Our little fish

He's finally getting the hang of taking a breath while he is swimming.  This was at the end of his lesson on Wednesday, and he was pretty tired.  We are SO PROUD of our little fish!!

"Love Mom"

Yes, that's what our boy said to me while we were cuddling on the couch.  It wasn't QUITE that clear, but it was obvious what he was saying, especially since I had JUST given him a big hug and told him that I loved him.  Apparently our stress-free summer is helping. 

I don't really have much else to update - swimming is going very well, and Stephen continues to be a super-walker.  We went back to the amusement park (just me and Stephen) on Friday, and he walked the WHOLE time.  We were there for almost FOUR hours!!  And then he did a lot of walking again on Saturday, too.

I didn't want to leave a post without any pictures.  This is Stephen's new "thing."  Well, it's not that new - he's been doing it for a little over a month, but I wanted to share a funny picture of it.  He's so silly!

Notice the dark spot on his collar, though... Stephen spent the last several months of the school year chewing on his collars.  We thought at first that it had to do with his big boy teeth coming in, but then it just continued... evidently, it was stress-related from school, because after being home for a couple of weeks, he's completely stopped doing that.

The Last Week...

 Last Tuesday, we were creamed by another hail storm.  It started around 8:30pm, but Stephen managed to sleep through most of it.  He woke up once, when Erik and I were running around the house, following the sound of broken windows.  There is a fair amount of damage this time, and we'll be getting some new windows and screens on the porch, in addition to the roof.  :-(

 This was the hail.  Some of it was larger than golf balls.  The way it was piled up against our sliding glass door, you would have thought it would have been damaged, but no such luck.  I thought about going out there with some golf clubs, but that's just too dishonest.  We would have liked a new door, though!

 

We will, however, be getting a new window in the dining room...

As well as the master bedroom and 2 other rooms.

To get over the stress, we headed over to our local amusement park a few days later.  We had a GREAT time, and Stephen was a SUPER walker while we were there.  We got season passes, so I think Stephen and I (and sometimes Erik too!) will be spending a lot of time there - maybe even once a week!

 

 

 

Stephen and Erik have been working on a baseball sticker book.  They are working on matching and number identification, and Stephen seems to enjoy it pretty well so far!

 

Our other excitement from the past week has to do with Stephen's speech.  He does not perform well under pressure, so speech therapy really hasn't been going well since he started school.  We hear him saying things occasionally here at home, but NEVER at school.  We are spending the summer focusing on other skills, as well as on using his speech program on the iPad (which is going VERY well, by the way!), and not put any pressure on him to talk with his voice.  Well... Stephen has been chattering up a storm lately!  We really don't understand about 95% of what he is saying, but we are pretty good at guessing, and he gets SO excited when we guess correctly!  It's pretty exciting, and we are looking forward to a BIG summer from our BIG BOY!