An Update

Elias dressed himself in this outfit. It was almost 80 degrees out.

With this blog I've been trying to avoid a "This is what I've been up to" entry. I've tried to focus more on concise stories with a point or a single thought expanded. However, I have done such an atrocious job of actually posting blog entries in the last month, I feel an update is in order.

In the last month my son has turned four and grown in leaps and bounds intellectually. On exactly his fourth birthday, he started asking 'why?' to everything. Before then he would ask us 'What happens when?' questions, but we seemed to have avoided the why stage. It wasn't meant to last apparently, because he is a full blown why-er now. I like answering why questions usually because it's neat to help out his inquisitive mind. We have had to put some limits on the why for the sake of saying the word why. Uttering 'why... why... why...' repeatedly is just intellectual laziness. :) We try to get him to clarify what he's asking why about. So far so good!

Elias' reading skills continue to improve and he's been sounding out more words in his head. He's also starting to master ch, sh, th, etc. That opens up a whole new world of words for him, and it's really neat! On the math front, Kristin has been printing out dot-to-dots that number 1 to 50, or 1 to 100. This has done wonders for his counting skills. He never really wanted to count much past 10, but he loves doing dot-to-dots, and in order to do the larger ones he had to improve his counting. It's amazing to see him recognize numbers like 34 and 67 just by glancing at them for a few moments. He really is growing mentally!

My daughter has learned to pull herself up on things and in general move towards toddlerdom. She's been uttering 'dada' for a while now, but I think now she actually connects the word to me. She's also started saying 'mama', and just like Elias she has a distinctive tone for each. For Dad it's light and cheery, sort of a 'Dad, I'm so happy to see you!' For Mom, it's more of a 'MOM! Why are you not holding me!' :)

Eva has also been showing signs of signing. I don't feel like we've been signing around her as much as we did for Elias, but we've been pretty steady on signing 'nurse', 'Dad', 'Mom', 'dog', 'ball'. Hopefully she'll pick them up as easily as Elias. I think it's great for babies to have a second method of communication, and it's certainly easier than speech for a child so young. Eva has signed 'dog', 'ball' and we think one hand motion she does is 'nurse'. It's not technically accurate, but contextually it usually fits. Granted, she's pretty much always nursing, so that's always her context. :)

Eva with her usual expression.

I've been slightly stalled on my weight loss regime. I lost 11 pounds in the first month, which put me about 10 pounds away from my 3 month goal. This month I think I'm down 16 total. I've kept up my riding and really enjoyed that, but my dietary restrictions on junk food have pretty much been abandoned. I'm still keeping the soda and mocha intake down, but now that I'm down to 182 pounds, my motivation to lose weight is almost completely zilch. :) I think I'll be ready to rock it out on the Tour de Phoenix in April as I've been riding Mt Lemmon almost every week and commuting almost every day. This week has been a bit slow for various reasons, but I plan on kicking it back up to full next week.

My commuter car is giving me trouble. I've put 5000 miles on it in the past year, which I think is impressive given my daily commute of 28 miles (plus all side errands). Unfortunately, leaving your car in the driveway 4 days a week doesn't guarantee that it will have no maintenance costs. This week I drove it to work one day out of laziness (hey, my son wanted to cuddle in the morning! :) ) and out of spite my check engine light came on. I took it to the shop the next day and in the diagnostic they found many things that needed to be repaired, mostly having to do with emissions. It's not fully repaired yet, but it's close. It hurts having to spend money on a car I try and drive as little as possible, but when Sam gets her license in a few months it'll be the car she drives so I want it to be in full working order.

Life has been moving pretty fast. The year is in full swing and the future months are starting to fill up with planned activities. I have neglected my blogging and updating my picture website. I hope to get back into that mode, but my attempts have not been entirely successful of late. We shall see what the future holds!