Tae Kwon Do Party

Brennan and Tyler were invited to a birthday party at the Tiger Den, a local tae kwon do school.  The party started with the kids learning how to sit and stand properly and to respond properly to the instructor, "Yes, Sir!"  My pictures didn't come great, but here are some video clips that you might enjoy.

Tyler couldn't quite nail that forward roll!

The party ended with the kids getting to break a piece of wood - very exciting!

I'm not sure if Brennan was worried about hurting his hand, but it took 4 attempts before he broke the board. 

Brennan's First Baseball Games of the Season

Brennan had his first two games last week.   It was about 20 degrees cooler than the prior week, so it was a rude awakening sitting there watching the game.  Fifty with cloud cover and wind starts to feel extremely cold after 2 hours!  At the first game, Brennan got hits both time while at bat.

He made it to first.

This year, his level is "developmental machine pitch."    The pitching machine they use is shown below.  Each child gets 9 pitches when at bat.  If they don't get a hit, it is an out.  Kids can also be fielded out.  There are 3 outs per team per inning, but the inning is capped at 5 runs.  The game is capped at 2 hours.

Brennan's stance was looking better at his second game.

Tyler was just cold at both games... he hid under a blanket anytime he was sitting down!

More photos to come this season!

KUC Art Show

Friday night was the annual art show at Tyler's preschool.  Tyler was very excited to show us his art projects.  We started at his classroom where we saw Tyler's picture of his family.

 And, his snowy window scene.

Tyler's favorite project was the dinosaurs.  Tyler's dinosaur is the middle back one on the table.

I thought Tyler's caterpillar had an adorable smile - it's the one above his head in the picture.

Cute turtles were resting on leaves.

And, a cardinal.

The door to the classroom was decorated with bird nests.  Tyler's nest is the one center left of the door's window.

It was a great evening at the school and we visited Tyler's classroom for next year before heading for some ice cream and playtime on the playground.  It's hard to believe we only have a month left of preschool before summer break!

Little League Opening Day Parade

The games have begun.  The little league season opened this weekend with a parade.  Brennan is on the Braves and is playing on the "machine pitch developmental" level.  This season is going to have a pretty steep learning curve, but Brennan will hopefully come out of it with an understanding of how the game really works and some new skills!  Brennan has a couple of friends on his team this season, so it's nice to know a couple of other families.

Brian and the coach road in the back of the truck with the kids.  This year's parade went from Sterling Elementary School to Sterling Middle School.  I'm not sure how many teams are in the league, but I think there were over 30 trucks in the parade.  Brennan's team was fortunate enough to get a loaner truck from the Ford Dealership - they were driving around in a brand new truck with only 10 miles and a sticker price of over $50K!  It was really nice!

Another mom and I were responsible for truck decorations.  We were happy with how it came out, but the Braves didn't win the contest for best decorated truck.

I have to share a close up of the banner.... we put a lot of work into it!  We'll hang it up for the games.

After the parade, all the teams lined up on the outfield for the ceremony.

After the ceremony was over, it was time for fun.  They had a moon bounce obstacle course that the boys loved.  Tyler also took a turn at the blow up tee-ball game.

Brennan did pretty good on the rock wall!  He's the one halfway up the wall in the photo below.

It was a fun morning and a very hot day in the 80s.

Easter 2015

We had a lovely Easter weekend, which coincidentally was the end of spring break.  On Good Friday, we remembered Christ's death with a dinner at church.  On Sunday, we spent the morning at church celebrating His resurrection.  It's become a tradition to have a family photo booth on Easter.  We managed to get another marginal looking photo...maybe one year we'll get one with everyone smiling and looking at the camera.

We died our Easter eggs on Saturday afternoon.  I think we had more success this year with getting nice bright colors all around than ever before.  The boys were thrilled.

We made a couple of tie-died eggs.  This was Tyler's favorite.  He said it was so beautiful.

On Sunday, after church, the boys couldn't wait for the Easter Egg Hunt.  They don't believe in the Easter Bunny, so I didn't have to be stealth in hiding eggs.  Brennan asked that I hide the eggs in hard places this year, so I tried to put most of them out of sight.  Although he claimed I still made it too easy, Brian and I had to help him find most of the eggs!

After enjoying some beautiful weather that afternoon, we enjoyed a quite dinner with just the four of us.

Tyler the Soccer Bug

Tyler has been watching Brennan play sports for the last few seasons, wanting to play, but being too young.  This season, he had really hoped to play soccer.  There was only one league option for 3-year old soccer and it was for a very short season, really too short for the price.  Instead, I found an indoor 12-week program called Soccer Bugs that is geared towards teaching the fundamentals to kids under age 6.  It seems to be more playtime with a soccer ball than any real soccer at this point, but Tyler is thrilled to be playing, so I am happy! 

Adventures in DC

It's been a while since I've actually made it into DC and this week over spring break, we managed to make it there twice!  Over the weekend, we hosted a German family who is friends with my pastor.  On Monday before they headed out, we made the most of a beautiful day and spent the afternoon at the national zoo.  Between the three families, we had 10 kids, so it was quite an adventure.  We tried to get everyone to pose for a photo, but Tyler was pouting off to the side because he couldn't get a seat on the bear statue.

Yesterday, it was 70 degrees and we headed back into the city with Brennan's friend Gavin and his mom.  We rode the silver line in from Reston, which was my first time riding the new line.  It was easy and convenient, though the boys grew a bit restless from the 45 minute ride.  We packed lunch and planned to just soak up some sun on the national mall.  It was lovely!

