Eclectic Concert Series

Henry had a rough start to his week.  He woke up Monday morning with a fever and a stomach bug. 

He took several naps throughout the day and laid around a lot.  He was feeling better at dinner time and was not too happy that I wouldn't let him eat teriyaki chicken with the rest of us.  He kept asking for the torquoise chicken, the tepenyaki chicken, and a few other T-with-random-syllables chicken.  He got applesauce, bread, and soup.  By bedtime his fever had spiked again, but he made it through the night without incident and woke up the next morning in nearly full energy.  Unfortunately, he passed his fever on to me and by Wednesday morning, I felt like a Mack truck had hit me.  The kids were very helpful to keep me in bed (so they wouldn't have to do school).  They actually really were very helpful.  They made me a Get Well card and they told me that if I ever needed them, I should set the timer on my phone for one second so it would go off right away and they'd come get me whatever I needed.  I finally forced myself out of bed mid-morning and once up, I felt a lot better.  They still got the day off of school.  Thankfully, no one else got sick and we're all doing well now.

For whatever reason, Friday turned out to be a really rough day.  The type of day when you look back on it and think, Not my proudest moment.  Being the bad day that it was, Caroline fell asleep on the drive to karate.  She slept for a good 45 minutes and she did not wake up joyful and rested.  She was a bit on the cranky side.  She tore right into me, "You ruined my life."
Me - How did I ruin it?  What did I do?
C - There are so many things.
E - Can you name just one so we can talk about it and try to solve it?
C - No.

I'm pretty sure this is a sign that her teenage years are going to be a breeze.

We had Go Western Night at Awana. Our little gunslingers dressed up accordingly.  It was also Awana Store, so they came home with all their little plastic toys that they love so much.  They each had about 163 points to spend.  Henry used 70 points to buy a full size Snickers bar.  I was pretty happy for that.  Consumables are always nice.  You don't step on them on the floor later.


The boys had their Derby Car Work Day at church Saturday morning.  We had all planned on going this year, but Caroline ended up sleeping in until 9 a.m. on Saturday!!  So the boys left without us.  Since Josiah doesn't forget anything, they went to Whataburger for breakfast beforehand, because Josiah reminded Todd that they have gone there every year on this particular day.  Tradition!  They built good cars this year.  Todd said they were both getting first and second place in the trial runs.  We never make it to the actual Derby because it's always on an Awana night, so I'm glad they got some success at the trials.

While the boys were away, Caroline and I ran up to the library to get our books on hold.  While  driving back home, she read most of this Pip book to me!  She spelled out a few "big" words, but it was so exciting to hear her read it.  She's coming along so well.  She even tried to read a phone text over Todd's shoulder today.
   

The neighborhood kids were at their father's house this weekend, so it was much quieter that it has been lately.  Saturday afternoon left us slightly bored, so we watched the classic, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.  The kids all liked it, although as soon as Henry saw the giant scorpion, he let me know I'd have to sit outside his door for him to go to bed that night.  Todd and I reminisced at all the old fashioned stuff like corded phones, the 1989 VW Golf, lots of wallpaper, and big, fat TVs.

I stayed home from church today, just to give the sickness a bit more time to get out of my body.  Henry graciously said he'd stay home with me.  Since our church live streams their services, and since it was 9:30 in the morning, we got our provisions ready.  We had some coffee, some spaghetti, and some Jesus. 

We have our CC family presentation coming up this week.  For the presentation, we're going to pretend to play Pictionary, but have the pictures already drawn.  The audience has to guess which picture belongs to which family member.  The kids each chose three of their favorite things.  One of Henry's favorite things was to read, so he drew a picture of himself reading a book.  He wrote War and Peace on the book, but then he was asking me about how long the book was and information about Tolstoy.  We looked it up online and saw that in its original publication it was 1,225 pages.  Henry (in all seriousness) said, 'Wow.  I bet it took a long time to illustrate that."  Oh, Henry.  You're so cute.

This evening we were invited to an eclectic concert series.  It started off with the "Whoa" song from The Greatest Showman, followed by KISS's Rock and Roll All Night, which transitioned into Louis Armstrong's What A Wonderful World.  They had a finale of a made-up song which included bits of KISS's Shout It Out Loud.  There was guitar throwing and head banging and fake-trumpet blowing.  We only recorded the second half of the concert, because once Josiah broke out as Louis Armstrong, I had to get his "raspy" voice on video.  We have quite the performers.

