It's Summer Time!

We're starting to settle into a Summer Groove. Monday-Thursday I teach swim lessons in the morning. The kids go to childwatch for about an hour, then they get to come to their own swimming lesson. Since the boys turned 6, I'm starting to send them to the locker room by themselves. It still feels weird to send them in there, but they've been good about meeting me in a certain location afterwards and it helps that there's two of them to send together. After swimming, we walk over to the park across the street and the kids get lunch. The kids: "Thanks for taking us here mom!!"  Me: No preparation, clean up, or trying to figure out what to eat that day? "You are welcome!" :)

Tyler & Bryce are turning into great little swimmers! This last Thursday, (June 14th) after their last day of class, they both performed the "green ribbon" test. They jumped in at the deep end of the lap pool and swam all the way across without grabbing on to the side. It was awesome! Having a green ribbon gives them access to all of the pool at the YMCA, so they can go off the diving board, swim in the lap pool and go in the lazy river and slide by themselves. They were so excited, it was really fun to cheer them on and share in their excitement. Bryce immediately headed for the diving board, while Tyler swam another lap side by side with his dad (pretty stinking cute if you ask me!). Lexi is doing well with lessons, but is very timid in the water. She can float by herself if the water is super shallow, but if you try to bring her out a little deeper she freaks out. She'll put her face in the water and blow bubbles and go under, so I think she's doing awesome for a 3 year old! She loves going to class, and especially loves sitting in the hot tub afterwards.

We've done a lot of dancing so far:

Our strawberry plants were doing awesome until the neighborhood cats/birds/and bugs discovered them. I think a cat dug out two of my plants, I was so irritated! Here's the first berries of the season:

 We're enjoying lots of this!

 We even took advantage of Sonic's half-price milkshakes after 8 and got everyone their own milkshakes last week. The kids aren't usually awake at that time of night so it was an extra special treat!

I always check on the kids before I go to sleep and am highly amused at the positions they fall asleep in. I did a double take one night because I walked in and found this:

 I had Marc come in and we just kind of chuckled to ourselves. We thought they had stayed up late talking (which recently started in the past few weeks) but both were adamant that they had gone to sleep in their own beds. We've decided that Bryce must have rolled off his bed and climbed into Tyler's by mistake.

Last Summer, it was Bryce who came to us to take his training wheels off his bike, then Tyler was the only one who was actually riding on just two wheels. Bryce was just too scared. We even had Marc's parents try to work with him a little bit to see if he would do better for somebody else.But he was still almost paralyzed on the bike, wouldn't pedal when you let go! I took the kids out to the church parking lot and roller bladed behind Bryce. I think his biggest problem was he was going so slow he couldn't keep his balance for anything! I held onto his seat and handle bars for a while, then got to both hands on the seat, eventually one hand to stabilize him and finally shoved him off and had him go. Without any curbs, grass, mailboxes or parked cars to run into, he finally felt confident enough to ride by himself! We called Marc at work and since he was leaving, he came over to watch him. Hooray!! We had to go back to the parking lot a couple more times to learn to start by himself, but now he is a completely independent (and very wobbly) bike rider

 Now if I can just hit the pause button on aging a little bit, I'll be happy!