Curious Zach goes to Kindergarten

It was a good day. He jumped out of bed, so excited, ate only a granola bar, helped pack his lunch and got dressed. We took some photos and all walked up to the bus stop (about 5 houses up on our street), and when the bus came he quickly waved goodbye and ran to get on!

As soon as the bus pulled away, Gabe turned to us and said "I miss Zach!" It was heart-wrenching and adorable. We walked home, Frank went to work, and we had a very calm and quiet day at home. When we picked him up he was the first one off; he ran to us and said "It was great!" He chose Burger King for dinner and talked to us about school all the way there.

Another photo dump, while we wait

I'm still feeling really good; my energy level has been way up for the most part, and I'm still cleaning everything I can. But as of Thursday when I saw my doc I wasn't even starting to dilate yet. I'll be induced at 41 weeks (10 days from now) if nothing changes!

Gabe acting as though vacuuming were a competitive sport... 

We saw Zach's classroom and met his teacher. He starts in a couple days.

He's been enjoying some new crayons he got from his school and making many masterpieces.

39 weeks

I finished sewing a quilt top and hung it in the nursery. Zach made the sign for her door, and we've now got a little spot for books.

Any day now

I'm due two weeks from today. I feel more energetic than I did last week, so I'm viewing each day as an extra opportunity to do stuff with the boys (as well as organize the linen closet and scrub the grout in our shower, you know, stuff like that...). We are taking it one day at a time and participating in as much as we can with how I'm feeling, which should be interesting with some kindergarten orientation stuff coming up in, you guessed it, the next two weeks. Here are some random photos of what we've been up to.

Haircuts

Went to the pool again, for possibly the last time this summer.

Zach is getting good with Legos; this is a "transformer" he built and photographed.

And Zach's coloring and drawing never ceases. There's a video at the bottom of this post to help explain all these "blueprints."

This is the before picture of how bad their little art area got recently. It's been mostly cleaned up, but I have to keep taking away things because if it's within reach it just gets pulled out. They can make this kind of mess in about half an hour.

Zach was playing spy and secretly taking photos from the couch of us making dinner.

The almost-38-weeks photo. She's dropped and is sticking way out.

Zach with blue monkey.

Us at the park. The boys rode bikes around the path. And it's obvious that I'm wearing the same shirt until it gets dirty :)

A gift from Grandpa Larry and Mary, followed shortly by a shipment of craft sticks, pipe cleaners, sea shells, and googly eyes. The boys have been so excited. After a bunch of pipe cleaners got pulled out and bent into who-knows-what, I decided we'd do something a little easier like gluing cotton balls on paper to make sheep. They want to hang them in their sister's room.

We've started making time each evening to supervise the boys cleaning their room and it is SO MUCH more manageable. We have a chore chart (similar to our magnetic calendar) and right now they feed Chloe (mostly Zach), make their beds, clean their room, and get ready for bed to earn allowance each week. They also have to clean each night if they want to earn computer/DS time for the next day.

We are setting up the guest room and are so excited to have company coming over the next few months!