Well, let's see, it had to get better from our last update with all of the sickness going around!  And, yes it did!  I was a balmy 73 degrees today. The warmest it's been since last October.  It is so nice to get outside these days and the kids love it!  We've been back to our favorite Park (Borderland in Easton) for some hikes and picnics, soccer has begun again (although our first games last weekend were rained out).  Plastic cups have started filling up around the house with picked flowers from the lawn (you know...dandelions and those pretty little white crabgrass flowers).  The kids want to go outside after school each day with a big plastic zip lock bag and find "treasures". Kaelin caught (then released) a little blue butterfly today, and she found a rabbit's tale yesterday.  Ainsley loves finding "crystals" a.k.a. pretty rocks, Aidan is a stick man, and Keeley is our flower girl (although Aidan always picks flowers for me too!). 

School is going so terrific for Keeley.  While she’s looking forward to the Bahamas next month, she’s really upset about us pulling her out of school for a week (we purposely did NOT want to plan a vacation around a school vacation week when the rest of the world and their kids are traveling).  We’ve assured her that we’ll get all of her “jobs” from her teacher and do them before or after vacation.  We continue to be amazed at Keeley’s reading ability (it's okay to brag, right??) and at a recent Parent Teacher conference her Kindergarten teacher told us that she was one of the two children out of forty in both her classes that got a perfect score on some recent testing.  We are very proud of her. It seems like the floodgates of learning and reading have opened for her.  She also raises her hand all the time in class and has really broken out of her shell.  She just received her voice and piano songs for her recital in June so she'll be busy practicing those along with creating her own song as part of a composing project she's working on. She's been very interested in going to church lately and I've taken her to the local Catholic Church twice.  It's a very hip place to be apparently, but Keeley was a little taken aback by some of the goings-on. Like shaking a stranger's hand during the "peace be with you's" and all the kneeling, sitting, standing, then kneeling, sitting, standing.

Kaelin is in the early stages of reading too, and loves to write. There are a dozen or so sight words she knows how to write and read by heart, but she's very eager to sound out words as she sees them and often when she's trying to spell something she gets it right or very close. We just love how she’s so interested in learning.  You'll see in the "Early April 2009" folder all the pics of the fun time we had with Baxter.  Baxter Kaelin's classroom stuffed animal that goes home with one child a weekend. She brought him everywhere we went.   She has a couple of really close girlfriends at school and we're in a dilemma about whether to keep her at the same school for Kindergarten or send her to public with Keeley. She's blossomed so much the past 8 months and we love the Montessori school.  We had a small celebration on Kaelin's birthday earlier this week and will hopefully have time to have a larger bash in a month or so. She wants us to have her party at a farm where her friends can ride horses all day. We'll see if any around here rent for parties.  We also got to celebrate at her school in their really unique way.  They celebrated each year of her life by having a collage of pictures and reading about each year since she's been born (we supplied the info).  During each reading, Kaelin walked around the sun (a cloth sun mat on the floor where she had earlier placed the months and seasons) while holding a globe of the earth as she "orbited" the sun. This symbolized each year/orbit of her life.  After each orbit the rest of the kids sing a song and clap for those number of years. At the end, she gets to blow out her candle and another song is sung.  She then presents the class with her birthday gift to them - a book that is wrapped in the giving cloth - the school's character/value lesson that stresses the importance of giving as well as receiving. We celebrated with fresh huge strawberries. (nothing but organic, sugar free, gluten free, and everything else free in class, however you bet we made up for it with her cake choice home - Cold Stone Creamery Red Velvet Cookie Dough Ice-Cream cake!. We also made fresh lemonade that came out perfect. Truly the best lemonade I've ever tasted. We washed that down with some pretzels. This was an attempt to replicate a fun day Mommy and the kids had recently at the mall - shopping, going on the merry-go-round and then gorging on lemonade and Auntie Anne's store big, warm, soft, salted pretzels!

