Spring.....a time to blossom

We had a beautiful weekend here in the Northeast and got to spend a great deal of time outdoors. I LOVE this time of year. The time when the world seems to go from black and white to color again. I am so enjoying how the landscape is coming back to life. While Owen was napping, Ella and I walked around our property looking at all the buds on the trees and all the perennials peeking there head back out of the ground.

The plum trees.......

The Cherry tree......

The Hydrangeas.......

The Redbuds......

Yes, I'm quite sure my neighbors were thinking I was nuts as I walked around taking pictures of our trees and bushes! This just makes me SOOO excited!!!

The kids were equally excited to get some much needed outdoor play. For Owen, it meant his first baseball lesson!! Ella, has by now, become a little pro--she's worked real hard last year and can actually hit pretty well now!

All ready with her pink bat and batting helmet

Look at that swing!

Next Ella decided to practice her pitching skills and poor Brian had to wear the pink helmet for his at bat!! He's such a good Barbie playing, pink hat wearing, tea party attending kind of dad!!

LOVE that face!!! I had uploaded a closeup of Owen as well and it somehow disappeared as I was adding text----UGH!!!

Now, it's Owen's turn. Dad is showing him how to hit. He had just woken up from his nap and wasn't quite awake yet when we threw him into the game!

Ella and Owen watch as J takes a swing (notice them holding hands!!!). Luckily for J, Ella didn't make him wear the pink batting helmet!

Enough baseball, on to the other fun backyard stuff........like driving the car......

or hanging upside down on the swing set.....

climbing UP the slide.....

or just picking Dandelions with your brother or sister :)

Flowers and trees aren't the only things starting to bloom.... so is Owen. I have noticed so many changes in the short week and a half that Owen has joined the hearing world. Right after he was fitted with his hearing aids, I began to notice him making new sounds. In addition to the new sounds, his vocalizations have seemed to change. I can't explain it, he just sounds different. The few words that he was able to repeat now sound just a little bit clearer, and he can now say "dada" as of a couple days ago. He is also understanding a lot more when we talk to him, and is starting to appropriately respond to a couple of verbal commands without cues such as gestures. It can still be quite frustrating, for everyone involved, when we cannot explain things to him and he doesn't understand what is going on. Such as when we need to break from playing outside and go in to eat. It would make things a lot easier on us, especially him, if we could explain that we need to go in for a little while and can come back out later. In a situation like that we get a lot of crying and understandably so. All in time :)

School is still going very well. It is a long day for him, but he really does seem to be enjoying it. He has yet to give me a hard time getting on the bus in the morning....thank God....and gets off the bus in the afternoon smiling. His speech therapist is back from her conference, so speech is in full swing starting this week. I am so excited about that! His speech therapist says he's so much fun to work with and is doing well. Wish I could fast forward six months to take a little peak at how he'll be doing then!

***Fellow bloggers....can someone please tell me why I sometimes can't get my post to publish with the spaces between the paragraphs that I DID put there????? I keep going back and adding then again, and the AGAIN it's publishes without the spaces??????