Caden - Catching Up

Caden is currently 4 years old, but he will be turning five on May 1st - which he is extremely excited about. He is a genius with numbers - really - I attended his preschool class one day and when the teacher was going through numbers, she had to ask Caden not to participate so that the other kids could have a chance. When the other kids did not know the answer, she would ask Caden and he always knew the answer immediately. This surprised me a little bit, because I am not sure what Melissa or I have done to help him in this area. He is also learning to read and is getting really good at this too. He just finished the first set of books from preschool (the red set according to Caden) and the teacher had him stand up and everyone clapped for him (he is the first one to finish). Caden is typically really shy, but for some reason he was ok with this - he was even excited to tell us all about it.

Right now he is in love with Legos - we went to Legoland in Carlsbad, CA (near San Diego) in October 2006 and he has not stopped playing with them since then. He is pretty good at building cars, space ships, trucks, and everything else you can imagine. Both grandparents have a pretty good collection of legos as well, so when he is bored with the legos at our house, he asks to go over to their house so he can play with the 'better' legos. In addition to legos, Caden also loves dinosaurs (which is the theme for his birthday party coming up). He has a pretty good memory and can usually tell me all about some of the dinosaurs. Melissa has been taking Caden and Kate down to the Dinosaur museum at Thanksgiving point and they all love it (including Melissa).

Caden loves having a little sister. For the most part he has been a good big brother, but lately, there seems to be a little more competition between them. Kate is not shy like Caden, so she is usually more daring than him and he doesn't like it.

Caden loves to have us read to him lately, so we read to him and Kate as much as we can. Over the past few months, we got a little lazy and allowed him to watch too much tv, so now we are enforcing a "one show per day" rule. Lately he has chosen "Night at the Museum" for his show every day. He has the show memorized and is pretty good at including lines from the show in daily conversation - which is pretty funny.

Caden is playing soccer again this season and he seems to have fun. He is pretty much afraid of the ball, but every once in a while he won't pay attention and the ball will come to him without him knowing it - at which point he usually will try to kick the ball, though he pays no attention to which direction he kicks it. We signed him up for the social side, which has helped a lot. He enjoys playing with his soccer friends now and looks forward to games and practices.