Bike Rides and Birthdays

Spring finally came! We're so excited to have flowers blooming! The boys are excited to have nice days to ride bikes and go play outside. We started planting our garden finally and put in peas and potatoes. Grant got to help plan what we're going to grow and he chose corn, so we'll be putting that in before too much longer. This is the bush in the lower yard that blooms first every year.The tree swing is no more. As soon as we got it out of storage this year, we began having fights over turns in the swing. So we bought a little swingset for the boys to play on instead. Grant even helped us put it together and was very excited to get to have his own swingset and slide in our yard. Jacob would probably stay in the swing all day long if there's someone there to push him, but Grant moves quickly from one activity to another. I just noticed that our yard looks very barren and brown. It's actually green everywhere except in this one corner because we have a different kind of grass that grows right here in our yard. The neighbors have the same kind of grass so it all looks a little dead still.Grant learned to climb across the top of the swingset about 10 minutes after we put it up. Jared showed him. He shimmies right across the top and has only fallen once so far.Here he is going back the other way.This is Jacob's version of the same trick. He can't quite get his feet up on the bar like Grant does yet. But he tries hard.He'd rather go down the slide anyway.

Other than the swingset, the boys spend most of their time outside on their bikes. We've been working with Grant to get used to having his training wheels off, but he's convinced he needs them, even though he rides all over without the wheels even touching the ground. These videos are from the first day that we took the training wheels off.

The first time he went down the driveway with Jared holding onto the back of his bike, he was anticipating Jared letting go and practically leapt from the bike as soon as he realized Jared didn't have a hand on the seat anymore. He's a little better now.

This was the best one I thought, because he was riding all by himself and he's telling Jared he's ready to put his training wheels back on. We do go for bike rides with him though, either with both of us on our bikes and pulling Jacob in the trailer, or me walking with Jacob in the stroller and Jared biking with Grant. He loves to go on bike rides 'just like daddy'. He thinks a long bike ride is like a mile or so. Just wait until he gets older. If he only knew...

Jared and I both had birthdays this month. The boys made sure we had cake and ice cream for both days and I even got video of the boys giving daddy his birthday spankings. Luckily mine weren't recorded for posterity.