Andrew is 5 years 11 months old!

I feel like nothing has changed for Andrew really in the last month.  He is busy with school, though with spring break there wasn’t too much school in there.  I think he is kind of bummed that we get to have fun while he’s at school, but I know he enjoys school, too.  He is running out of ideas at his Writer’s Workshop, but his teacher is trying hard to make him think he has good ideas.  I think if they could write imaginary stories that would probably help, too.  His reading is continually improving.  He doesn’t like reading to me too much (not surprising, since reading is so much work), but I try to get him to almost every day.  His fluency is improving.  I am always impressed with the amount of math he is learning.  He is really seeming to get a good grasp on numbers.  He understands negatives pretty well and can add and subtract within twenty really well.  The boys think it is great fun to give me whole strings of numbers to add together. 

I went to a parent teacher conference again this last month.  Andrew is doing well.  His teacher thinks he would probably enjoy school more if it was more focused – he thinks the other kids and their wiggles is a little bit much.  We mostly talked about Andrew’s reading and how he depends on sounding it out too much and he needs to think about context and whether it looks or sounds right, too.

Andrew had his first trip away from us this month.  We went to Greenville, NC to visit.  Andrew seemed excited and seemed to do really well.  We left him at a neighbors house and he worked really hard to make sure that Seth wasn’t too scared.  He went to school and bought school lunch both days, which was a new and fun experience for him.  The third day, he didn’t have school for a holiday and so he went to the zoo with our friends and then had an Easter egg hunt at their house.  Overall, I think he had a really fun time.  He didn’t sleep as much as he should have (poor our friends), but otherwise, I think it went really well.  I think he is a little excited about the thought of us moving, though he would love to stay with his elementary school friends, forever.

Andrew is still doing his swim lessons and is working really hard on them.  Level 2 is a little harder and he is shorter than the other kids, so he can’t just stand in the pool like they can, but it makes me happy that he works so hard at it.

Fun Things This Month

• First time without Mom and Dad.  Did great and even had a super fun trip to the zoo, bought school lunch for the first time, and got picked up in the car line.
• St Patricks’ Day – we had green breakfast, which Andrew liked.  We also went to the St. Patrick’s Day parade.   It was cold and, of course, Andrew wanted to see the whole thing.  He was way up at the front so he could collect candy and swag, but there wasn’t space for us, so we stood back on the sidewalk.  After some people cleared out, we wanted to go up and stand by him.  There was this really nasty guy standing in the way who’d obviously had too much to drink or was just a real jerk anyways.  Anyways, he wouldn’t let us walk past him, even though our kid was there.  And the City Garden people wouldn’t let anyone walk on their plants.  So, we just had to wait until the stupid guy left and we could finally stand over there.  Andrew had fun anyways.
• Lots of playing at the park on the days when it was warm.
• Fish fry.
• 2 easter egg hunts back to back.  We were planning on skipping the first one since we had swim lessons.  But someone apparently had an accident in the swimming pool after Seth’s lesson, so Andrew’s was cancelled and we ran and barely made the first hunt, one we have always enjoyed in Richmond Heights.  Then, we went to a new-to-us hunt in Forest Park.  It was cold, but the boys had fun.  It was in the huge field (where the Balloons for the Balloon race start) and we got to see booths, the Bunny arrive by Helicopter and each of the boys had their own egg hunt.  There was TONS of eggs (55,000) so the boys got lots.  And some even had good candy.  We had a lot of fun. 
• We had a big snow storm the first Sunday of spring break – a whole foot of snow!  The boys built a snow fort and a huge snowman.  It was really really wet snow.  Thankfully, it didn’t stay around too many days.
• During Spring Break, we also
  • went to the zoo.
  • went to Magic House.
  • went to Purina Farms.  We saw all the baby animals.  Andrew was super grumpy and yelling that it wasn’t the real Purina Farms because the dog show outside wasn’t going on (it was indoors instead because of the big snow storm).  He said it was really Burina Farms.  I think he enjoyed it, though.  The dog show and the hay ride were nice.  And Andrew and Seth loved running through the tunnels in the barn.
  • went to the CHildren’s Garden at the Botanical Gardens on opening day.  They had music performers and the boys also got free plants.
  • Of course, what did Andrew tell his class he did over Spring break – went to Tilles Park.  Which we did, but it was clearly the least exciting of all.  It’s just what we did the first day.
• Spring Break was also the week before Easter.
• Andrew enjoyed waving the homemade palm branches while we sang Hosanna and acting out Palm Sunday.
• We had a passover dinner with lamb, homemade unleavened bread, bitter herbs, and grape juice.   Andrew liked the lamb.
• Friday, we had a Jesus dinner with foods he might of eaten, plus some symbolic food to remember the events of that day.  We also made hot cross buns, which Andrew refused to eat.  We also dyed Easter Eggs.  Andrew loved that of course and worked hard on decorating his eggs.
• Saturday we had our traditional ham dinner.
• Sunday we had a traditional ham dinner with friends.  Andrew was so excited because he finally got to go to their house.  It was probably the highlight of the week for him.
• Sunday morning we had our Easter egg hunt in the house.  Andrew had tons of fun finding eggs and eating the treats inside.
• General Conference – the boys listened to the prophet, but otherwise, they mostly just played.  They did enjoy doing bingo with chocolate chips one day and eating chocolate chip cookies the other day.