Out With the Old

Caroline started her new swimming lessons and on the first day they gave her a challenge.  She had already learned how to swim freestyle, front flip at the wall, and streamline back into freestyle.  Now it was backstroke, backflip at the wall, streamline to backstroke.  Backflips were much tougher than expected, but it's good to have something to work on.  

The kids spent many days this week playing with their neighbor friend.  It was very loud.  I need a quiet sound-proof room to recuperate.  

At some point this spring, Henry asked if the kids could have another late night where they could do whatever they wanted for however long they wanted (within reason...).  He conveniently remembered I said it would be better to do it over the summer when there was no need to get up early and have brain function the next day.  So that is what they did this Friday night.  They stayed up til midnight, which was their goal.  They played video games until their minds were dull.  Caroline wisely slept-in until 8:45 the next morning.  Not the boys.  They woke at their usual early times.  Caroline did, however, wake up older.  She recently mentioned getting rid of some of her little kid things that she no longer played with.  She wanted to put books on her bookshelf, not toys.  Saturday was the day she was motivated to clean house.  I casually pointed to a spot on her floor and told to put everything she wanted to get rid of in that spot.  An hour later she called me back to her room.  There sat 85% of her known possessions in the donate pile.  Apparently, she's not the sentimental type.  When I sat to go through it, we had to keep shooing Josiah out because he would have saved everything.  The cheap stuff got tossed.  Some was given to friends.  Some will go to Goodwill.  Some I saved should she get sentimental in the future.  After going through her giant pile, we continued cleaning out her room to prep for painting.  Today she wanted to spackle all the holes herself.  Tomorrow we start on her top color.  

While we spackled the walls, Henry took panoramas of Caroline's room.  Josiah purposefully moved with the camera shot and gave himself ridiculously long arms much to his delight.  

Caroline also earned a t-shirt at church this morning for reciting all the books of the Bible.  She had learned them in years' past for Awana, but spent this week refreshing her memory so the songs would come easily.  Henry's aiming to get a t-shirt next week.  

Henry did have a day out with Todd on Saturday.  He is moving up to the student ministry at church, so they had a conversation about that while enjoying burritos.  It is really hard to believe he's going into 6th grade.  

Tomorrow we are starting school-lite.  Just math and reading to get it going.  Josiah will add Latin into the mix because we did not do a good job of keeping up with his flashcards and declensions and all that fun stuff over the summer.  

And Benson enjoyed his day of destroying a box.  By the end he had torn it all to shreds and wore himself out.