We headed into the Air & Space Museum to see an IMAX movie.  We saw Journey to Space in 3D.  It was really fascinating.  I had heard about these supposed 1-way missions to colonize Mars, but I didn't realize NASA was actually working on a manned mission to Mars, of course one that would involve a return home!  It was a lovely day and now we are looking forward to Easter this weekend!

First Day of Spring

Spring is trying to arrive, but we keep fluctuating between 40 and 70!  Day over day, we don't know what we're going to expect.  On the first day of spring, I decided to take Tyler to Briar Patch Park after school.  He was thrilled and the chill in the air didn't bother him at all!

He was so excited to climb and slide.

I saw a real difference in him this trip to the park - he was fearless!  He was climbing up the tall ladders and couldn't get enough of the tallest slide in the park.  He calls it the "full slide" because it's a fully enclosed tube slide.  It made me think he might be pretty bold this summer at the pool!

The Science Fair

When notice about the science fair came home in February, I knew Brennan would want to participate.  He loves doing experiments.  Initially, he wanted to create a volcano, but the science fair pushed you to create a question and hypothesis to test.  So, we did a little online research and decided to test the following question: "Does water temperature affect how quickly celery absorbs water?"  Here were out supplies:

We ended up with two snow days the week before the science fair, which gave us the perfect opportunity to stay home and work on the experiment.  We set out 5 jars with food coloring and water of differing temperatures:  boiling hot, hot tap, room temperature, cold tap, ice cold.  Brennan's hypothesis was that the boiling hot would absorb the fastest.  he set his celery in and we started to watch the results.

Brennan was very excited to get to work, though afterwards, when I printed these pictures to put on his display board, he said, "Mom, I'm wearing pajamas in the pictures!"  Well, that is something you can get away with in first grade!

Brennan tracked the celery absorption after 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, and two hours.  The boiling hot turned out to be the slowest - I think the boiling water may have cooked the celery, slowing down it's ability to absorb.  By the time two hours passed, the food coloring had made its way to the top of all the celery stalks (the room temperature and hot tap water made it to the top in 1 hour.)  The boiling hot did eventually reach the top of the stalk, but it took 4 hours.

I helped Brennan make his display board.  We printed the headers, but he hand wrote most of it.  His conclusion was that room temperature water and hot tap water were the best for celery absorption.  Unfortunately, the day of the science fair, Brennan came home from school with a stomach virus.  We had already dropped his display board off for viewing, but he missed the fair itself.  Thankfully, his teacher allowed him to present his work to his class when he returned to school.  He was so excited and it is already talking about next year's fair.

Donuts with Dad

Last Monday was "Donuts with Dad" at Tyler's preschool.  Tyler was so excited to have Brian drive him to school.  He kept saying the event was called "Daddy donut" and attempted to eat Brian for breakfast before leaving.

Tyler gave Brian a card.  He said that Dad sprinkles him with "huge, love, kisses and tickles."

Then, of course the interview questions.  Beer appearing as an answer in Tyler's questionnaire again (anyone remember his answer on my mother's day card last year?!)  When I followed up on this, Tyler explained, "Daddy likes beard (yes, he said 'beard'), he pours it out and the brown stuff comes up."  Ha... he is describing the settling process that takes place when you pour out a can of Guinness!

Tyler also made Brian an adorable paper tie.  I thought this was a great little craft!  Tyler loves his Daddy!

Sledding at Lowes Island

On Saturday, we got hit with a pretty serious amount of snow - maybe our biggest snowfall of the season.  Church was canceled on Sunday, but that day turned out to be beautiful, in the high 40s.  We set out to find a decent sledding hill and landed at Lowes Island Elementary, just a short walk from my sister's place.  Brennan was working on building up a ramp to sled on.

Tyler was loving it, but would only allow Baba to help him.  (My folks make the drive on Saturday during the snow, they made great time to Baltimore and then from there, it took them 5 hours to get to our house.  The DC Metro area is a nightmare in the snow... driver do crazy things and do not know how to handle themselves in these conditions.)

Brennan had a blast and we eventually built that ramp up to get a little air when you hit it with the sled.  The warm temperatures made the sledding so enjoyable.  I allowed myself to be a kid and do some sledding as well... so much fun!

A snow man of their own

Although we haven't had feet of snow fall that other areas of the country have experienced, we have had a pretty constant amount of snow and with the lasting freezing temperatures, it's remained fairly white here.  The kids have had a ton of snow days - last week they only went for one day and it was a 2-hour delay.  It's nutty.  About a month ago, we didn't really have enough snow to make a great snow man, but the kids really wanted to try to make one.  It was a very wet snow and I didn't really want to venture out with them, but I offered to let them go make one on their own if they were up for it.  It was kind of dirty and misshapen, but it was their own creation and they were proud!

Ice Skating

Towards the end of January, we took the kids ice skating with Debby and Joe.  Brennan has been able to hold his own on the ice for a while now, but Tyler has had a really hard time.  Tyler couldn't figure out how to position himself to keep his feet from slipping and sliding.  It made it really hard on the adult helping him, since we'd have to support his entire body weight while he feet slid all over the place.

After struggling to instruct and help Tyler, a stranger gave us some advice, to have him "stomp" while skating.  Thankfully, that worked and although he never fully found his balance, he was at least supporting his body weight on his own legs, so we could just guide him.  Here is a little clip of his stomping, unfortunately, we had to continually say "keep stomping," but hopefully if we go a couple more times, he'll start to get it.

Here is a short clip of Brennan in action:

Here's just a silly shot of me and Brennan, his request.  We had a fun couple of hours of skating, but were all ready to get our feet out of those skates at the end of the session!