Out with the Old, In with the New

The transition from Spring into Summer has brought along a couple of changes for us. Today was Cole's last day of Pre-K at Lakeland Christian Academy. We had a big end of the year party (my last job as room mom - which I loved doing:) and we had to say our goodbye's to everyone. This fall he'll be a kindergardener at Highland Village Elementary. He is growing up so fast. Even as a baby, Cole opened my eyes to just how much children can learn. Cole has such a good memory, the possibilities are endless! I'm so excited to see how he's going to do in the coming years.

Another goodbye we had was to Cole's spring season of baseball (it was his first season of coach pitch). He's always had fun and we're on a great team but Cole really doesn't seem to be into it. He can't stand being in outfield (he's the one kicking the dirt) and he says he doesn't like to sweat (ha! . . . there were a couple of hot game days towards the end). We'll see if he wants to do it again in the fall but in the meantime we want him to tryout for LAC swim team. We'll probably do that after we get back from California so it will be towards the end of July.

Next, we finally found a big boy bed for Cy. He had been ready to be out of his crib - we just hadn't found the right color bed at a reasonable price. So when Daddy put together that big boy bed he went to sleep with a smile on his face. It's been a few weeks now and he hasn't gotten up once (except to turn his closet light on because he wants a night light:).

Another big change we made happened this week. Cole and Chase have shared a room since Chase was just a few weeks old. Well, after night after night of them messing around, getting hurt or constantly getting up to tell us something we decided to seperate them - just for the time being. It's been a really good change: they go to bed easier, bedtime routines are easier (they'll actually listen to the book that I'm reading instead of being distracted by each other), and keeping their rooms clean is a lot easier (for some reason the playroom was always so hard to keep clean!!!).
Chase is so excited to have his own room and of course, he loves the train theme (we kept the train table in there). The only thing we didn't like about seperating them was the bonding time we know that comes along with sharing a room. That's why I said it's just for the time being and Brandon and I decided to let them have a campout in one of their rooms once a week - I think it'll be fun - we'll see . . .

The final change was re-doing the landscaping in the front yard. Here's a picture of our house when we bought it just a little over a year ago.
We wanted to get rid of all the bushes (a lot of them were really prickley and grew like weeds so they were a lot of work to maintain) and we also wanted to make the planters smaller and give them a little more curve.
After a lot of digging, tilling, pulling and rearranging we were finally ready to put in what we wanted. (actually Brandon did all the tilling - I just wanted to look strong:)

We wanted to go with a tropical theme so we put in a pond, two little palm trees, elephant ears, tropical canna's, dwarf lillies and we still need some little flowers to go in front of the pond for some color. On the other side of the house we planted three royal crepe myrtle's (that will be bright pink when they bloom!) and more dwarf lillies. Eeverything right now is really small but I can't wait for it all to bloom and fill in!

So here's the after picture.










That's enough change for now! Now we'll see what the summer holds for us.