As I write this, the kids are all asleep in their own beds and we're cautiously hoping for an all-night-long sleep.  We started the movie Jumanji this afternoon, but didn't finish it.  We had paused for dinner and then the neighborhood kids came back and wanted to play for a bit this evening.  So, we watched a scary-for-a-kid movie and stopped halfway through when it's still scary and there hasn't been a resolution.  I'm pretty sure Henry will be running to our bed before the morning. 
This coming week will be filled with all the usual school and activities, and most likely afternoons with the neighbors.

Red Belt-Black Stripe

Josiah received the game, Jumanji, from his cousins.  We had fun playing it, mainly because there's a rhino figure that gets to block other players from moving forward.  That brought a lot of entertainment.  Todd made lots of "rhino" noises when he moved it around, but his "rhino" was eerily reminiscent of an elephant trumpeting.  He and I went back and forth blocking each other.  Josiah won the first game, which everyone was happy for because we were all about to die.  We've been playing board games nearly every night we're home and it's been a lot of fun.  Caroline typically plays with the remaining game pieces or she's our "timer girl" - she flips over the sand timers.  She likes her role.  We've enjoyed the game time.

It is good to get some family time in with the board games, because the kids are all about the neighbor kids right now.  The second they get home from school they are ringing our doorbell.  It's like our lives just all of a sudden changed.  Nearly every afternoon and hours upon hours on the weekends, they're playing together.  We've been trying to do one hour at the neighbor's house/one hour at our house and back and forth.  The kids have spent so many hours away lately, that our house is cleaner than it's ever been.  There have been amazing benefits to neighbor friends, and the kids really love running back and forth between houses, but it just takes some getting used to for the parental units.  We knew friends would be the favored people eventually, but it's come a bit sooner than expected.  Still, I'm loving the cleaner house. 

We have been learning about the Romans in school lately.  The ancient Greeks had philosophy down, but the Romans made a lot of cool things.  We read about their roads and aqueducts and then watched a few videos about them so the kids could actually see what we were talking about.  After lots of observation, we made an aqueduct of our own using the materials we had on hand - our marble maze pieces.  It was a good exercise because the kids were forced to work together to get it to work properly.  They were proud of their outcome, but there were quite a few arguments as to who could put the water (marble) down and when, but they had a good time with it.

Josiah has been waiting for months and months to get his next karate belt invitation.  He finally got it this week and had his test on Friday night.  Todd went and said he did really well.  He was proud of his progress.  Henry and Caroline are not as keen to do karate anymore, but Josiah says he wants to work his way up to black belt.  This picture is Josiah desperately looking out the window for the other student to come for the belt test.

Josiah worked with Mr. Thomas throughout his test and even Todd came home and said, "Mr. Thomas is amazing." We wish Mr. Thomas could come live with us. He is just an amazing instructor - incredibly encouraging, but still having high expectations.




That was our week! Short & sweet. School, activities, and tons of neighbor fun. 

Double Digits!

I have been reading devotionals via email from a pastor that Todd and I both loved in Virginia.  In one of the devotionals, he said that he's been reading a "Proverb a day" for years.  There are 31 Proverbs, so he reads the corresponding Proverb for that day of the month.  I thought this would be a good thing to incorporate into our school morning.  So, Monday, January 7th we read Proverbs 7, entitled, The Wiles of the Harlot.  Here's a snippet (vs. 18-19), "I have sprinkled my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. 'Come, let us drink our fill of love until morning; Let us delight ourselves with caresses. For my husband is not at home, he has gone on a long journey.'"  After I read all the way to the end (because who wanted to end in the middle?!!), Henry said, "What was that about?"  Yeah, we're going to read from a different book of the Bible now. 

The kids have been on cloud nine this week because they met our new neighbors.  They have a boy, nine, and a girl, six.  They are obsessed about playing with them after school lets out and Caroline has been a little put out that the girl has both ballet and gymnastics and it takes up so many of the evenings when they should be playing together.  It was sad the first day we met, because the boy said right off the bat, "my parents are divorced.  I hate going back and forth."  He kept asking our kids if their parents were divorced, then if their grandparents were divorced.  It sounds like it was a recent thing.  Poor guy.  It has been great to have neighborhood kids, but in the newness of it all, it's been a bit obsessive.  At least  the desire to hang out seems to be mutual.  The minute we drove in from church today, they were at our house.  At our driveway, I told them that we had to have lunch and change clothes and then the kids would be out.  No less than five minutes later there was a knock on the door.  Were we done yet?  No.  Not yet.  (There were three more knocks before all our kids made it outside.)  Todd and I have gotten a lot of yard work done just so we can be out front and keep an eye on everyone.  At the rate the kids want to hang out, we may win Yard of the Month.

