Jonah learned a new song at preschool!

It is so cute when Jonah sings and he's not embarrassed at it at all! He sang to me several times, he sang to his sister, he sang to the phone so that Honey and Big Papa could listen and he sang this morning in bed for Papa! He's just the cutest boy on the street!

Miss Laura, his preschool teacher told me that there will be a 4 days in the morning space available but when I called the district preschool office the space was already taken by some kid who was on the waiting list.

Jonah still loves his preschool, he always draws pictures for me! I need to scan in a few and post them!

Swimming

Kids are still doing great in swimming. We go to the pool every day. Jonah even does now much better than a week ago and Olivia is now jumping from the side of the pool into the pool... :-)

Kids rooms are ready!

Finally!

The kid's rooms are more or less done! Little things are still missing like curtains or crown molding but the gros is done and everybody loves their room! It took me 4 days to re-paint Olivia's room due to the dark blue ceiling that's now white again! And the light blue walls are gone, exchanged with a brown that you can find on most walls in our house and the cream colored wall where I stuck the 'tree' on. It really came together good and Olivia loves it.

This is the view out of Olivia's window to the right...

...and the street view

Jonah's Room

Jonah loves his cars stickers! He's such a fan!!! But he loves his room, too, with all the shelves!

The view out of his window to the neighbor's house and our Aspen trees.

Parker Chronicle

Excellent - first 'Parker Chronicle' we get (free weekly newspaper) contained this article about a mountain lion aka Puma to be under someone's porch in east Parker...poor cat needed to be destroyed since she obviously had no fear towards humans any more since this was not the first incident with this cat....I know why I keep my eyes open in the open space or hiking in the mountains...

First swimming lesson for Olivia and Jonah

Olivia and Jonah got their first swimming lesson today at our neighborhood pool. I found a fantastic life saver/swim trainer and she's really awesome with the kids!

I started them in semi-private lessons but will probably hold on of Jonah since he's kind of stubborn in what to do. I think tomorrow Olivia will get a private lesson and I do these things with Jonah, that Jamie did with him today!

Here a short video from Olivia trying to do the crawl

And here's one from Jonah...he can do so much better than that already but of course did not want to. What can you do?

Swimming

Jonah and Olivia's 'swimmimg' improved tremendously since we have our neighborhood pool. Both are diving like crazy, even they can't swim yet. Olivia gets things out of 3.5 feet (1m) deep water and she swims to me in a waddle duddle daddle dog like action.

Now I need to try to get them into swim lessons at this pool. So much cheaper than the recreation center!

Olivia getting a toy from the bottom of the steps. The water is 3.5 feet deep.

Jonah diving in the baby pool. He dives towards the toy for about 3 feet.

Some videos of Jonah's diving.

House pictures!

From you eagerly awaited, here finally some house pictures!

Our garage...this mess is still the current stage. It is full to the top and we need to park the cars outside. Just the hot rod found a spot in the garage (you can actually see the front light peeking out under all the boxes) and is currently used as a shelf...lol

The kitchen - welcome to my mess! But it already looks different, much cleaner and organized...

The official living room/entrance room. This room was just used to store every box and piece of furniture for now...looks much much better now, too! It stored as well kid's toys but we got their playroom mostly done and could empty out the entrance space...

Two new family members...washing machine and dryer that whistle a song when they are done washing/drying! Hilarious!! Just a 'beep' is so 80ies! Yeah, and the red babies were on sale!

The kids' playroom. I will paint it different when I have nothing else to do because the house has a lot light blue to offer...but for now it's good and the kids' toys all found a home - actually, we need to get rid of a few...there's way too many!

Kid's bathroom with light blue tiles and wallpaper. It looks quite cute and the previous owner left us the shower curtain, porcelain animals matching the curtain, bath rugs and towels! At IKEA we got both of the kids a matching white/blue step stool. They love that each of them has their own sink and we have so much more space in this bathroom than in the old Jack-and-Jill one!

The guestroom/my study. No big changes here, just the computer got hooked up at this very desk. So just picture me sitting right in front of it right now.

Olivia's room. I so need to re-paint this room, most likely one wall orange and the other three a cream color. Therefore her room looks quite bare, no shelves up yet, no nothing. Just bed and a side board which the owner left us.

Jonah's room. The old owner painted it new before selling the house,it is a nice sand brown. We need to buy shelving and such for Jonah but he loves the room just the way it looks.

I bought him CARS stickers off of ebay and Jonah loves them! And the stickers really look great!
More pictures of kitchen and the other rooms are to follow later!

School started!

For both Olivia and Jonah school started this week. He goes twice a week in the mornings to preschool at the same school Olivia attends first grade. Poor Olivia has a VERY long day...in my opinion much too long for a 6 year old! School starts for her at 8:40 and pick-up is at 3:30 in the afternoon. The school has a cafeteria where she can buy a meal or I prepare her a lunch that she can eat. But still, a very long day.

So far she's enjoying school. In Broomfield she attended Kindergarten with 17 kids in her class (including her) and now they are 28! And just one t

eacher! No assistance for her! Poor teacher...but I am able to volunteer in Olivia's class and see what she is doing all day....

Jonah loves preschool! Finally he can play all morning and in his class there are just 9 kids, 6 boys, 3 girls. The teacher even has a pet bearded dragon in a terrarium in the class names Spike.

The teacher, Miss Laura, is really nice and just laughs all day. Tomorrow I will post pictures of Olivia's and Jonah's class rooms, so different to when I started school a couple of years back :-)

The school is a tad further away than the one in Broomfield that Olivia attended. The kids rode once the scooters to school and I was not aware that the entire time it got slightly uphill and me running after them got very sweaty. Luckily, on the way back, I could take Olivia's scooter since I forgot to bring a key chain with me to lock her scooter.

One time I drove them to school since it looked like it was going to rain any minute and today we rode our bikes. Luckily I could get my bike out of the cluttered and still messy garage so that we were able to go to school with our bikes. I found a back road going to school where is almost no car traffic and tons of kids ride their bikes or walk to school this way.

The school has a huge playground for all ages and Jonah likes to play there a little bit after we dropped of Dudu in the mornings.

Random things

Parker is so much more beautiful than Broomfield in my opinion. Rolling hills are starting at this end of Denver and everything is so green besides the heat that we have. The drive to Castle Rock to sign up Jonah for preschool is just beautiful and I love it living now down here, missing Broomfield notsomuch :-)

Our right-door neighbors gave us this little treat the weekend we moved in, this was a real nice gesture of them! All the cookies were very yummy and the kids enjoyed them a lot! And I still need to return the tray...oops!

Olivia and Jonah enjoy the pool that is in 5 minutes walking distance. We get our bathing suits on here in the house and walk over there just wrapped in our towels and take a dip into the water. Last week we have been to the pool every single day for like 30 to 45 minutes and Olivia started to dive for animals that she drops into the water (she can dive up to 3.5 feet!) and she learned how to swim, all on her own! She swims/dives like 6 feet to me in a dog paddling action and is not fearful of the water. Every now and then she swallows some water and needs to cough but that only makes her better at diving. When I take the kids alone with me I always make sure that both Jonah and Olivia are safe with either swimming with a noodle or staying there where their feet still can touch the ground.

A lifeguard is there for the entire pool opening hours that run every day from 10 am to 8 pm. The pool has a baby pool and a 25m section, so space enough for everybody!