Dish Soap...Not for Dishwashers

Our summer felt that it was officially coming to an end this week.  I spent all day Monday going through all of our curriculum and scheduling out our school days.

It is our goal to keep a much more consistent/predictable and tighter schedule this year.  The boys are both getting new subjects added to their previous years, so we have more to accomplish each day.  I even scheduled a 45 minute break so they can play outside midway through our subjects.  Even Caroline gets to start her curriculum.  With her, we take one book a week and read it, do art projects from it, look at colors/shapes/numbers in it, etc.  Just a little something to get her started.  The boys both liked it when they were 3, so hopefully she'll fall in line and enjoy it, too.

We did take a break from all the school prep to watch the Olympics.  I was excited to show the kids rowing.  I got to share all my 20-year-old rowing knowledge and got them pumped up about it.  The boys were really getting into the races and cheering on the Americans.  Then, as the German men pulled ahead of the U.S. men's boat during a race, Henry spit at the Germans.  So, that just gave us the opportunity to talk about sportsmanlike conduct.  Water polo elicited some chuckles because Henry thought the men were playing in their underwear.

The Olympics inspired the boys to give me another school lesson.  So, Henry drew up all the sports on the white board and planned to tell me how the U.S. was doing in each.  I was glad to see he had a crew team in there.

Water polo up top, rowing at the bottom, you guess the middle.

After the lesson, the school room got shut down.  I hung a "Do Not Enter" sign on the door.  I spent some time in there rearranging the furniture and Todd helped to hang up the white boards and a cursive letter chart.  I want it to be a surprise to them when we begin on the 22nd.  What is amazing is that they will obey these signs.  We have days when it seems like the kids just don't listen at all, but when we pause to think about it, they listen a lot.  If I tell them they can't go in a room, they don't do it.  If I tell them to sit on the stairs (time-out), they do, and they don't get up until I tell them (usually).  If I say they can't eat a certain food (dessert) for whatever reason, they don't eat it.  It's amazing how much they do listen.  Then when I think about if I had to be in their position and not have control over where I could go or what I could eat or anything really, I would be very frustrated.  Yet they do it.

And then there are days where their freedoms increase either because I need them to step up or because they have seized the reins.  Mid-week I was sick.  I spent most of Wednesday in bed, only coming downstairs to quickly make the kids something resembling breakfast/lunch/or dinner and then quickly going back to bed.  When I came down to get Caroline something for breakfast, I saw that the boys had made themselves waffles.  What I really saw was some sort of solid object doused in chocolate syrup.  I looked at it, and in my sick state, thought, "At least I don't have to make them anything.  Their bellies will be full for a little while."  Josiah was very helpful this way.  He was capable of getting food for Henry and himself for the most part.  They weren't going to starve.  Mostly, I had to only care for Caroline.

And then Saturday, Josiah, seizing those reins of independence, came up at 6:30 a.m. to tell me he had done the dishes.  I had heard a lot of clattering down there and figured he had hand-washed some dishes and put them in the drying rack.  That's what it sounded like he was doing.  But Todd got up a few minutes later, went downstairs, and I heard, "Josiah!  What did you do?!!"  He had started the dishwasher.  He had filled it with dish soap and started it.  It had been going long enough for the cup to open and all the soap to fill the dishwasher.  Fortunately, Todd was very good with Josiah and thanked him for trying to be helpful, but dear child, you know not to fill it with dish soap.  This was in fact his third time of filling it with dish soap.  He actually knew it was the wrong soap, but he couldn't open the Cascade, so he filled it anyway.  The dish soap has now been removed from below our kitchen sink.  Hopefully he doesn't feel particularly helpful in the future and use the hand soap.  Meanwhile, Henry was walking behind him saying, "I told him it was the wrong soap."

The boys had their first karate class this week.  Both Henry and Caroline fell asleep on the drive to class.  Henry often doesn't wake up from car ride naps in particularly happy or cooperative moods, so I was a bit worried that he would not want to participate.  We ended up being early that first class, so he was able to wake up a bit slower which helped.  Then he just went right in the gym area.  They loved it.  They both did really well and showed a lot of interest and self-control.  They already knew most of the kids in the class as well as the instructor, which no doubt helped.  At the end of their second class they had to show five perfect punches and they already got a yellow stripe on their belts.  I didn't even realize that was what the instructor was doing or I would have taken a picture.  I just thought he was showing them how to do it correctly since they were new.  I saw him with the tape and just assumed he was showing them what the tape was for.  They were quite taken with the fact that they had a stripe on their belts.  It is a good motivator.

Caroline did well during karate, too, because another little boy from CC was there.  It was Henry's old buddy, Ezra.  He talked to us the whole time and showed us clips from movies on his mom's phone.  We saw about fifty 3-second clips.    

Three seconds tends to be the attention span of little ones at times.  For Bible time one night this week, Caroline was just moving all around the room, climbing all over the boys' beds, looking and touching many things, appearing to all of us around her that she was not paying a bit of attention to the story.  At the end of it, Todd asked her, "Caroline, what did you like best about the Bible story?"  And Caroline, in all of her three-year old wisdom, paused, and then answered, "God."  She shut us down.

The boys spent some time this week making their own Lego kits.  They are always creating new kits, but in the past they would just tell me what the picture on the box would look like.  This time, they actually got a box and drew its cover.

Then they put their kit in bags marked, "1" and "2."

Then they put them together for me.  Josiah would explain what he was doing in between making noises with his mouth the entire time.  He really has a thing with his mouth.  He is always talking, whistling, doing a grunting-tic thing, humming, or making some noise.  Always.  It's his thing.

When Henry explains his Lego kits, he always says, "here's a good safety tip."  It's not necessarily a safety tip, but it is a good tip.

Henry and Caroline have picked up my cold.  I tried to warn them to stay away from me, but they like to snuggle too much.  We've been trying to do calmer, quieter things that don't cause them to cough as much.  So, we dusted off the old Battleship game.  The first game was Caroline against myself.  I begged the boys to help her and Henry finally helped a bit.  After a while the confusion was too great and I had to look at the boards.  As you can see, my board is on the right with the battleship I sunk at the top of the board in the horizontal position, in row E.  Caroline and Henry's board was on the left, with the same battleship now vertical in column 10.  After I sunk the ships, they would pick them up to show me and then move them off to the side.

Then later Josiah and I played, and great minds think alike.  We had both picked our initials.  <Insert Todd rolling his eyes.>  I won because Josiah kept asking me if I had figured out his pattern.

This is our last week of summer break.  Hopefully the kids will feel well enough to have some school playground fun before the public school kids go back and reclaim them.