Triplets 5.0

CET

CTE

The wild west

Time to update what life is like with our 5 year old identical triplets! Life is running smoother than ever due to the boys developing new and honing old skills. Our typical day starts early, about 6:30-7 am. The boys wake up playing and only pause for their morning cereal. If it's a school day, I lay out their clothes and they dress themselves. I only ever have to help them with tough buttons and socks (or finding shoes, ugh!). If we don't have school that day we do our "activities" were we do our Spanish language homeschooling. We practice reading, writing, and math (we spend about one to one and a half hours doing this). Nap time follows, around 1:30-2 pm where we first read from My Book of Bible Stories or Learn From the Great Teacher, then I let them each pick a little Caleb & Sophia video to watch from the JW.org website (this all takes about 20 min before their head hits the pillow). The boys are good little nappers and rarely protest taking naps. I wake them up at 4-4:30 pm (so they take about a 2 hour nap). We still wake up really cranky from naps and I just don't want to put up with that so I let them each pick out something to watch on Netflix to ease them back into life, ha! After about an hour and a half of TV we shut if off. Bedtime is 9 pm-ish, its kind of late but we don't read books at bedtime anymore after we noticed that they weren't paying attention anymore and just playing around (we read at other times of the day now).

Going out with them is a breeze, they stay close and are very well behaved. At restaurants they wait patiently and only get restless if there is a really long wait for food or if I take too long to finish my beer, ha! They don't get cranky if they skip their nap (although we only do this on occasion) so we don't worry about "staying on schedule" like we did when they were younger. They are not social butterfly's, I really have to pull their ears (so to speak) to get them to say hi or reply to someones question. If you are someone they know really well and are comfortable with they'll talk your ears off though. They now enjoy watching "family movies" with us which is what I call non-animated movies we can ALL enjoy. We recently watched The Sandlot and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, the boys loved them both.

The boys play together a ton and its usually "cops and bad guys" or firemen or "hunting for treasures" in the basement (I'm not a fan of this one). When they aren't playing together they build police stations and vehicles with their Lego's (they LOVE Lego's!). They enjoy drawing or coming up with their own little "projects" to do, like for example they made paper money the other day (all their own idea). They are really starting to understand the concept and value of money. Currently they are obsessed with anything law enforcement (police, FBI, swat team, etc) and they recently renewed their love of firemen (they had all but abandoned it). Paw Patrol is one of their favorite shows along with Little Einsteins, Garfield, Daniel Tiger, Rescue Bots, Jake (& Pirates) and Dino Trux.

who needs to earn it when you can just make it!

The boys have good appetites and aren't very picky. They love pasta's, brothy soups, real Mexican street tacos, most fruits and a long list of veggies, chicken and fish (they go to town when ever we have fish). I fried up some smelt once and they even loved the crispy tails, they kept asking "more fish tails?!" I can say for sure now that none of the boys are mirror twins like I had hoped, everyone is right handed. I originally thought they might be since they all have a different cowlick pattern (Thomas has his on the right, Caleb on the left and Eli has two, see my Mirror Twins post) and they also sprouted some teeth on opposite sides of each other. They are still very petite boys, they are of course 5 years old but they are wearing size 4T (and with plenty of room to grow) and size 9 toddler shoes. As of the last 4 years the trend seems to be a size per year.

apple munchers

All are very well behaved in school and their teacher recently commented on how well they write their letters for their age. They play well, not only with each other but with other kids in their class. They have their own little clique of boys that play cops and robbers, their friend Charlie directs who plays the bad guy and then all the boys chase him. They do really well at meetings now and for the most part Phil and I can listen and pay attention to the talks. The boys all have similar physical and intellectual abilities and of course still look identical to most anyone but Phil and I. But it's their personalities that really set them apart. In the next post I will cover each boy's personality, so stay tuned : )

The boys love copying words out of books,
then they show me all proud if I can read what they wrote : )

Some samples

some words are in Spanish

With their class at a pumpkin patch field trip
(their Teacher is on the left and the teachers assistant is on the right).
I am really loving teacher Katie, she has had many great lessons and the boys are learning so much. For example September was "learn about your body" month and they learned how the heart pumps blood and all the different areas of your tongue that can taste bitter, sweet, salty, and sour. It's really cool and real stuff that I would have never thought to teach them!