Summer!

 While it's not officially summer on a real calendar, it is summer in the Keating household as we just finished up our school year this past Wed!  The boys are thrilled to have a break, although I'm not sure if they are as happy as me:)  It is so nice to just have some space and time to not be so busy during our days.  Towards the end of the year, I was starting to feel somewhat overloaded, and so it's such a breath of fresh air to have more time during our days to finish up laundry, clean and make meals - all of which were starting to fall off the wagon recently!  I'm sure by the time we start up for next year, we will all be ready for a routine again, but for now - I'm loving this time to be fairly unstructured.  

To keep them busy, I started a summer reading program for the boys here in our house - I had seen the idea on a blog somewhere and thought it sounded fun.  Yesterday I made up charts for Caleb and Noah with 15 minute blocks of time and told them after 40 blocks got checked (10 hours), they could pick one animal book online to order.  I assumed they would read about an hour a day and at least take 2 weeks or so to hit their marks.  

Well, they took up the challenge!  Not only 48 hours later, they each have about 1 hour of reading to do before they can order a book.  They also both have a running list of animal books they are hoping to score.  I guess I should have made it higher!  I just thought with being outside and heading to the pool (soon!), we wouldn't be inside as much as during the winter months.  It has been super rainy around here the last 2 days, so that played right into their wanting to stay in and read.

I'm starting to think I may be shelling out quite a lot or money for this reading program;)  But it's great seeing them read so much and they love reading animal books too - so I figure it's a win-win.  Because of the baby coming end of Sept, we will also be starting back up with school again on July 1, so they really only have about 5 weeks for the challenge.   We'll see how the rest of summer goes! 

Micah loves looking at books as well as lining up all his cars!

We made gak yesterady morning - it actually was more interesting to the older two than to Micah, which was the opposite of what I expected - still fun though!

Here they are in reading positions;)