Fall Fun

Fall is my favorite time of year! Here are a few pictures of some of our fall fun. 

While Sam still refuses to ride his Strider bike, he will take it for a walk occasionally. 

Sam did learn to pedal his trike forward with one leg. After he's pushed one pedal forward and moved a few inches, he'd crank the pedal backwards and push with the same foot again, over and over. We're still working on the continual motion pedal. This was a picture of his face when he figured out he could pedal and move forward on his own. This "proud face" is one of my favorites. 

Sam likes to have little tea parties at Grammy and Poppy's house in Colorado Springs. 

Sam also loves helping Poppy put birdseed in the bird feeders. 

Sam's obsession with the moon and shuttle launches and rocket ships continues. In general, he prefers factual books about the moon, space shuttles, tractors, dump trucks, fire engines, etc. than he does story books. Don's mom says Don was the same way. Since even still I prefer my fiction over any non-fiction (I do force myself to read non-fiction at least twice a year. Yes, I had to make it a goal; it's not easy for me), he's clearly inherited Don's factual tastes. 

Sam loved our Tuesday morning visits to the farm. He especially was fascinated with watching Geoff and Sarah dig up the potatoes one beautiful October morning. 

Geoff and Sarah were some of my favorite farm friends. They were funny and sarcastic and we always had the best time joking around together. They also were so nice to Sammy and would play with him while I weighed and collected my weekly veggies. 

Sam was so excited to run through the farm's pumpkin patch.

He insisted on touching every pumpkin in the entire patch and saying "and this pumpkin, and this pumpkin, and this orange one..."

"and this orange one..."

"and this big one..."

I share Sam's love of pumpkins and pumpkin patches. I just can't get enough of them! We went to three last year and three this year. I would have gone to more if I could have. 

Candee, Laurie-Anne, and Staci (my close friends and neighbors) and I started a little once a week hour-long co-op preschool for our kiddos. Sam hated it at first. He refused to let me leave so I stayed with him for the first 4 or 5 weeks. When it was my time to teach, he'd cry and cry. I'd have to distract the other kids with snacks while I gave Sammy a little time out to collect himself. 

He is about 6 months younger than the other kids so he doesn't have the attention span or knowledge that the other kids (particularly Elsie - she's so much more advanced than the boys) have. I was about to give up on the whole thing but Sammy came home one day and said, "That's my letter E, for elephant!" and pointed to a little foam letter E on the fridge he had made at Laurie-Anne's.

A week later, I took him to Candee's and he turned and waved at me and said, "Bye, mom!" I was able to go do my grocery shopping by myself for a whole hour! It was amazing!

Now, he loves preschool and looks forward to it so much each week. He also loves the other kids in the preschool like crazy. After he started liking preschool so much, he also started liking nursery at church since all these kids go to nursery with him. Instead of crying the whole way to nursery like he's done since he was 15 months old, he sprinted out of Sacrament meeting with me chasing after him, dodging people to catch up. Once I finally caught up to him, he had run into the nursery room and when he saw me he said, "Bye, mom!", as happy as can be!

Unfortunately, though, his preschool friends have now moved on to Primary and he's left behind in nursery. Now, he doesn't love nursery as much and asks where Josh, Elsie, and Adam are. It's hard being the youngest of a group of friends. Poor guy. 

We just got back from preschool today and Sam had a great time (and so did I! An hour to myself!). He's learning a lot and points to every letter S he sees and says, "There's an S. S is for Sam!" He is also really working hard on learning to count with his fingers. He practices at meal times. His counting usually sounds like this, "1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10." He really likes 2 and 6 and ignores all the numbers in the middle even though I've heard him count from 1-10 in order a few times. 

We work on the ABCs a lot during meal times. He likes to watch me write the letters out. He also really likes shapes, which we are working on this semester in the co-op. He is pretty talented at tracing them. He draws great circles, fish, and triangles. He still gets confused about his colors (particularly red and green - is he colorblind like my twin brothers!?) but always knows purple, orange, brown, black, and is pretty good with yellow and white. Blue, green, and red are usually all "green". 

His favorite thing right now is having Don draw him tractors, trains, dump trucks, and rocket ships. Don is a really good artist and can sketch things easily and accurately. On the other hand, my sketches are sometime indecipherable. Sam loves drawing time with daddy (mostly at meals and church). We have been motivating him to eat by drawing something and then stopping 'til he takes a bite until today. I talked to the doctor and she said bribing him to eat probably isn't the best idea. Darn. It was working. Eating is our continual challenge with Sammy. He takes forever and would rather go to bed than eat and then cries because he's hungry. He also doesn't want to eat on his own and getting him to stay at the table is a huge struggle. Common 2 year old behavior - I know. :)

Here the kids are preschool at Staci's. I think it is so cute seeing all these little people learning to sit together and work together.

Staci had the kids search for letters with magnifying glasses and then Sam and Adam decided to make silly glasses. They made us laugh and laugh. 

Here are the kiddos one week when I was in charge of teaching. Cuties!

One of Sam's favorite things to do before it got too cold was to go "ride the bumps" with daddy. Don took Sammy in his bike seat over to the business park that is adjacent to our apartment complex one day and took him on the bike trails through the hills.

Sam was in his bike seat on Don's bike and thought going up and down the hills with Don was absolutely hilarious. He asked to go every day after that and Don took him over and over. I went with them a couple times and the sight of Sammy and Don flying up and down these whoop-de-doos made me laugh and laugh. Something about Sam's little Mario Brothers mushroom helmet bobbing up and down was just so funny!

More fall adventures to come!