Lately...

I've been posting lots of pictures of things we've been doing, but haven't posted much on just what's going on lately.
Yesterday Jake decided several times on his own to walk 10 or 15 steps!  Of course, as soon as Buck got home, he decided otherwise, but other people saw it...I swear!  He has also turned into a rather jealous boy.  It surprises me for a 4th child, but Ellie likes to sit in my lap, and when he sees that he crawls over and pushes her out forcefully.  He usually tags on some nasty sounding "screams", sort of like, "Take that!" too.  He has started to raise his hands up to ask to get up.  I thought he was just getting into football, but that wasn't it.
Eve has started reading pretty well!  She doesn't have much confidence, so doesn't like to read for long periods of time, but she's really good at it.  Lately she and I butt heads a lot...mostly because we've got pretty hard heads to butt.  She knows where my buttons are and really likes to push them, but at the end of the day, she's really tied to me at the hip.  She didn't want to play soccer in the spring, but agreed to as long as I coach.  That should be entertaining.
Maybe this isn't appropriate for the blog.  Maybe one day John will read it and want to wring my neck.  A few weekends ago he made my heart sink a little.  We were watching football, and for the first time he expressed that he liked a girl for her looks.  Erin Andrews is cute, I'll give him that.  He didn't want me to know.  It was supposed to be a chat just between him and Buck.  On the one hand I'm just not ready for him to grow up like that.  On the other hand, I know I should be celebrating that he is expressing how God made him to be, and that he shares that special bond with Buck.  Slow down, little man!  Fortunately he spends most of his time building awesome stuff with legos or with his nose buried in some sort of science or history book.  He loves learning things and building things.
Ellie is getting "big enough" for lots of things these days.  She's big enough to sign up for soccer, almost big enough for a booster seat, and big enough to strip the sheets off all the beds for me!  Now that's a neat trick!