Is it Spring Yet?

It seems like spring has been a long time coming and we're all going a bit stir crazy. Our warm days are starting to outnumber our cold ones though and we've actually got flowers out now. It's so nice to see the trees budding out. The boys are having their own spring fever and get a little hyper when it's sunny outside, but too cold to go out.

Since they can't go out to play, the boys have taken to hanging from various pieces of furniture. Here's one time that I got it on video.

These pictures were from a couple weeks ago after we went grocery shopping. The boys played under the table on their 'chairs' for almost 40 minutes while I put groceries away and got lunch ready. They played with cars, Grant pretended they were in their own house. I love the starting to play 'pretend' games. It's so funny to listen to the boys play together. They say some really funny things.

Grant's started reading stories to us and to Jacob now too. Jacob's just as excited about books as Grant was at this age. We really love that both boys love to read and be read to. He's reading a book about Lightning McQueen and you can hear Jacob saying 'McQueen' and also Mater, which he says 'May May'.

The 'monkey' gene is staying strong in our family. In lieu of anything else to climb on, Jacob's taken to climbing on the bar on the back of his high chair. He tries to do this on the monkey bars at the playground like he sees Grant doing. He loves the great big tall twisty slide at the park and I have to watch him so close, because he'll head straight for it and start to go up the stairs without me if I'm not right there. He goes down slides without any help, even that big one. I stand there and say 'Ready, set, GO!' and he scoots himself down. Grant didn't do that until well after reaching age two. So there's something to be said for having an older brother to set the example.This is the 'robot' that Grant made one day this week. He came and got me to come and see his robot one morning and this is what he built. I tried to get him to pose with it, but he wouldn't. Pretty impressive robot built with library books, cars and two magnifying glasses.Bedtime has been quite the challenge lately, since we try to put the boys to bed at the same time and in the same room. Here's Jacob and me after the boys' bath (that's why I'm all wet). Jacob's saying 'cheese'. He has to brush his own teeth after we do it for real. If he doesn't get to, there's a tantrum!Here are the boys sitting together brushing their teeeth on the counter. Now the story behind this picture is quite funny. Grant has been having this problem staying in bed at night so he gets out and comes and sits at the top of the stairs until Jared or I hear him and come up to chase him back to bed. Usually we can hear him coming because the floor creaks or he sighs really loud while he's sitting there. This particular night, we'd put him back to bed a couple of times and thought he'd stayed there finally. Then when we came upstairs to go to bed ourselves, we found Grant asleep on the kitchen floor with his blanket. It was too funny. He's done it since then, but on the carpet instead of the hard floor. We don't know what the aversion is to his nice soft bed that he prefers the floor or the couch, but it's really interesting to find him in weird places when we think he's safely in his bed. And no, he's not sleepwalking, he goes to these places before he ever goes to sleep.