Eli has learnt to kiss, and is now enjoying giving everyone kisses. Grace is super happy because she loves giving kisses. He gave her a kiss goodbye when she was getting out of the car at school today and she was so excited she went back for another one, “Eli gave me a kiss daddy!”

Eli likes to sit on my equipment box and get a little ride when I come in from work at the end of the day. Today, Grace decided that she wanted to join him. Grace weighs about 20.5kg, and Eli weighs 13.5kg, and the box probably weighs about 5kg – at 39kg suddenly my box was weighing a lot more than usual.

Eli insisted on a hat and sunglasses when we were getting ready to go out yesterday. Grace was determined to take her colouring book. Together, they made a interesting pair…

“Cheese!”

We had a girls and friends get together today, Grace, Emma, Cate, Hannah and all the families. Lots of good time and amazing food, but I think the highlight for Grace and Eli was riding around on the Gibbons’ quad bikes. We were riding around their garden, with Grace pretty much always next in queue, and Eli just kept saying, “More, more!” He does seem to have a love for motorbikes, so he was in his element, and Grace loves anything with a little bit of speed.

Cate is really sweet with Eli and gave him lots of cuddles today

Grace and Eli are getting to a stage where they are happy to go off and potter together, playing in the sand pit, finding some water to pour, jumping on the trampoline, “building” Lego, or whatever it happens to be – little pockets of peaceful time and happy playing.

A little bit of painting fun with mom

Grace has been working on getting the monkey bars right, and yesterday she managed to get across the ones at school all on her own….now just to conquer the ones at home. She can pretty much do them, it is just a matter of overcoming her fear of them being a bit higher than the ones at school.

Grace has been loving doing the new maths work she has been presented – addition. Yesterday morning I went in to see how it works.

First you get an addition card, in this case, 8434 + 1464. This is the basic addition, as there are no carries in the sum. Then you put the numbers out, thousands, hundreds, tens and units. Each is on a different coloured card, and sized so that they lie on top of each other. Then off to the shelf to collect the thousands cubes, hundreds squares, tens beads and unit beads.

Collect each number (one digit at a time) and lay them out next to each other.

Once you have the two numbers as a set, combine and count. Then put down a card for the thousands, hundreds, tens and units.

And that’s how you add up two numbers to get 9898.

Eli jumped for the first time today! He’s been bouncing on the trampoline for a while now, but finally got some air today.

Eli has always enjoyed the “Pound ‘n Roll”, and was having fun giving it a good whack today.