On two wheels

Ever since the weather warmed up this year, we've been spending a lot of time like this:

Today, however, thanks to the kindness of neighbors we'd never seen or met before, neighbors who just happened to be on their driveway when we rode by, our daily trike ride changed forever. We now have a bike! The boys are especially thrilled:

Since they've only ever ridden trikes before, it took a bit of practice for them to get the hang of pedaling without braking every rotation or two. I must admit that I was particularly frustrated trying to teach Isaac how to pedal without braking. He eventually figured it out, but not before teaching me a lot about perseverance: Every time he'd "mess up," he'd get right back on the bike and cheerfully say, "Let's try again!" Jude also struggled a bit, but he found his groove a lot more quickly than his brother:



The challenge now will be managing who gets a turn with the bike and when. I envision a bike purchase (or two or three) in our near future!

Adding up

A while back I noticed that Lucy was starting to understand that if one kid left the table, only three kids remained, and other such scenarios. Eager to encourage any burgeoning math skills, I started occasionally creating my own word problems in the midst our daily life to introduce the kids to the the idea of addition, subtraction, fractions, and the like. Apparently this approach is exactly what Lucy needed to learn to add without any formal instruction! Check out what she can do:



Isaac may be our numbers guy (he taught himself to count to 100 well before any of the others could reliably count to 20!), but it looks like Lucy's the first to understand what you can actually do with numbers. Girl power!