So what has M been up to lately?

I'm really going to try and do a better job of taking pictures and documenting with a new baby in the house. But it doesn't seem fair to gush all over the baby and not tell about my amazing 4.5-year old.

M is such a big kid now. He is always so curious and has been pretty sweet and helpful with the baby. We've dropped his preschool down to 2 days a week for the term, but I've been taking him for longer days. Even after a full 7+ hour day, he still wants to stay and play. It has also been fun having him at home even if we do need to work on him entertaining himself for a mere hour so I can take a nap with the baby.

We tried to make sure that we did a one-on-one activity each day of spring break. The two biggest highlights included his first snow-skiing outing where the lack of snowplowing didn't keep him from graduating from the conveyor belt to the chair lift


and picking out and then planted flowers in the yard. The flowers thing started on a bike ride to the hardware store where on the way home he declared that he and Papa needed to stop and smell the flowers on the way home. This was followed by a serious demand that we needed flowers in our yard. So, the next day we went to the nursery where he took complete charge of the experience. Thank goodness we had agreed upon 6 pots because he has good, but expensive, taste.
He also has recently built a snowman from all of our late March snow.

His current obsession is anything related to space. He knows far more about space, the solar system, star names, etc than I (or most adults) do.

Mema Ne was kind enough to help this obsession along with a solar system mobile activity when she was here. It turned out pretty well for an activity that really does require fine motor skills beyond his 4 years of age. My favorite part is how he insisted that the non-Saturn gas planets also have rings (made out of construction paper with crayoned circles) added to them. Anyways, M's pretend play has always been fairly grounded in reality so he LOVES flying his new space shuttle around the house and doing flybys of the solar system.