The older 3 kids

On April 23rd, Nikolas asked to have the training wheels removed from his bike, and he zoomed down the street as I stood next to him.  I got nervous thinking he would fall and skin himself, especially as he turned to the side to look at me as he took off, but he actually controlled his balance.  Then he came back up the hill, in perfect control.  The kid is amazing at sports.  When I only think how many times I had to try until I learned and how much darker the skin on my knees was from the rest because of falling and scraping it over and over again. 
Go Nikolas!

On a different note, he still finds us all boring and annoying because we always give him homework to do, but when he is motivated by some kind of reward (dessert, going somewhere, getting a toy or a right to watch a movie....) he does a beautiful job.  When he was trying to impress his friend Yarden when they did homework at her place, he wrote a page and a half long essay in meticulously neat handwriting, the kind I've never seen from him before.  He adds and subtracts in his head carrying over 10 without counting one-by-one or using his fingers (8+9); deals with ones, tens and hundreds (20+30, 100+200...), and understands simple multiplication too (5*3).

Sonja is reading short words and spelling them out for us.  Michael is just starting to do the same, even though he is the one who gets most excited about books and spends a lot of time going through the pages.
They don't pay attention when we read books to them before bedtime though, and they just use stories to procrastinate going to bed.

Both Sonja and Michael are doing great at piano.  They read notes, they understand their duration, left vs. right hand and are just starting to use both hands simultaneously as of the last class.
These two are also very imaginative.  We just need to throw an idea to them (to imagine (Cinderella's) dwarfs, ninjas, spiderman, animals, and they will act out a story together.

All three recently started going to gymnastics.  Nikolas was so excited from the first day when he realized he was as good or better than the rest of the boys who have been doing this for months already, so that the next time he told me he had butterflies in his stomach from the excitement about going to the class!
Sonja and Michael are not afraid of flipping over the bar (like one of the parallel bars in gymnastics)--they actually like it now!