The times they are a changin'

What a week! We have been so busy and with the beautiful spring like weather here in the southeast, serious blogging has fallen to the wayside in an attempt to allow the G unit to soak up some Vitamin D and enjoy some family time outside. I am very big on when the weather is nice, we are outside. I have managed two three mile walks and Gavin has fallen asleep exhausted on several occasions after a trip to the park and evenings spent pushing his cars and toy lawn mowers up and down, up and down, up and down the street hundreds of times. Wednesday I took the day off and I took the kiddos on a walk alone. I pushed the Goose in her red car (formerly Gavinator's red car) and pulled Gavin in the wagon only to pass in front of a neighbor's house with toys and bikes in the front yard and have Gavin jump out of the wagon to try to play with their toys. Heaven knows the boy has the exact same toys in our garage but the allure of toys belonging to someone else was too much for the boy to bear. He lept out of the wagon and exercised his klepto ways and finally I had to carry the boy away kicking and screaming while pushing Grace in the red car and pulling the wagon. Good times. I lost a pound this week.... I wonder why?!?

I took Wednesday off of work so we could visit a preschool and so I could check in on Gavin's progress in speech therapy. Gavin loved, loved, loved preschool as did Lloyd and I. Small classrooms with educated teachers coupled with the notion of 9 glorious Gavin-free hours during the week for Lloyd was enough to make our heads explode. It is close to our house and affordable and it took every ounce of my muscles to drag him out of there so I think we found a winner. Try as I might I'm trying to get all mushy and sentimental over my baby boy growing up and attending preschool but the time has come. He is ready and more importantly, we are ready. Our boys is a social outcast having never spent much time around children his own age and living a life of total and complete freedom with every whim being filled in our home and limited structure. He jumped right into to several classrooms and even tried on some kid's Thomas the Train backpack. We were debating whether or not to put him in the two year old or three year old class this fall (as his birthday falls just 5 days after the cutoff) but after seeing the three year olds tracing letters with pencils and watching our boy trying to EAT the pencils, we are going to start him in the two year old room. Preschool at this point, in our minds, is less about academia and more about socialization and we feel he will probably fall more in ine with the two year olds. That is who he will be starting school with given his birthday after the cutoff and this visit only reaffirmed our decision to put him in with the two year olds.

At speech therapy I was so impressed with his progress. I am in awe at so far he has come in such a short amount of time. He will outgrow Babynet (the provider for his therapy) when he turns three and I received some bad news that he will more than likely not be receiving therapy from the schools after he turns three. The good news is that he won't receive therapy because he doesn't need it! He is pretty much age appropriate at this point and his vocabulary is growing daily. The words he can't say, he can sign and communication has increased by an infinite amount in just a few short months. He is putting words together and transitioning with ease. I almost burst with pride right there! After speech I took him out for ice cream (vanilla with M&Ms) and he smacked his lips and said "MMmmmmmm, yummmmmmm, that's good! Oh yeah, yummmmmmmmm" after almost every bite. He even wiped his mouth with a napkin!

We went to the park after that and ran and jumped and played and we ended our time at the park on the swings. The baby swing was too low to the ground so I sat on a big person swing and put him on my lap facing the opposite direction with his lags wrapped around me (we used to call this "the spider" back in the day). Every time we swung up I would kiss his forehead. After a couple of minutes I stopped the kissing and he said "more" to indicate he wanted more kisses. There we were in the spider position on the swing with the late winter sun shining down on us and me kissing his sweet forehead with every upswing. There is a heaven and I tasted it that afternoon. It is salty with a faint hint of vanilla and chocolate.