Swim Meet

Brayden has been working really hard during swimming lessons, he is getting closer and closer to being able to swim on his own. We thought it would be fun for Brayden to enter a swim meet or race as Brayden likes to call it. They let Brayden use a noodle, and they have a lifeguard in the pool helping him along. He did a really good job. His coach helps him get his arm over the noodle at the beginning of the video. About 52 seconds into it you can see Brayden say, "I'm not going anywhere." Jared and I were cracking up. I think he was glad the lifeguard gave him a little help. Sorry I am yelling in the video, I was having a blast cheering him on.

I want to tap

 

After watching Kira tap away, Brayden wanted to give it a try. He also showed off his new hula dance moves. Oh, course Reagan has some moves too.

Just cause

This is a pretty standard cheese face. When ever she sees a camera she says cheese and this is her cheese smile. Gotta love it.

Brayden needed to get a picture too, with his helicopter of course.

Jumpers

Friday morning Jared was able to take us to go see some jumpers. It was quite the ordeal getting to the jump site. He was given directions, but they were very general. We were in a hurry to get to the jump site so we wouldn’t miss the jumps, and we ended up not being patient enough and turned too early. Jared tried to drive us through a lake to get to where he thought we should be. It wasn’t really a lake, but the water was way to high. He thought we could make it through, and after driving about 10 feet, and me telling him to stop I opened my door to find the water about an inch below the car he decided to listen to me and find another way. The only problem was the other way was driving right through the drop zone. The good thing was the Chinook helicopter was on the ground so we didn’t get into any trouble, but everyone was looking at us like and I am sure thinking “oh there are those idiots that drove through the drop zone”. Once we got parked it was a lot of fun watching all the jumpers and the helicopter land to pick up more jumpers. The type of helicopter was a Chinook, they have two sets of blades. Each time the Chinook would circle 10 soldiers would jump. It would circle around again and then another 10 would jump. After the 20 jumpers went the helicopter would land and pick up another 20. They had over 80 jumpers so we were able to watch several jumps. It was a pretty good time. 

Here is the Chinook getting ready to leave.

 

Here they go...

I was a little nervous, so I would count each time and make sure there was 10 parachutes.

 

Here are a few landing. They said you don't want to get too close cause it hurts and you will hear some words you don't want to hear.

 

Once the chinook landed soldiers would get off and start getting the next group ready.

 

It was a fun time, well a little stressful, but pretty exciting to see it so close up.

 

Kiddos these days

We have a family membership to the Y. Included in our membership the kids can participate in several activities. Reagan has swimming lessons with mommy and gymnastics. Brayden has swimming lessons, gymnastics and basketball. This was his last day of basketball, he was too excited to look at the camera.
Reagan loves to put on my hat, any hat for that matter. She is so funny and thinks she is so cool when she gets to wear a hat.Last Saturday I went with some friends to lunch to celebrate an upcoming baby arrival. Jared took the kids to the park. It was freezing so they didn't stay long, but as you can see Reagan had a blast. She loves going down the slide.
Last week it snowed; the kids had a blast going outside with daddy. Brayden thought it was pretty funny to knock on the door and then hide. When I would come to the door he would throw a snowball at me. He was a little shocked when I went out back and made my own snowball to throw back at him.
This is Reagan doing her work. She loves when she can sneak the computer away from Brayden. She still loves the stairs and if I don't know where she is I usually can find her on the stairs.
While Reagan takes her nap I let Brayden do things that are a little to difficult to do when sister is awake. Today he wanted to draw on the white board while I did some work on the computer. I looked down to check out his drawing and found him drawing this. He told me it was a volcano and it was about to explode. I thought it was pretty good.

Reagan oh so tired

I was busy cleaning up the kitchen, I turned around to see Reagan oh so tired.

Brayden's Preschool

We got to Washington in September and I immediately started looking into preschools for Brayden. I didn't feel good about any of them, and after much stress decided I was okay with him not attending preschool and my focus needed to be on other things, like unpacking. Since we are feeling a bit more settled and Brayden has mentioned preschool more often lately I decided to attempt having preschool twice a week at our house. I spent about a week figuring it all out, and mapping out what we would learn over the three months I would try it. When the first day came Brayden could hardly stand it. We invited a friend of Brayden's to join us and Sophia was pretty excited to. Here they are on their first day. I could hardly get Brayden to stand still so this was as good as it gets.
They had a great time fishing for letters and painting. I just hope I can keep up on it.