A Cursive Kind of a Week

We started our week thanking Todd for Laboring for us with a big IHOP breakfast.  Josiah has been wanting to go to IHOP ever since they built it.  So, we went, we ate, and we don't have to go back.  Josiah liked his meal the best.  He got five silver dollar pancakes and Todd encouraged him to try a different flavored syrup with each pancake.  So he did.  Henry said his had too much chocolate.

After spending some time in a sugar/syrup/carb-overload coma we finally got some schoolwork done.  Todd took Caroline to the store which helped immensely as the boys do not like to do schoolwork with Todd home.  Todd home = vacation time.

We had our family presentation at CC this week.  It is a super simple presentation of our family.  After introducing us and saying what Todd did for a living, the kids each said their name and how they like to spend their time.  I cannot remember all of what Josiah said, except that he spoke really well and he said he liked to do cursive.  (!!)  Henry said he liked arts and crafts, and Legos.  Caroline liked to play on playgrounds.  Henry has gotten the cursive bug and wanted to scrap his Manuscript book for the more mature Cursive book.  Seeing how he still needs the Manuscript book, Josiah took it upon himself to teach Henry cursive.  He wrote up lots of papers of all the names of our family members, one letter per line.  He even had the small arrows showing how to form the letters.  Then a little later in the week, Josiah received the letter he had mailed himself.  Part of his Grammar assignment was to mail himself a letter.  Well, Josiah addressed it to himself as the assignment said, but inside it was a cursive kit he made for Henry.

Cursive.  Who knew we'd still be all gung-ho about cursive writing.

Science has also been a favorite subject this week.  We do science three days a week and each science lesson has an experiment/activity attached to it.  One of the lessons this week had us make a representation of Earth's core, mantle, and crust with a gumball (we used a Skittle), a marshmallow, and melted chocolate.

The boys are really into science now.  We were also supposed to make a glacier another day, but we needed to get sand first.  We're finding out that sand is a key ingredient in our earth science-ish experiments.  We're trying to keep a lot of the learning hands-on so we do as many activities as we can with our science and history lessons.

All of our fall activities began this week.  WAM began at our church which is worship arts ministry.  All three kids were able to participate in it.  Josiah got to pick a track and he chose "banners."  His group is making/decorating/painting banners to go with the final presentation in December.  He does that for half the time and then practices all the songs for the other half.  Henry's kindergarten group just does the songs and some sort of active thing where they play music through different mediums.  Caroline and I are in the 3's class.  We had Caroline and 34 of her closest friends this past week.  Having two slightly loud and crazy boys of our own, I thought this particular class of 35 3-year-olds went really well.  They were fairly quiet and listened to the story and most of them paid attention to the songs.  I was quite impressed.  The other leader, who mentioned she had two very low-key girls, thought it was chaos.  Perspective.

The next day we were exhausted.  Caroline napped, Henry kept saying he was tired.  And I thought I wouldn't be able to make it past 2:30 p.m. without a nap.

The next night we did it again as Awana started back up.  Caroline was excited this year because she got to participate and is now officially a Cubbie.  She doesn't get her book, bag, and vest until next week, so we'll have pictures then.  Henry was excited to move up to Sparks with Josiah.  Josiah is now the big man in the Sparks room which is for K-2nd graders.  Henry had to give up his beloved snacks as the Sparks have to make it the whole hour and fifty minutes without eating a single thing.  You should have seen them when they got home.  They all ate liked they hadn't had dinner or anything.

Saturday morning, Henry lost another tooth.  (The one on the bottom left.)  He has showed me how he eats everything in the back of his mouth now.  He loves his Bugs Bunny carrots (long type), so it hasn't changed his diet a whole lot.

We also made it to the library, which always gives us at least a couple of good reading days.  Henry has been reading books to Caroline at her request.  There's nothing better than seeing one child read to another.  It was a Level 2 reader, so Henry was proud to move up in his reading abilities.

There has also been a lot of Lego building this week.  Josiah made several trips downstairs one day to show me the movie he had made with his Legos.  These are all his Ninjago characters and he had me watch his 20 minute movie that I think he made up as he went.  He usually has Sequels to everything he does, so we'll see if we get Parts 2, 3, & 4 this week.

Today was Patriot Day, so the kids wore red, white, and blue to church to honor those who lost their lives on 9/11.  Todd and I reminisced about where we were when it all occured.  I was actually driving north on I-95 towards Northern Virginia when I kept hearing the events as they happened on the radio.  I saw more State Trooper cars/SUVs than I knew existed pass by on the shoulder as the regular traffic crawled along.  It was unbelievable to hear it.  I knew two people who died - one in the Twin Towers and one on the plane that hit the Pentagon.  We want our kids to know the importance of the day and remember it.

Caroline wanted a picture with just her, but was upset the boys got their picture done first, so she still wanted the picture, but this was the only expression she would give me....