We took so many pictures last month that I started to feel a little guilty this month when I realized we didn’t have too much in the pipeline. I even contemplated skipping the entry this month and scaling back to less frequent updates, but then I looked back at the entry from January of last year and discovered I was grappling with these same issues last year. Guess December is so busy for us that January becomes a sigh of relief month where we get back into our routines of work and school and scale back the activities on the social calendar. That said, this month was not without its fair share of happenings, including:
- Orange picking at grandma and grandpas house followed by orange juice making at our house…the kids love this stuff (one of the nice part of this age is how you can turn the simplest things into “fun” projects for the kids without much effort)
- A ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate the opening of Tyson and Heidi’s new business venture
- A good bye party for cousin Fabi
- And a family get together on Cathy’s side of the family
Lilah
This month Lilah left her ballet dance roots behind and started taking tap-jazz dance lessons. The lessons are with the same instructor she had for ballet. I think the livelier performances of the tap-jazz troupe appealed to Lilah, thus she made the switch. The drawback is that the shoes are definitely a lot noisier, something which is even more evident when you have a lot of tile flooring in the house and a daughter who now loves to wear tap shoes and put on impromptu shows. Oh well, she’s having fun with it and as long as that continues mom and dad are willing to put up with a little extra noise (within reason).
In addition to her tap-jazz class, Lilah continues playing her piano. She had a lot of fun playing the piano at Tyson and Heidi’s new music studio — here is a short clip (6MB – need broadband access to watch this) — a place we spent a several hours in this month as we tried to help with a few of the mini projects that had to be completed in preparation for the ribbon cutting ceremony.
Luke
Luke is into applied mathematics these days. He’s not really writing numbers or letters, but he is into figuring out how many items of something there are: how many fingers, how many chicken nuggets, how many minutes till we get to our destination…things like that. He has a workbook full of exercises he likes to go through with mom that help him with his problem solving skills.
Luke’s pre-school teacher told me that Luke is doing really well and that he will be re-evaluated shortly to see if he still qualifies for the speech program he is in — she suspects he won’t as he’s talking so much now that it would be hard to justify keeping him in.
Okay, I think I stuck to my plan of keeping it short this month…Until next month!