Kaiden's Hawk Award

Snow in September?  Really?!?  Yep, it snowed 9/28/19.
Kaiden won the Hawk Award!  He got his award at the Assembly in front of the entire school.  Way to go Kaiden!  

Misc September

Piper sleeping with Kaiden.  She tends to bed hop between Connor and Kaiden.
My boys in twin PJ's.  Kaiden devowering a cucumber.  Soccer. 

 Kaiden exploring 2 parks in Couer d'Alene with me while we wait for Connor's reading lesson to be done with his tutor.  Connor and I on a dinner date at Meltz Extreme Grilled Cheese after his lesson.  OMG that place is good!! We loved it.

 

soccer

Both boys took Spring Soccer this year.  Connor liked it.  Kaiden started off liking it, but then fizzled out towards the end of the season.  He was also very upset his team color was purple.  He had a fit about wearing his purple jersey for the first game.  It so happened that Connor's team color was also purple.  Kaiden's coach (Meg and Chad) were really sweet.  They had twin boys on the team.  Kaiden's best friend, Landry was also on the team.  And bonus they had matching soccer cleats, which they thought was cool.  Connor's coach wasn't our favorite.  She did a lot of yelling.

Mowing and Fred

Kaiden's bottom tooth is finally coming in.  We also decided that it was time Connor started mowing the yard.  His friend, Raheem mows their yard, so we decided to let Connor try it out.  This was his only experience this year... but he'll get more practice next summer!

Kaiden is a cucumber eating fool.  This kid could (and sometimes does) eat cucumbers at every meal.

 At the beginning of the school year we found a tutor in Couer d'Alene that is part of the Linda-Mood Bell Program, which specializes in reading.  Our tutor's name is Kristin Nelson and she has changed the way Connor reads!  We noticed a dramatic change within the first few sessions.  Connor went from hating to read and sounding out everything- even small words to actually loving reading and reading fluently without sounding out words.  I can't believe how much progress he's made in such a short time!  He's been in reading programs at school and we practice every single day- including reading every day in the summer and nothing seemed to help.  We tried flash cards, reading out loud, reading to himself, easy books, chapter books, etc...  I'm so glad we found Kristin!  Nothing helped until he started working with her.  We  started off with driving Connor to Couer d'Alene for a 3-4 hour session on Saturday and Sunday and then trying to do a 1 hour session on-line every day during the week.  We quickly found out that it was just too hard to do the 1 hour sessions during the week with soccer and homework.  So, we continued with the 3-4 hours every Saturday and Sunday.  While the weather was nice we drove him to her house for the lessons in person... then I would find something to do with Kaiden while he had his lesson.  After a month of doing this we switched to doing 3 hours Saturday and Sunday on-line through zoom (similar to skype so they can see each other and the material).  Connor loves doing his lessons.  He feels more confident in his reading and he now loves to read.  He's moved onto harder chapter books and he's rocking them!

 Fred.  Well, Fred is a tagged pigeon that flew into our house and injured his wing.  Being the animal loving family that we are... we took Fred in and nursed him back to health.  Connor and I went to the store to buy him some bird food, which he seemed to love.  He found a nice dry, safe spot under Jason's 4 wheeler to live.  Every day me and the boys would leave a new scoop of food for him.  Once he started to heal up we noticed him on the roof of our house and by our front door.  Then Jason saw the neighbor cat chase Fred and Fred flew just fine.  That's when we realized that Fred was completely healed and being a free-loader.  We stopped giving him free meals and he finally decided to venture on and fly away.  Safe travels Fred.  Watch out for houses!