Friday, January 25, 2013

Happy 5th, Asher!

Sooo... There were other pictures of Asher's birthday, but the card filled up so Brian did a quick dowload onto my computer.  Somehow it's all gone though.  Everything since Christmas, basically.  So that's sad. :-(  Hopefully it can be found.
Anyway, Asher had a great birthday.  He invited two friends (that's all he wanted.  And one of them is Brennan's age/friend.) and we had a casual "party" at Papa's Pizza.  The manager was very nice, getting us a great table and even giving Asher a T-shirt, even though I hadn't bought any sort of party package.  Later that evening Grandma and Grandma Templeman came over for present-opening and cake.
Whenever someone asked Asher how old he is now, he'd reply, "5 and a half!"  I think we've got him straightened out, more or less, now.

 
Asher is a hilarious individual.  On the one hand, he is so very serious, but he also chats everyone's ear off and loves being funny.  The other day he approached Brian and I upset because Brennan doesn't believe him that Transformers are real.  He explained that he knows they're real, because he's seen some of them in car form in real life.  He was really rather mad at Brennan about it, lol.
I could never explain the funny things Asher constantly says.  I can't do them justice.  It makes me sad to know I'll forget all these things and can't adequately capture them.
Asher still loves playing in room - loudly!  I've tried to record it, but it's just not the same.  You hear some of the bangs as he crashes into the door and walls in the video below, but in person it's quite a thing to hear!  All over the house - even when I'm in the shower! - I always know when Asher's playing in his room.
Asher enjoys, and is quite good at, video games like Minecraft and especially the Lego games (Star Wars, Batman) on Playstation.  He spends his day alternating between movies and games and playing in his room, switching off about every half hour. I worry about my current lack of time limits, but I honestly can't complain about a lack of exercise or using his imagination.  He's rather bored while all his friends are in school.  And there's no yard to send him to even if it were warm enough.  So I guess until summer and then school he gets to just do his thing.  Anyway, the point I was originally going for is that he is amazing good at games.  Not like a prodigy, but better than me.  I suspected my children would learn to play these things, but I never thought I'd see them at 3 and 4 doing it!  Even Hollyn enjoys grabbing the remote and thinking she's playing games on the TV!  Man this world we live in.
Anyway..  Asher is a pleasure to have in our family and I'm excited to experience 5-year-old Asher, seeing as how much fun 4-year-old Asher was.

***********************************************************************
Update on Hollyn

Oh Holly-boo, so many fun things, mixed with so many less-than-fun things about this age!  She's 21 months old now and still getting into EVERYTHING.  Well, that may be lessening, actually.  She's moving into just MOST things. :-)  She loves to help though.  With anything.  But there are some specific chores that she now expects to be able to do, and doesn't like it much if you don't let her.  For laundry, she loves to help me get the clothes out of the dryer, and then she'll drag the basket out of the laundry room for me and over into the living room.  She'll then come back to help load the dryer, and MUST be the one to shut the dryer door when we're done.  She loves separating the clean clothes and thinking she's actually putting each item into the correct person's basket.  And she loves to take her basket into her room, and put all the clothes into the dresser.
She loves baths and showers and if you mention either word she races up the stairs, complaining all the way if you aren't following her.  I have to spell them now, but Brennan always says them outloud to confirm he got it. :-)
And she loves to empty the dishwasher.  For a while now she's been a helper there, handing people the items for them to put away. But the other day I wasn't in the mood to do that chore, so I told her she could do it herself.  She looked at me like, "really?" and got busy.  Video below shows it.  So now that's her thing.  She just does it herself. (Since she began helping months ago, I started removing the sharp things first thing, even if the rest gets left for later.)  And surprisingly, she'll put things where they actually go.  She memorized my kitchen!

 



One of Hollyn's best attributes is that she smiles at us a LOT, and it's always in.your.face.  She'll climb up onto your lap, cock her head to the side and just smile nice and big. Then cock her head to the other side, going back and forth until the game is done.  She loves silly faces, and getting people to interact with her.  She often comes up behind one of her brothers and grabs them around the waist.  They then start walking with her as the caboose and both get a big kick out of it.
She's saying more and more things and it's blowing my and Brian's minds how fast she's growing up all of a sudden.  She understands SO much, and get's her own concepts across so well.  It's terrible!  Why won't kids stay little for much, much longer?  Or at least, why don't we have the ability to remember everything like this with perfect clarity?  The hardest part is knowing you forget most of these things as they slowly move into new stages that feel like they were always in.

No comments: