberately broke his own and also started crying. The level of imitation is incredible, and the fidelity is quite good too.
Let's go back to sleepovers for a minute. Occasionally we have their two cousins (one is G's age, one is R's age) over for a sleepover, usually just one night. It's always a ton of fun, and more and more fun as they get older since they play more independently. Usually they all run off and play together and need basically no involvement from us. In the last few months the kids have also had mini-sleepovers where one will sleep in the other's room. Usually it will be G sleeping on his sleeping bag in R's room while he's in the crib. We've tried it the other way a few times, but R isn't quite ready to sleep outside a crib yet, and I usually have to take him back to his crib in the middle of the night. On these nights they're always super excited and stay up late reading books and talking. Sometimes G will want to go to sleep but R will continue talking for too long, so I have to go in there a couple times and settle them down.
They've had a huge growth in independent play together lately. They have been playing together to some extent for ages but it's really taken off in the last, say, 3 weeks. R must have reached some critical level of competence or vocal mastery to suddenly be more fun to play with. Some days we barely see them because they've managed to play with each other for basically the whole day. I mean for the last hour I've barely had to intervene at all. They're having a great time and I'm getting some time to write this. It's awesome.
Conflict Resolution
Since they are both playing more physically with each other too (like roughhousing), mommy had the idea to introduce the concept of consent, at least for G. We actually use the word "consent" when we talk about it, too. When we witness them playing rough, we tell G to ask for consent before doing something that involves hitting or other kinds of rough play. Then he'll say something like "can I bonk on your head?" and actually listens depending on the answer. We felt it's important for them to start thinking about other people's boundaries.
Other things we talk to G about at this stage are more nuanced things like not teasing (example: prominently displaying something that R is not allowed to touch), gloating (example: loudly saying that you won and the other person lost), and being annoying (example: deliberately saying something you know the other person doesn't want to hear). Mostly I try to make him think about how he'd feel if that were done to him. He usually gets the idea but it needs constant reinforcement. Over time we'll elevate that to thinking about how someone else would like to be treated, even if it's different than how he himself would like to be treated (the "platinum rule").
In terms of resolving disputes, they keep getting better. It didn't start this way and doesn't work out 100% of the time, but I'll often hear stuff like: "R! Don't put that Lego on there! Go work on your own thing!" "Ooookay. I'll work on my own Legos." or "G! I want my car back!" "OK, you can play with this one and I'll play with this other one." or "Can you give me some space?" "OK, I'll go work over here." For larger dust ups, usually one kid will come running out crying or something. We'll listen to their greivances and then usually tell them "Well, did you tell them that? Go talk to them about it."
When I witness an obvious and direct infraction that I think needs intervention, my usual approach is to ask the offender to "make it right". If G pushes down R, either on purpose or by accident, I'll ask him to say sorry and go over to help him feel better. If he breaks something R is working on, I'll ask him to help rebuild it. If he snatches something away, he needs to give it back and say sorry for taking it. Sometimes if he's mad he won't do it, in which case I'll have him usually wait in his room and calm himself down until he's ready. When he's ready to apologize to the other person he can come out and do it. It sounds a bit like a time-out, but it's not really punitive; it's about collecting himself enough to make amends. If he's taking longer than a few minutes I'll usually go in there and talk to him about it, listen to his side of the story, and remind him why it's important to make it right. When he does his apology, I ask him to say specifically what he's apologizing for. Sometimes I help him find the words he could use: "I'm sorry I pushed you."
We try to model the "make it right" approach too. If I'm accidentally too rough with him to stop him doing something he isn't allowed to do, I'll apologize for being too rough. If I make a mess of something I'll go clean it up. If I forget to give a treat that I promised, I'll apologize for forgetting. I hope he absorbs that saying sorry is something everyone has to do, both kids and grown-ups.
Well, I've gotten to about the end of the planned content I had. Things are eventful here but good. Everyone is safe and we've got exciting stuff to look forward to. Next time I write, G will have been in kindergarten for a while, so I'm sure that will be interesting. Hopefully it won't be another year until the next one, but no promises!