Lemonade stand

Leo's best friend's mom organized an amazing lemonade stand for the kids today. They live at a perfect corner for this. Tons of people on bikes, foot, skates and cars stopped to have lemonade.

In addition to lemonade, the kids handed out free cookies and Leo made his free samples. Ever since Hawaii's farmer's markets, Leo has been in love with the idea of free samples. He makes them up at home and wrote 'Free samples' on his chalkboard and has been begging us to let him do a lemonade stand. Some of his free samples have consisted of bread dipped in green sugar water - you can imagine how eager we were to set up a stand for this. Having a whole lot of kids is a lot more compelling to potential customers than just one so we had 11 kids out here. Leo's free samples today consisted of black olives stuffed with parmesan cheese - he set up on this cooler (he's in red)

We had other classmates stop by and join the party. Nancy made big batches of pina coladas which helped the parents deal with the heat.

The kids did great. They got really good at pouring the lemonade and serving the customers. Making change was hard for them but they got a lot of tips which eliminated having to make change. You'd think 11 kids was too many to run a stand, but it all worked great. They all got turns doing different part of the sale and a bunch of kids eventually took over Leo's olive stuffing effort.

They pulled in some $35 in less than two hours. We ran out of lemonade which was fine since they all wanted to play anyway.

First soccer game

Today was a really full day for us. Leo had his first soccer game. He didn't get to play too much - one quarter playing defense when his team's offense happened to be really good. He didn't really seem to care all that much and was more interested in eating the snacks. But he said he enjoyed it.

Reading!

This summer I tried to read with Leo. It was like pulling teeth. He'd read a few words and get tired. It was so frustrating. Even stuff that I knew he could read, he would just be too tired to try. I was worried that a lack of perseverance would not do him well in life.

Well, I guess I was bit vocal about it, or maybe it was when Paul told Leo last week that I was worried about his lack of reading, but this week Leo is reading! He brings short books home every day and is reading them easily. The books are categorized by level of difficulty and he actually picked a hard book to bring home today. He said he picked it out because it was challenging and he'd probably need all week to read it. Being a huge bookworm myself, I'm just so psyched he's becoming a reader!

More than life itself

I told Leo in a fit of maternal frenzy, "I love you more than life itself!"

He thought about it and smiled and said, "Well, since I came from life, then it's a tie!"

Independence!

Thanks to Paul, Leo is finally becoming independent! We can now tell him to take a shower and he will strip, turn on the water, wash his hair and body, dry off and get dressed! It's amazing! To me, at least, the coddler, who secretly wants to rock him to sleep.

First day of First grade!

School started today in Boulder! It was Leo's first day of first grade. Here he is standing in line to go in. His new teacher is a guy, Mr. Nieman. We're all excited because Mr. Nieman likes robots and science. Leo rode his bike to school for the first time (last year he was on a third wheel trailer bike) after spending the weekend practicing. Apparently there are no Legos in first grade. But they get to check out two books from the library at a time which is nice. It all went fine and Leo's best friend Claudia is in his class which is great. He still seems to be playing mostly with girls - after school he was running around the playground, trailed by a pack of girls. All in all, we are all very hopeful about the new school year!