Happy Birthday to...

Happy birthday to Grammy and Dad!

Nicholas & Sarah Kate's Grammy celebrated her birthday on June 2nd! Nicholas loves singing the Happy Birthday song and helping to blow out candles. He almost loves it as much as eating the cake! We loved that Gram spent her special day at our house this year as it fell on the day that she babysits the kids. Here is Nicholas laughing and loving the singing....

and the blowing out of the candles...

Two days later Daddy celebrated his 4oth Birthday and we got to do it again!!! Nicholas again laughed and sang Happy Birthday....

and helped to blow out the candles...

For Daddy's 40th birthday he is getting a John Deere riding lawn mower. He has always wanted one and this is the perfect occasion as at 40 he should now be able to sit and mow the lawn. I knew Scott would want to come to buy it and pick out just the right one so I wrapped a toy version of the tractor and the information from the store. Here are the boys excited about the gift...

As I have said in previous weeks, Nicholas is simply amazing! He has this love of language and letters that is such a unique and special thing about our little guy. He knows a great deal of vocabulary from the many, many ABC books we have read. He asks me all the time how to spell words so he can either write or say them. The other day he asked me how to spell Umbrella Bird. As I told him he wrote it. I decided to take a picture to mark his writing ability at age 3! I'm so impressed...

Isn't that great!! Speaking of Nicholas' development, this past week I met with his preschool teachers to review his progress. Overall Nicholas is doing amazingly well! His strengths are language and letters (no shock there). He is above his age level in academic knowledge. He has made great gains in speech but he still is behind a bit in articulation. We are going to continue to work on that at home and with the speech therapist at school. Also, he is still catching up in his gross motor skills. Again, he has made continuous gains and can now do stairs so well! However, he still needs as much opportunity as possible to run, jump, climb and simply improve his overall strength, coordination, and balance. He will continue to receive PT at school and we are working on signing him up for some great activities this summer that will be a lot of fun and help in all areas. One activity we are definitely doing is swim lessons. We just finished the last class today and we are going to sign up fro another 6 or 8 week session. It was amazing to see the growth over the course of the class. The first week he cried and wouldn't go in the water with the teacher. By then end he was jumping off the side of the pool into the instructor's arms and taking every turn he was given to go in. He has a long way to go but he loves going and it is so great fro him! Here are a couple photos of him having fun in the kiddie pool after the last swim class today.

This is Nick swimming with the instructor and a green noodle. He loves those noodles!

Sarah Kate looked so cute today in this darling dress that I bought for her. I decided to try to get some cute shots of her and Nicholas too...

tummy time...

It is SO HARD to get a good photo lately!

This one is cute but Nicholas would only give me a crazy smile :-)

This one really shows the cute dress...

Sarah Kate is doing so well! We are amazed by the rate she is growing. She is such a sweetie and we love her to pieces. Today Nicholas wrote "I love Sarah Kate" on his toy writing board. How cute is that!