Aidan has been intrigued by the human body every since his hospital visit last month (triggered by his extremely high fever).  He spent a good two weeks asking me to print out pictures of his x-rays (these were google photos of x-rays of various parts of the human body - skull, legs, arms, feet, hands, etc.). He showed them to everyone he could from the fedex man to his girlfriends (yes, plural) at school. He's a real player in preschool and often comes home to tell us which girl told him he was "cute and handsome" that particular day. Aidan keeps reminding us that we need to buy a box of popsicles and bring them to the hospital because they gave him their last one last month when he was there.  In his generosity, he is also collection things around the house, making bags and bags of drawings for "all the poor kids" and keeps asking when we are going to deliver them.  At our parent/teacher conference, we were told that he was a "very deep and profound thinker", that he often speaks of things (educationally) beyond his 4 little years.  He's very inquisitive about everything, where it comes from, how it works, etc.  His pictures in art class have really begun to take form to the point of really being able to tell what he is drawing. He signs all of his masterpieces "Aidan P." whether he's at home or at school. He just drew a picture tonight that says "To Mom (heart drawing sign) Aidan P."  Because of the large population of Aidan's around here, we've been finding ourselves using his nickname more an more "Bo" (as in Aidan bo-Baidan) or "Aidan Kane", maybe we'll drop the Aidan at some point so he doesn't have to go the next 20 years being called "Aidan Pee"  Aidan has this super cute habit of finding things around the house that belong to Jeff or I, whether it be work stuff, things in drawers, gadgets, etc.  He zones in on it and says the exact same thing each time “Do you need this?”, “Does Daddy need this?”, “Can I have it?” We normally let him take whatever it is and the item ends up being carried with him all day, all the way to his bed at night.

And, what has our little Ainsley been up to the past few weeks? Better question, what has she not been up to and into.  She can find any stool in any room, no matter how heavy to climb up onto anything to get her way, she's quick as Flash Gordon in either sneaking into something or running away from a diaper change or nappy time.  The language skills on Ainsley (okay, here we go bragging again...) are unbelievable. Not so much the pronunciation, which is good, but the thoughts and clarity behind the sentences and stories she tells.  Some of her stories are comical and the conversations she strikes up (sometimes with herself and her dolls) are always so funny to listen to. We don't remember the other three being this far ahead on language, but then again, she's got 3 little teachers around constantly in Keeley, Kaelin and Aidan. Her ABC singing is so cute, we wish we could capture the sounds of her singing and that her cute little baby voice would never change.  Ainsley has such specific routines at bedtime, going around making sure that all the other kids kiss her, hug her and say a proper "good night Ainsley".  She loves doing art projects and we can't keep her away from the radio/cd player and signing and dancing most of the day. After watching any movie, she’ll jump off the couch afterwards to start dancing as the credits roll.  She's got quite a temper and often takes it out on Aidan as they frequently go back and forth with “you’re a baby”, “no, you’re a baby” or “you’re a poopy”. She’s quite the tattle tale “Aidan did x”. She also has quite the arm and tends to use it (throwing things) when she doesn’t get her way.  Keeley’s clothes horse ways have rubbed off on Ainsley and she’s very particular about what she wears. Of course, we have boxes upon boxes, upon boxes of hand-me down clothes for her, but there just never seems to be enough or she picks the same favorite outfits time and time again.  She’s also very particular about her hair, doesn’t like it down at all, and always wants it pulled back. We are thinking about a short cut for her for the summer, which will be unusual for us with all the long hair on all the kids (including Aidan!).  She's very interested in using the potty, but we want to hold off until after our trip. It's tough enough finding bathrooms when three of them have to "go", never mind a little one in training who can't hold "it' as long. We also haven't had a second to go bed shopping for her and want to be sure she's out of the crib before we undertake training so she can get up in the middle of the night if she needs to.  AND, after having potty trained 3 kids in the last three years, we know that it's a heck of a lot easier in the summer when they are basically wearing nothing all the time anyway.

We had a stress-free Easter Sunday after a long Easter Eve of decorating eggs and then preparing for Easter morning after the kiddos went to bed (if you know what we mean...Keeley may be reading this and all...).  After going through all the baskets and presents the Easter Bunny brought the kids and tracking down and cleaning up his white footprints that were left all over the house, we opted for a nice buffet brunch at a restaurant over cooking and entertaining that day. The kids really enjoyed getting dressed up to go out.  The room that the brunch was in looked like a ballroom to Keeley and Kaelin, so they were excited about that and the soothing music that was being played had Ainsley on her feet twirling around the table and insisting Jeff twirl with her.  The food was great, the clean-up even better :-)!  After a big brunch we went home for a short while before heading over Nana and Papa's for what was suppose to be just dessert, but if you know Nana, you know it couldn't just be dessert...We spent the next couple of hours snacking and catching up with the family. Most of whom live only 10 minutes to 2 hours away, but we haven't seen since Christmas.  You know, the worst part about Easter is that damn Easter basket grass that's all staticy and sticks to everything. I'm sure we'll be still picking it out of places months from now.

We are still counting down the days until our Bahamas vacation; the kids have their suitcases packed already and are looking forward to the sunshine and hopefully playing with some dolphins while we are there.  We finally got all the kids passports. They think those are so cool, so we had to hide them so they don't end up lost at the bottom of a toy box.

So, as I look back at this post, I see that I did a lot of bragging this month about the kids.  We can't help it though, we are so proud of all of them, they continue to amaze and they are each so unique in their own way. We want to be sure that when they look back on these "blogs" 20 years from now that they now how special they are!