Catching up on life...

So here we are, 2 1/2 months later and I haven't blogged once, but life has been busy, so I feel justified. First of all, just to clarify... I only have 2 kids, Cooper (4 1/2 yrs) and Katelyn (22 months). If you seem some pictures of a 10 yr old Chinese girl, she's been living with us since January and she's now back with her parents. Long story. She may or may not be back in the fall, so this might be the only post with her picture in it. I also haven't been clear enough in these past few posts about the other baby girl. In fact, several of my friends who I haven't seen in a while have emailed me saying "I didn't know you had 3," and of course I was thinking "3? but I only have 2..." until I realized that they're referring to pictures on my blog of my kids and my niece.
She's my niece, Mackenzie...my sister's daughter.
She's 8 months old and 2 inches shorter than Katelyn, and she and Katelyn have been sharing clothes now for a few months. Yes, my daughter is a pygmy. She's still in-between 12-18 month old clothes. I'll have to post a picture sometime this week of the two girls standing next to each other. It's pretty funny. Kate and Kenzie are also the same weight. So, my sister and I have decided that the girls will just share clothes and they'll only need half as many.
Okay, onto what we've been up to lately... In 2 1/2 months Cooper has become quite the swimmer and longboarder. He had an AWESOME wreck on his longboard, or actually it was my longboard. He and Jake went cruising down the trail in Aliante (the master plan community we live in) and as they headed into the tunnel Coop got scared and steered into the tunnel wall to stop. Needless to say, he came out with some roadrash on his face. Yes, he was wearing a helmet, elbow pads, and knee pads. Usually he just
steers into the grass and stops, but apparently he didn't make it to the end of the tunnel or this would've been prevented. Oh well, live and learn. This isn't the best picture, but his face looked pretty cool once it scabbed up. Coop has also been practicing his swimming minus the floaties almost everyday. It's nice that our condo has a pool and my sister who's just a few mintues away has a pool too. We just switch back and forth between the two so we don't get bored. Coop's been working on his front flips (from the high side of my sister's pool) and running front flips. We keep trying to teach him how to dive, but it either ends up in a belly flop or a front flip. I think next year we'll do swimming and diving lessons. The pool is about 6 1/2 feet deep and yesterday Cooper jumped in and touched the bottom of the deep end. Talk about satisfaction, he kept telling Jake he couldn't do it and Jake kept telling him to just try, so he did! He was so happy he kept practicing it over and over again. Last week, Jake took the kids to go swimming and we found out some bad news...the condo pool has had some "vandalism" and they've closed it for 2 weeks until they can get an onsite security guard. Bummer, huh. So we've been heading to my sister's pool instead. She has a saltwater pool, so it's more bouyant than the chlorine pools and I can actually swim with Katelyn on my back. Kate is definitely NOT in for the long haul when we swim. She's usually in for about 45 minutes and she's ready to get out. Lately she's been assuming the lifeguard position...this is what she does when she's done swimming, except she's usually wrapped up in a towel. We've been working on having her go underwater and sending her between my sister and I. I finally got her to float by herself, but she's not a huge fan of it. Hopefully we can get her to do some swimming by herself before summer ends. Swimming lessons will probably be in a couple years for her. My friend Carly has been giving me AWESOME tips on how to teach your kids to swim at home, and it's totally worked so far with both the kids.
Onto our other adventure(s)...last night we went to a putting course at Angel Park. It's a really cute place, with sand traps and water traps or whatever you call it in golfing lingo. I'm not a golfer, but it was fun last night. The kids had a blast and guess what?? Yeah, no one had a camera. For some reason, my sister and I can't seem to remember to bring the camera when we go out. At least we had one a few weeks ago when we went to Spring Mountain Ranch. A friend of mine, Kim, invited me to go there with some other moms and their kids when I first moved to Vegas. Bad news for us, they were in the process of moving out shortly after. Her son and Cooper got along pretty well and I'm sure they would've been great friends if he didn't have to move away. Oh well, maybe by some stroke of luck they'll move back. So we went there with my sister Stephanie, her husband Tim, and their daughter Mackenzie. It was a blast! We brought a little picnic with us and the kids just had fun running around learning to throw a football.
I've gotta get going though. Time for church!! I've made it a goal to NOT be late - especially since I need to sit in the side pews to keep my kids cornered from running off!