All About Duke: How we're prepping for preschool and keeping up with our first baby

A couple of weeks ago I signed Duke up for Preschool 2019-2020! Our sweet 3 year old will be going 3 mornings a week and he is so excited.  Back in October when we went in for Duke's 3 year well child check-up, our pediatrician recommended that we do a speech evaluation for him.  He was very hard to understand and I was pretty much the only person that could fully translate what he was trying to communicate to other people. The key thing that pushed us to do the evaluation (despite the fact that we really trust and value our pediatrician's opinion) was when he said adults will likely take the time to understand what Duke is trying to say, but kids won't, and the last thing we wanted was for him to get left behind because his friends couldn't understand him.

We started speech sessions 2x per week in January and he's been making a lot of progress. One of the main factors in my mind that really affected his overall speech is the fact that he knocked out his front tooth when he was 18 months old.  A lot of sounds are harder for him to make with that gap! Anyway, he's really been improving and it's gotten me exploring other educational resources for him to continue to challenge him and get him excited for school in the fall.

I came across Education.com and they reached out and asked if we'd like to try an activity for Duke.  He's been interested in letters so the tracer worksheet they sent us was absolutely perfect! He still needs a lot of practice but one of his favorite things is doing his homework (anything to feel like a big kid!) and he loved getting out a pencil and sitting with me to practice this worksheet. We've been spending a ton of time outdoors as the weather warms up, so this bug-theme was spot on for us!  Look how cute it is!

Learning fun will be in full bloom with this spring bug-themed word tracer worksheet. Word tracers are a great way for little ones to practice pre-reading skills such as letter formation and word recognition. For even more reading skills practice and learning fun, be sure to check out Education.com.

Now that we are rocking the 3 kid life, I am always on the lookout for creative solutions to keep the bigger boys entertained without always resorting to screen time so I can't wait to check out more activities like this in the future. Duke has already been asking for another one and I know Theo won't be far behind in his quest to be just like big brother.  Other favorites for these two include chalk drawing in the driveway, water beads, and loads of pretend play with tractors, trucks and dinosaurs!

Between mastering potty training (thank the good Lord! By far my least favorite thing...) and seeing him in a school setting during speech class, the past couple months I feel like our first baby has grown up so much! He is just the sweetest big brother with such a caring heart. He's funny and absolutely wild and I love watching him grow into his own little person, although nothing about him is little! He is so tall, weighs in at 43lbs and it's hard to tell how old he is when he's running around with kids that are a couple years older than he is at the park.  He can scale the climbing wall and slide down the fireman's pole BY HIMSELF at the "big park" in town and he's got a pretty good t-ball swing.  He absolutely loves driving his truck all around the neighborhood and helping Dennis and I with any task we'll let him.  He truly embraces his role as the oldest boy in the family and I know Theo and Grayson are lucky to have him looking out for them!

One last thing I don't think I've shared here before was how we finally decided on Grayson's name.  We had it in the running with a few other contenders for months and had actually settled on a different name pretty confidently before changing our minds.  Anyway, I started to ask Duke one day if the baby's name was some of our other choices and with each one he would say "Nope, mom, that's not his name."  When I finally asked him about Grayson, he said "Mom! That's his name!" and I almost burst into tears. It was the sweetest most confident declaration, like somehow my three year old already knew so much about his newest baby brother, I knew we had found the right name for our guy!

Time is certainly flying these days but we are soaking up the few years we still have before full-time school and all the activities dominate our schedules. These boys are simply the best and I don't want to forget all the sweet moments of this season of life. The tantrums and whining? Those we can gloss over ;)

Happy Sunday, friends! Thanks for reading!

-T-