I took all three kids (and both bikes) to the park today. I got some footage of both kids in action. They are both still learning.  

We found this tricycle at the thrift store for $5 last night! I had been praying about and looking for a used tricycle for the past two weeks, ever since I realized that the new bicycle we purchased for Avril for her birthday was a bit too heavy for her legs to push at her size. At first, I thought that if we practiced with her bike enough, she'd get stronger and be able to handle it, but after a while it became clear that her little legs and body need another winter of growth before they could handle a bike that size. I realized I had spent as much money as we had to spend on a bike.. on a bike that was too big and so I was stuck. What could I do?

I was afraid Avril wouldn't have anything to ride on or even have a stroller to ride in (now that her baby sister is here) till she was big enough to handle that bike the next summer.  Would she just have to toddle behind us all summer long while I pushed the baby in the stroller and her big sister Norah rode her bike way ahead?

I had been looking on Craigslist and I saw these Kettler tricycles. I knew that they were going for over $100 used (way too much for us to spend). So when I walked into the thrift store and saw one of them by the entrance last night, I went over to it directly. I checked the tag and I could hardly believe the price.  It was so affordable, it would have been wrong not to buy it! We put Avril on it to see how well she would do pushing it and she rode forward with real ease.  At that, our whole family broke into cheers right in the store. We had all seen just how hard it had been for her to get any forward motion on her bike and we were all sad over her bike-predicament.

I give God the glory for these kinds of coincidences in my life. He's a good father to me and to my children. In perfect time, Avril has a bike just her size and she's ridden it all around our streets with ease twice today already.

We always participate in our library's summer reading program, but we never win any of the awesome prizes. Apart from the bag of free goodies we get for signing up for the program in the first place, we have never seen any reward for so many hours and hours of reading and diligently keeping track of it all. So we've decided to create our own summer reading program this year with rewards we agree upon as we go. The grand prize for 100 hours of reading will be a trip to Coco Key. And I'm taking Norah to Toys R' Us to get some ideas for the smaller prizes that she'll get along the way for 10, 25, 50 and 75 hours of reading. To keep track of Norah's hours, I used clip art to make the sheet of clocks you can see in the photo above. I can print it over and over again till we get to one hundred hours. Under my close supervision, I will let Norah color in the amount of minutes she reads till she fills up one hour on a clock and then goes on to the next. We think this custom reading program of ours will be lots of fun. Norah wants to start counting her minutes and getting credit for her reading right away and I think I'll let her.

Chilled watermelon on the deck stairs.

We're trying to get back into the swing of things with home school, so Norah has been doing just the basics everyday: Reading (Sonlight's Readers 4-5), Writing (Zaner-Bloser 2C) and Arithmetic (Math-U-See's Beta). But we are getting so far ahead in those three subjects at this point, I think we'll take another three subjects like Spelling, Science and History and do those for a week or two, till we can get back to the point where we can do every subject in one day again. 

Norah always begs to do reading first, but we save it till the end because Norah will often get so into a book she won't want to stop after just one chapter.  Like yesterday with Henry and Ribsy, she read the entire book in only a few hours. So she started the new book (and may well finish), Encyclopedia Brown, today. 

Big smile!

The girls helped Grandma Karen make her pineapple casserole. Dwayne told me it was a recipe he really liked growing up, so I asked Mom to bring it with her so I could learn how to make it for him again and again in the future.