Sweet Sam

Life with Sam has still been fun lately. He is still just as sweet as ever. However, he has started to test the boundaries on things he can say. A friend described it perfectly the other day as “lippy”.

Sam is doing so great at baseball. He has done great at hitting the ball from the coach and only every once in a while having to use the tee. We have been very impressed. His team is currently in a tournament and this seems to be much better baseball for him. In regular season, they bat through the line up and this just makes for long stints of doing nothing. In the tournament, they play three outs which definitely speeds things up!

Sam is a sweet friend and has lots of best friends. It changes regularly depending on what day you ask him. Dylan, above, seems to be the friend he plays best with. In the picture above, they were being spies and Sam had his spy coat on. One day I asked Sam if he was friends with a certain kid in his class and he simply said, “Not yet.”  I thought that was such a sweet thing for him to say. We saw another one of his friends from class at Disney World and they were so cute together. We ran in to them in a store and they just played and played while I talked to his mom.

He has a great imaginations. In fact, I would say Sam is much more imaginative than Reese is. This seems to make him have more “bad dreams”. I don’t know that he is really having bad dreams but every.single.night he comes in to our room. He did that for over a year when he was three/four years old but we got him stopped around Christmas last year. Recently he has started again. The rule is he is not supposed to wake me up. He is just supposed to curl up on my floor with a pillow and blanket and go back to sleep. It doesn’t always work that way though.

He has good and bad days with each of his siblings. He loves to pick. He picks on each of them until it pushes them to the limits (which comes faster for Reese and louder for Hayes) and then this pushes Mommy to the limits. He likes to be helpful with Hayes but Hayes doesn’t always like that. However, when they are all sweet together it makes my mommy heart happy!

Last weekend Joci spent the night with us and her parents came to get her around 10:30 the next morning. The kids were up bright and early and outside playing. I was listening in and heard Reese performing a wedding ceremony. Sam and Joci got married. When she told Sam he could kiss his bride, both of them said “EWW! No!”…thank goodness. I told them no kissing for a long time! After the ceremony was the reception where Reese was teaching them how to slow dance. Oh my! Luckily Joci’s parents got here quickly.

I can’t believe Sam is going to be five in less than a month! It is so crazy and I don’t know if I am ready for it!

Life with Reese

Man! These last few weeks have been packed full of crazy! We are non-stop. Hence, the lack of posts and reflecting on life. I decided that I will do a post dedicated to each kid to to remember what has been going on with each of them.

Today is Reese.

After Disney, it was rough getting back in to the swing of things but Reese has been doing amazing at school. At least once a week her teacher was emailing me about Reese being “Super Student”. That is until she decided to come up with a different rewards system for the class. Reese’s teacher is a first year teacher so I think she is just trying to figure out what works. Now Reese comes home with things from the treasure box or candy jar. I am not exactly sure what kind of behavior system is working in class but I know Reese is behaving.

This is the quietest and most peaceful time in our house. Ha! Reese has at least 15 stuffed animals in her bed at all times.

One weekend Reese had Target homework where she had to SCAMPER ideas for a paper airplane. Those are the times I am so grateful to have Lance around to do homework with her. I had no idea what to do.

The first weekend in October Reese and I had the chance to spend the night at the Tennessee Aquarium. I went in to it a little nervous about how it all would go but we ended up having a good time. It just took me all week to recover from the lack of sleep.

Reese has also been playing soccer again this fall. Writing this post I realized we have not taken any pictures with our cameras yet…must fix that this weekend. She is doing really well though. She improves each week. However, she told us she doesn’t want to play anymore. Each fall, on the playground, all of the little girls doing football cheerleading do their cheers. Each fall, Reese says she wants to cheer. Once registration rolls around though she says she wants to play fall soccer so I don’t know what will actually happen next year. Her soccer coach pulled Lance aside a couple of weeks ago and told him we need to decide if we want to have Reese try out for a select team. Lance told him that Reese was saying she didn’t want to play any more and he said that was a bad idea. Ha! He said she has natural soccer talent and that she could be really good if she continued.

I just signed her up to play basketball this winter. She has been begging to play and she always goes outside to shoot baskets with our neighbor so we decided to make it happen.  We will see how that goes! Neither Lance or I know much about basketball.

I have recently learned (and I don’t know what took me so long) that Reese and I are complete opposites. I am not sure there is anything other than blood that we share. It is definitely something that I am learning and trying to grow through.

I am so proud of Reese. She is a great friend, wonderful student, and most of the time a sweet sister.