Fun Times

Recently, one of my best friends (and the best man at our wedding), Nick, moved to the KC area with his wife and their two kids.  It's been great to see him and catch up.  We had them over for dinner a week or so ago and the 4 kids had a great time playing together.  One of my favorite parts of the evening was when, after what seemed like a too-long period of silence, I heard a bunch of giggling as they came down the stairs.  We turned to see this:

Also last weekend, I bought a new Nintendo.  Amy and Daniel have had a great time playing Mario Kart.  Daniel can definitely hold his own!

This weekend we went to the pool and had it mostly to ourselves again.

And spent a lot of time playing outside.  Daniel and Leslie are playing exceptionally well together lately, it's been a real treat.  One of their "projects" from the weekend involved finding leaves and making piles of them in the yard.  When it was time to come inside, they had to work together to get all the supplies they used back up to the garage.

This morning, the kids woke us up and then went downstairs.  When I went downstairs a bit later, it was completely quiet.  I walked around the corner to the family room to see:

Can you guess where they were?

This evening we spent some time playing board games.

And then, Daniel lost his other front tooth!  He and Leslie were playing in the basement and he came running upstairs, very excited to show us.  He said he "bonked it out with a box"..whatever that means.

For months now, we've been working on sight words with Daniel.  We made flash cards and started with a few and have worked our way up to all 92 words he will learn in Kindergarten.  We go through them almost every day and he does great with them, even if he's not always super enthusiastic.  Well, today I felt like all the work was worthwhile.  He asked me how to spell "tooth" and then took his sight words upstairs to his room.  A little later he showed us what he had been doing.  He did this completely by himself:

Hopefully the tooth fairy will remember to visit him tonight!