M - M - M - Milestones!

We'll return to our regularly scheduled Spring Break posts shortly (recaps of our awesome visits with Littlewoods and Smiths still await) but first, I have to share some exciting milestones my boys have experienced this last week.

First off, Will started preschool! He goes to the early childhood learning center preschool through the school district two mornings a week, and he loves it already.

Doesn't he look so grown up with his little backpack?

I was able to drop him off and pick him up his first day, which was apparently waaay more emotional for me than it was for him. He jumped right into the activity and I had to work to get a 'bye' from him.

Thursday morning he rode the (short) bus for the first time, and it was possibly the happiest moment of his life to date. I attribute this somewhat to Grandma Pam gifting him a small toy school bus and a school bus book and getting him all psyched to ride the bus. In fact, when I picked him up from preschool on Tuesday and led him to the car, he was pretty distraught as we passed the line of school buses.

I thought I would be a lot more anxious about sending my baby away on a bus, but I felt totally fine about it, especially since there's an aide who helps the kids get on and buckled in and such.

He was pretty excited to see me when the bus brought him home that day, which was sweet.

Now onto Clyde's exciting news: he's playing soccer this spring!

Here he is at his first practice last week (thanks to Grandma Pam for taking him since Chuck was at work and I had Scouts).

And here he is all geared up for his first game on Saturday morning, isn't he sooo cute?

Getting all warmed up on the field before the game started.

Here's his fan club wishing they were getting all warmed up. Our friend Matt warned us that we'd freeze watching the early Saturday morning games, and he was right!

Getting a pep talk from Dad before he hit the field.

Game time! I don't think there's any way I could describe the game's hilarity that would do it proper justice - just note how many adults are on the field - yep, almost as many as there are players :). There were lots of tears (luckily not from our child), an alarming lack of defense, and Clyde definitely attempted to reposition the ball with his hands . . . twice.

Luckily he redeemed himself by scoring our team's only goal, as kind of seen here.

Unfortunately, the other team had some sort of miniature pro on their team who scored like 25 goals. It was kind of ridiculous. I had to keep elbowing Chuck to stop him from calling out things like, "Hey buddy, we know you can score, let's see you pass!" And that kid played the whole game since only three of their players showed up.

Luckily the snack was cupcakes since it was one of our player's birthdays, so that took some of the sting out of the loss :).

Finally, Chuck's excitement occurred when he went to work today at 6 am instead of 6 pm! Chuck has worked the night shift ever since Will was born three years ago (and actually, for a year when Clyde was a baby as well). He's done really well with it, but staying up all night three-four days a week and then trying to switch back to a 'normal' schedule on your days off really takes a toll after a while.

So he decided to take a slight step down to assistant shift supervisor so that he could take an open day shift. He still works 12-hour shifts, rotating days and every other weekend, but we're very excited to have evenings together as a family and hopefully extend his life expectancy a bit :).

Oh, and technically Quinn isn't one of my boys, but he definitely experience an awesome milestone recently: he proposed to his beautiful girlfriend Eden and she said yes!

He surprised her with a picnic at the Train Depot a couple of weekends ago (she didn't even know he was in Boise!). I was privileged to be part of the plot to get her to the Train Depot without arousing suspicion. Eden's sister Summer was my co-conspirator and we were amazingly convincing. We might even go into business delivering people to surprise situations. . .

Chuck was recruited completely against his will to get the surprise moment on video, and he did very well even though he felt like a creep videotaping their extended hugging :). We then slipped away and watched the proposal from afar (as Will screamed because we wouldn't let him run around!). Congratulations Quinn and Eden!! We're very excited for June 15th!

And there you have all the recent milestones in our family!