Happy Mother's Day

Landon woke up a little early Sunday morning and gathered the other kids to help with a Mother's Day surprise -- breakfast in bed of oatmeal and toast (the only breakfast I ever really eat), confetti hearts through the hallway, and handmade pictures and cards decorating the wall outside my room. Sweet kiddos, and what a great Landon leading the way!

Home Again!

We were still unloading the van yesterday afternoon when Ellie ran out front to ask "Have you seen the backyard?!" She led me through the house and said to her brothers something like, "Inside it's just like oh, a regular house. But look outside and it's a Wonderful World of Springtime!"

We had a wonderful trip to London (more to come) and now we're happy to be back home to a beautiful, warm, and oh-so-green Spring!

Our first afternoon back yesterday was naps, some friend time, grocery shopping, soccer for Landon and a City Council meeting in the evening for me (and a popcorn party with Grammie for the kids).

Today the kids went back to school, I had a quick doctors appointment, and otherwise we're just slowly unpacking, sorting mail, doing laundry and enjoying a quiet day. :)

Train Bike Extreme

a fuzzy phone picture doesn't quite do this great train bike justice, but it's all I could find :)

Jordan has been thinking about getting a tandem bike, so he was excited to borrow one from our friends for a little bit to see what kind of configurations he could come up with. After some tweaking and experimenting, he came up with the perfect extreme train bike: the tandem bike with Landon, then Ellie on a tag-along, Owen on another tag-along, and Porter in the trailer caboose at the back!

Sadly, after a few rides over the week, they were riding downtown and the chain of the tandem bike slipped off. Then kept slipping and slipping if he ever tried to go into the lower gear (or is it higher gear? whichever one you would need to ride hard with a heavy load...) So they were all a stranded downtown without a way to transport all of the bikes home. Another Dad biker stopped by to help and rode them back to his house to try to see what they could do. The kids all had fun running around and playing hide and seek, but they had no luck with the bike. Finally Jordan rode to Al's and left it there and I picked up the whole crew. (And I think we're still waiting on a new part to come in to finish the repair job, sorry Rita for the slow fix!!)

I think Jordan's still excited about the possibility of pedaling the whole family on one bike though!

Glasses, etc.

image here

A couple of weeks ago, Jordan was talking with Ellie about how our vision works and how the brain can automatically join the picture from our right eye with our left eye into one image, etc.  Landon got involved in the conversation and as they continued talking and experimenting, we learned that everything was fuzzy when Landon looked just with his right eye...

So we made an eye appointment and had some hard news. (I probably should have been worried when the eye doctor asked Landon 'Why are you here today?' and Landon answered, "Because I pretty much can't see anything with my right eye." I definitely thought, shouldn't I have known that before today?)

First, Landon definitely needs glasses (not so bad.) Second, he has likely needed glasses his entire life (not so good!). And last (the hard news), since his vision has been so poor in his right eye, but fine in his left,  basically his brain has developed ignoring  whatever it sees in his right eye. Which means at this point, even with a perfect prescription, he still can't see very well at all with that eye.

Doctors have previously thought that treatment for this issue could only be helpful up to age 8. (How did we not know Landon couldn't see well all these years?!)  Recently they've found that treatment can be effective with older children, though it's unlikely that he'll ever recover full vision in that eye, even with glasses.  :(

We're picking up his new glasses today, and there are other treatment options we'll start in a few weeks (Jordan's getting him excited about becoming pirate Landon with an eye patch over his good eye a few hours a day!) So we'll just do whatever we can and hope for the best, but oh man! I wish we'd discovered this sooner!

blossoms

(Ellie Anne, last Spring)

As we drove home this morning, Porter spotted our corner trees all covered with beautiful popcorn-ball blossoms and exclaimed,  "Look at the trees Mom! They're getting so wonderful!"

Also, yesterday Owen and I took a quick walk to the park for our preschool time because Owen was so excited to show me the nest that he'd built with McCall on Monday. Unfortunately, the nest was gone, but he happily made a new one with the new grass clippings the mower had left behind. (And I just loved such a happy little walk with my little boy!) On the way home he stopped at our blossoming trees to pick a few flowers as a gift for me which we carefully arranged around another vase of flowers on the kitchen table.

I love these boys!

lemonade stand/Saturday working day

(and a new lost tooth!)

I'm not sure if it was when Owen was a baby or Porter, but somewhere along the way of new babies + not enough sleep, Jordan started the tradition of Saturday morning movie time. He helps the kids wake up and get situated so quietly while I get to sleep in (hooray for Jordan!) And even though it is not nearly such a desperately needed event these days, I still look forward to it every week!

The only problem has been that it is often hard for the kids to transition from too-much-screen-time to Saturday working time mode. So this week we made an extra effort to help with that transition and to get all of our Saturday jobs done cheerfully-ish. And with some help from Jordan for each of the kids when they reached their breaking down point... everyone did really great. :)



As we finished up, Landon had the lemonade ready and his plans all set for a lemonade stand. He even got out the recipe book and (with just a little help) made some delicious chocolate chip cookies  while Ellie worked hard on decorating their sign.

Cute kiddos and a happy Saturday afternoon!

campfire

We had our first campfire of the year this weekend! Jordan and the boys rode bikes to Green Canyon and picked out a spot for us, while Ellie and I grabbed some dinner and s'mores. We met in this beautiful Spring green spot and had a great little evening!

While Jordan built a fire, the kids explored and collected little shells which turned into currency to rent or purchase each other's secret hideouts. 

As we were packing up, the wind started to blow and just before we made it to the trail to walk back to the van/bikes a storm hit with little hail/rain/snow falling pretty quickly. The younger kids and I were happy to drive back in the cozy van, while Jordan and Landon braved the storm by bike. (Just another reason to be happy for such a short distance between our home and the canyon!)