Happy birthday dear Lukey, and other stuff...

It's been awhile so I'm including various pictures from the last month. Our church has a parent-child "date night", so I got to take Luke out. We went to the church and they had lots of sweet treats for dessert, and they took your picture and the kids made a picture frame to decorate. So I included a picture of Luke and I before our first big date; there was one picture of Luke with a more normal grin, but this one definitely is more of his real personality and better than the eyes squinted shut shot. There are several of the boys coloring/painting at the table. Luke likes to draw or color (which is really just more scribbling on the page, he is able to do more than just scribble, but his preference is to simply "scribble-scrabble" as he calls it), so Ben must follow suit. I bought Ben some special crayons at Christmas that are more difficult for him to eat, so that's what the toy-looking things are that Ben is rubbing on the paper. Well, Luke quickly decided this day that he wanted to paint, and so Ben was quickly unhappy with his crayons and wanted a paintbrush too. At first, I was just going to let Ben rub a dry brush, or at the most a dipped in water only brush, but then I thought why not just let Ben paint too? He enjoyed it and if you can see the painting at all, he did it all by himself! The only help I gave was when he occasionally tried to paint off the paper (oh, and I did put the paint on the brush for him, but the painting itself was all him!)

Next, but definitely not least, today is Luke's birthday! My oldest baby is now 4. We got him a bike for his birthday, his poor knees were bumping the handle bars of his tricycle. He did so good, and it's not just mommy bragging good, it's he can really ride a bike good. At first, he would push back on the pedals on accident and bring himself to a halt, but he figured out pretty quick to keep pushing forward. I still had to help him out to get up the driveway into the garage, and occasionally to get his feet pedaling again, but he almost instantaneously took off down the cul-de-sac. I even had to jog a few times to keep up with him! Aaron said he had one of those moments that are forever burned in your memory as he watched me and Luke take off down the cul-de-sac with him riding his bike, and thinking how big Luke looked and wondering how is already big enough to be doing this, riding a bike?!?

He's always been such a motor driven child, I've predicted he will be quite the athlete. I guess we'll soon find out because today was also our first soccer practice! We were late, because I pulled one of my rare, but true, airhead moments and had the time wrong. We were out riding our bike and my friend Andria called (whose son Braden is one of Luke's best friends, also pictured) and said "where are you?" I instantly knew I had messed up and realized I had the time wrong, so we missed the first 25 minutes of practice, but I still got a couple of pics. He was so excited he had to put his soccer uniform on when we got home and he wore it the rest of the evening.

Well, there will be birthday party pictures coming soon (party is this coming weekend), and I will include more soccer pictures after he plays a few games.

Happy birthday Lukey!