Another HUGE Catch-up Post

I can't believe how fast this past month went! It seems like we had one thing after another pretty much all month. And this one promises to be even busier. The calendar for May was booked solid before the month even arrived! Anyway, I can't possibly remember everything I had wanted to post but I do have a few things, including pictures to share. These first ones are the failed attempt to get Lynnsey and Kaya in their Easer dresses:

This next one is a picture of Taylor with a cooking experiment that he was quite proud of. But that's not why I'm posting this picture. I'm posting this picture because for once I got a shot of him smiling and showing off his braces. I'm glad we got them for him because they do seem to have helped his self-confidence improve. But he wouldn't have gotten them now if we had known that our insurance plan had some very, very fine print and won't actually cover half of the cost like we had expected. Apparently the company approved that much but our actual plan will only cover $1000 of the $5500 price tag. Nice, huh? I really despise our insurance company(and all others that we've had). This isn't the first time that we've been burned by them either. Even stuff that they are supposed to cover, a lot of times we have to call and fight with them to get them to do it. I think they make a lot of their money off of people who just give in and pay for things that are actually covered by the insurance plan. And now I guess we know that we need to start a braces savings account for the rest of the kids! But, I digress...this is supposed to be a happy post.

With things so busy, the kids tended to get ignored a little more frequently than they are used to. You know that phrase that parents use to describe kids that are so bored and restless that they "are climbing the walls"? Ours have been. Literally.

Every year the elementary schools have what they call the Forks Reading Challenge where the kids pledge to read a certain number of books and if they meet or exceed the goal they get to do something fun to the principal. This year they shaved his head. Anyway, both Lynnsey and Kendall did a great job and worked really hard to read as many books as they could and pass the comprehension tests after each one. They both did great and at the awards ceremony they received a certificate and a free book. Kendall also had the distinction of reading the third highest number of books in the whole school.

And now let me tell you a bit about Kaya. She is exceptionally bright and we don't think that is just our opinion. She isn't even two yet but she has been speaking in sentences for the past couple of months and is mostly intelligible to people outside of the family. She also has been going potty for the past two weeks! This is unbelievable. Especially when you consider that every last one of our previous children wouldn't even look at the potty until they were past their third birthdays and some closer to their fourth. I think if we put her in panties and pushed her a bit we could probably get her potty trained in a relatively short time. But we have a big trip coming up this summer and the thought of making all those potty breaks is a bit daunting so we haven't been pushing it too much, just giving her opportunites when she wants to. She has started undressing herself periodically during the day though and going potty more frequently so we may end up just letting her train herself and see how she does on the trip. I have to say the idea of no more diapers is thrilling. And she is so cute when she goes. She does a little potty dance and claps her hands yelling: "Yay Kaya!" every time. She loves to dance and sing and her current favorite music is "Mercy River", a CD I picked up at Time Out for Women. She LOVES to watch the Baby Einstein DVD's and we even let her in spite of all the talk about the big lawsuit that some people brought against the company claiming that the products didn't make their kids smarter. Duh! If you put your child in front of the TV for 8 hours a day, they won't get smart no matter how educational the show is. But we love the shows and watch them with Kaya so that we can discuss all the images. Sometimes we watch them in Spanish or French too and she's even picked up a few of those vocabulary words. She would love to watch them for eight hours a day, but of course we limit her viewing to no more than six. (I'm just kidding!) But when she can't watch the shows we sometime find her pouring over the little paper inserts that come with the movies. Kendall snapped this adorable shot of her "reading" one. She looked at this thing on the kitchen floor for a good 15 minutes that day.

Kaya is also our most active child ever. EVER! We used to call our other daughter Hurricane Lynnsey because she was so destructive. What's worse than a hurricane? Because that's what Kaya is. It takes only seconds for her to undo an hour of housecleaning. Case in point:

This took 30 seconds. No joke. THIRTY SECONDS. I left the room long enough to get a drink of water and came back to this. It's just a good thing she's such a cutie. Here's a few more shots of our little charmer:

She loves to be outside more than just about anything. We have to watch her closely too or else she'll just take off walking all by herself. I've had more than a few near heart attacks lately.

Not too busy to stop and smell the flowers though.

The other day I was in the dollar store and I had a brainstorm when I saw a package of paintbrushes. I bought them and we filled the kids' pails with water and let them go to town "painting" whatever they wanted. I used to do this with my preschool kids but had forgotten all about it until now. Spencer, Kaya, and the little boy I babysit spent over two hours painting the garage, their bikes, the porch, the driveway...everything. Best of all, it was just water so there was no clean-up to worry about.

The kids also took a free dance class offered by some of the college's dance students. We tried this a couple of years ago and our little shy-guys wouldn't cooperate. But Lynnsey decided she really wanted to try again and begged Kendall and Spencer to join her. It was free so I figured if it didn't work out, we just wouldn't go back. But they all had so much fun! Kendall was a little embarassed because he was the very oldest in the class and aside from Spencer there weren't any other boys. But once he just relaxed, he ended up having a great time too. And Lynnsey, who would never do more than stand and watch while she sucked her thumb and twirled her hair, got really into it. She wants me to consider signing her up for a "real" dance class (meaning the kind that costs my entire babysitting salary per month). We'll see. Anyway, these pictures were taken on the last day of the class which was during spring break, so there were only a couple of other kids besides ours there.

If you look closely, you can see that they had a little addition to the class. I tried so hard to keep Kaya over with me but everytime they'd start the music she just seemed to be pulled out to the floor like a little magnet. Since it was so laid-back that day, the instructors let her join them. She was so stinking cute out there and really tried to mimic what they were doing--even if she always was a couple of steps behind everyone else. She especially loved the parts involving jumping.

She also loved the stash of exercise balls that she discovered stacked in the corner. They didn't stay stacked for long.

Anyway, that's about all the pictures I have for now. I'm sure I'll think of other things I wanted to write about but without photo prompts, I am drawing a blank right now. However, I will leave you with one thing I overheard the other day. We were outside playing and I was sitting on a stump over by the fire pit sort of out of range of the kids. I was babysitting my afterschool kids and I overheard the nine-year old boy I watch confess to Lynnsey that he "kind of likes" her. Like as in LIKES her. After my heart started pumping normally again, because, lets face it, I am not even remotely ready for boys to "like" my beatiful little seven year old thank you, I listened for Lynnsey's response. She stared at him for a few seconds like she was trying to decide if she had heard him right and then she growled, quite forcefully: "You're goin' down!" I was laughing so hard I almost fell off my seat. I just hope she keeps that up for another decade or so!