Caroline has had a big week in school.  She read her Active A book for the first time.  She did well, and it was tough because there are so many words for her.  It's a lot of words when you're sounding everything out!  She also did a word search in school.  Every time she found a word she'd say, "I'm so awesome. Woo hoo, I'm the best."  No confidence problems around here.

Caroline has also graduated from the sock on her hand to just having her thumb taped up at night.  We went this route because it was much cooler.  She is still saying how much she wants to suck her thumb.  It's a hard habit to break, but she's doing so well.  I keep telling her, This is hard, YES!, but you can do hard things.  Even if she watches TV during the day, she doesn't put it in her mouth, whereas before it'd be in there immediately.  (We also use bandaids during the day to keep it covered up if necessary.)  I have noticed her not sucking it in the car either, which used to be an always-sort-of-thing.  It's pretty exciting to finally break this habit. (for me at least, not so much for her)

Mid-week, our church had their annual Winter Blast with the snow and sledding, hot dogs and s'mores.  I realized I've turned into an old curmudgeon because lots of kids kept taking snow from the side wall of the slide.  Either their parents weren't stopping them or they were off by themselves unsupervised.  One middle school girl had a giant chunk in her hands (seriously giant), so I (slightly matter-of-factly/slightly un-Christlike) said, If you take the wall of the slide off, you don't have a slide anymore.  None of the other parents were stopping their kids.  The workers were yelling down at the top of the slide for the kids to stop taking the snow.  I told another group of kids where to find the snow to make snowballs (literally adjacent to the slide - look to your left).  Nobody listened.  Knowing I had no more kind words to say (if I ever did), I had to remove myself from the sledding line because it was driving me nuts.  Our kids had fun, however.

Caroline had two rounds of two s'mores.  When she asked to go back to make more, she was quite put out that I would not allow a fifth.  This year they had a train ride, too.  The kids loved the train ride, so much so that every picture was incredibly blurry.

Then the best part of the week came.  This guy turned double digits!

It is so hard to believe we have a ten-year-old. 

He wanted his presents to be put under the Christmas tree, so we had left it up for him.  Foot Loops for breakfast (which will get the song Footloose stuck in your head all day long).  For his birthday, Josiah wanted to spend the day with his friend, Bobby.  So Bobby's dad dropped him off on his way to work and they really did spend the entire day together.  We went on a field trip with our CC campus to a science class about Pompeii, hung out at the museum, ate at Which Wich, and then we came home for them to have some free time together.  Grandad & Nana got Josiah beyblades and Bobby gifted him the Arena, so they played beyblade battles for 2.5 hours.  I almost suggested they do something different, but that would have been projecting what I considered boring (after 2.5 hrs!), so I stayed mum.

Eventually they did come out of their intense battling when the new neighbor boy came home from school and asked to play.  We went outside for some street races, both cycling and running. 

Henry takes the lead.

We ended the night by going to Awana and eating cake afterwards.  When the cake was done we all collapsed from exhaustion.

Josiah got a (fake) Lego Titanic.  It turned out pretty cool.

Besides beyblades, he also got a Junior Trivial Pursuit game from Grandma & Grandpa that we've played the last two nights.  We've already had to set rules to handicap Todd.  Apparently, he's smarter than the rest of us.  I do call foul on some of the questions, though.  Todd had the question, "What company did Steve Jobs found?" And then it gave choices!  My question for the Science & Nature category was, "What technique did Spock use to render his opponents helpless?"  Answer?  "The Vulcan nerve pinch."  Spock. From Star Trek.  Not Science, Not Nature.

Todd has enjoyed passing down his love for the band KISS to the kids.  The kids may make Todd come to hate KISS, or at least a few of their songs.  They sing, repeatedly, the one lyric, I want to rock-and-roll all night and party every day.  One day this week Henry informed us all, I know four KISS songs. to which Josiah replied, They only have four songs.  Smile to my face, knife to Todd's heart.

10!!!

Abolishing Thumb Sucking, Take 3

Well, it didn't rain on New Year's Eve, which meant fireworks for hours upon hours.  The kids went to bed like normal, and stayed asleep which amazed us because the fireworks were on the street directly next to their windows.  Finally at midnight both Caroline and Henry woke up because it was so ridiculously loud.  We rang in the new year together, watched a bit of the fireworks show, thanked the Lord that it had rained the day before and everything was still damp so our roof wouldn't catch fire, and went to bed.

The morning of January 1st, Josiah, Mr. Washboard Abs himself, decided that he was going to get in shape for 2019.  He ran laps around the house, climbed up and down the stairs, did push-ups, jumping jacks, and burpees.  I was tired just looking at him.  Henry joined in for some of it, too.


For the new year, we are still working on Caroline's thumb sucking.  We've now started wrapping her hand in a sock at night.  Because it makes her hand hot, she holds a small ice pack.  The first night she got out of bed and said she really needed to suck her thumb because she needed a flavor in her mouth.  I told her if she could make it through the month of January we could go to Monkey Joe's.  Every morning she gets to put a sticker on the calendar if she made it through the night without sucking her thumb.  I hope our calendar is full come January 31st.

Flash photography was not appreciated at 10pm

She's actually done better than I expected.  The sock at night, along with the ice pack, seems to work really well.  She even (excitedly) ran to get the ice pack one night in anticipation.  It's during the day that is proving hard.  She keeps telling me how difficult it is to not put it in her mouth.  She also said that she doesn't know what to do now when she's bored.  Before when she was bored, she would suck her thumb and that would cure her boredom.  Now she's just bored.  We have put a bandaid on her thumb during the day to prevent boredom/unconscious/preoccupied sucking.  Caroline has also been milking the process.  Besides Monkey Joe's at the end of the month, she asked for an extra treat every day if she doesn't suck her thumb.  Sure.  We're still trying to get rid of Halloween candy around here, so that was an easy yes.  We'll see what else she has up her sleeve.  She has been going to bed just fine now, which is one hurdle.

We have also instituted new jobs for the new year to help improve parental sanity (namely mine).  After dinner, one child will wipe down the table, one will sweep the floor, and the third will clean the bathroom sink downstairs (because we had to think of a third job).  Jobs rotate weekly.  It has definitely helped me to see most of the crumbs picked up after dinner.  Ideally they'll learn to eat over their plate and prevent some of the mess.  One can be hopeful. 

Ellen's Game of Games has come back on TV.  The kids love it and the ridiculousness of the games.  Usually the contestants have to answer some sort of trivia question.  One person was asked how many teaspoons in a tablespoon.  They guessed 2.  Henry, deadpan, said, "Three.  You need to go back to CC."

The kids have worked on their derby cars for Boys of Iron.  It always seems like a last minute thing to get them painted, so we started early this year.  Josiah wanted to do his in colored pencils and he chose Captain America as his theme.  Actually it was Captain Amrica.  We're working on spelling.

Henry chose solid colors at the moment.  His is taking several days to paint due to different layers of coloring.  We'll get a picture next week.  Caroline got a car this year, too.  She sanded and put primer on it, but hasn't picked out a design just yet.

The kids regaled us with a play about football.  Finally a play Henry could get into.  He'd hike the ball to Josiah and once Josiah threw him the ball, they'd be on opposing teams and Josiah would run to tackle Henry.  Caroline played the part of the mascot, who danced and jumped around the field during the middle of plays.  The vast majority of pictures ended up very blurry.

The kids also messed with the filters on my phone.

It school news, we've been doing botany this year and just before break we learned about photosynthesis.  Our book suggested that we get a plant in every room of our house to clean the air.  So, we took it to heart and bought a sturdy, hard-to-kill plant at Lowes and we've already plucked off two leaves to root for new plants.  The kids have really liked botany and it's been a good study.  I think we've all learned a lot about plants this year.

For church today, the kids wore their uniforms.  Three-piece suit.  Red Izod shirt/khaki shorts/knee socks.  Fancy dress.  (Henry literally wears this outfit every Sunday, no matter what temperature it is outside.  He tells me his socks keep him warm.)

That was our week.  It is hard to believe that Three-Piece-Suit is turning double digits next week!