If you take a boy to a Renaissance Faire, chance are ...

he'll want a wooden weapon.

If you buy him a wooden weapon, he'll walk through the crowd fighting pretend enemies with no thought for the real people he's almost whacking.

If you take his weapon away, he won't understand. Not even when you promise to give it back when you get back to the campsite.

When you get back to the campsite and give the weapon back, he'll immediately commence "fighting" with his brothers in slow motion.

You'll have to tell him to get away from the van. 

Repeatedly.

He'll smash his brother's fingers or poke him in the eye or whack him in the head.

Repeatedly.

You'll take the weapons away and tell him to play something else for a while. 

He won't know what to play.

You'll suggest he play pioneers in the woods. And chances are, if he agrees ...

he'll need a wooden axe to chop trees down.

Look Ma, no training wheels!

As soon as Luke got the bikes out, the boys wanted the training wheels off. Benny was riding in no time, even starting himself off pretty easily. Alex had outgrown his smaller bike, so he got a bigger bike. He's finding it easier to balance on a bike that fits him, and all three the boys are just flying around the driveway now!

My sons,

Today you chose to get dressed in your matching shirts from Grandma and Grandpa, because you like each other and want to be like each other. You're buddies, playmates, built-in best friends. It's not always like this, of course. Sometimes you fight and argue and cry that you're getting left out. More often than not, though, you find life more fun with one or both of your brothers by your side.

I want this for you, this friendship of the heart as well as kinship of blood. When you grow up, life is lonely sometimes. I can't help but think that having your brothers be your friends, too, will help a little.

So love each other. Choose kind words. Encourage each other to do right, to do better, to have fun, to explore life together. My mama's heart says to keep each other safe, too, as you do all that.

                                                           Love,
                                                           Your sentimental mama

Happy Birthday, Ben!

Benny is FOUR now! We had his family party Saturday, and he was thrilled to finally be able to open some presents. (Although he thought we should just move on to the ones under the tree after he finished the birthday gifts!)

I think he likes it!

"Optimus Prime! That's amazing!"

"This is just what I've been wanting! A drill like Daddy's!"

He wanted a monster cake, and he showed us his monster face, too.

This one isn't so much a birthday picture, although that's Optimus Prime in truck mode. But this picture makes me laugh - Benny is there all neatly buttoned up in his church shirt (this was after lunch Sunday) while Alex has his shirt OFF and has changed into sweat pants. It just shows their personalities so well!

Benny and Dad coming in from getting birthday donuts and a square balloon.

Ben named his balloon "Happy Birthday Benny" and talked to it all day. It's hard to believe that he's four already, but they insist on continuing to grow up!

Sense of style

I'm trying to pull together pictures to do a calendar for a Christmas gift (act surprised, okay Mom and Dad?), and I'm finding so many pictures I should have posted and didn't because ... well, life gets in the way. But this one just makes me laugh - Ben decided he should have a necklace, and made himself one out of paperclips. See how nicely he matched it to his shirt?

October Highlights - Benny

Benny is a busy boy, like most almost-four-year-olds. He has been listening in on most of Alex's Five-in-a-Row stories and tagging along for the activities, but he's also been busy building forts, playing with the Playmobil toys, making Zoob guys, and throwing all the dress-up toys on the floor. He's quite frequently a cowboy, complete with his trusty steed, but sometimes he decides to be a super hero just to change things up a bit. He's also not napping except for maybe once a week, so he's been a regular ray of sunshine the last couple of weeks.

After Alex used the counters to add up Ping's relatives, Ben tested which would float.

Marker! Glue! Paper and scissors! This is heaven!

Woohoo! Sour!

Ben challenges me and keeps me busy, but I can't imagine life without him! I'm kinda glad we have two more years before he's officially in school.

Nap transitions, camera woes, and excuses

That time between when a boy needs a nap every day and when he doesn't need one at all can be so hard ... lots of crankiness and tears, and it can be so hard to stay awake when you sit down in the evening to watch a little TV!

Note Benny's mismatched socks. 

 We were going to have a picture of Alex writing his list of subjects to complete on the white board (like I do Ethan's). He was sitting on top of his desk, shirtless, and had "REED" written down. I grabbed my camera ... and the battery was dead. I sent Ethan for his camera (our old one) ... and its battery was dead. Add to that an SD card that just wouldn't read any more because it was so old, and we're left with the one picture I snapped tonight. (And a recharged battery and a new SD card, both too late for the cute pictures this week!)

So I haven't gotten several week-in-review posts up, any of our vacation pictures, or anything else posted. We have been busy, but there's also been some post-vacation funk going on. Fighting colds, fighting children, and unmotivated mamas add up to just the essentials getting done. That does include school, but no pictures of this week and I'm too lazy to look back over our records and list all that we've done. I have high hopes for next week, though!

Week in Review, September 4-7

I managed to take absolutely no pictures this week. Zero. Not even the ones of Alex and Ben listening to frog books with their stuffed or rubber frogs. So I'm just going to hit a few highlights of the week, and hopefully we'll manage a more thorough review next week.

Ethan completed his regularly scheduled work for the three r's. He made a Venn diagram comparing marshes and ponds as part of his geography assignments, categorized characteristics of angiosperms and gymnosperms in science, and read all of the frog books I got for Alex's theme this week. He also finished Heart of a Samurai and was thrilled to get Swallowdale from the library.

Alex actually enjoyed one or two of his workbook pages and suffered through the rest. He explored the math concepts of patterning, measuring, and counting, wrote me lots of notes, teleported and time-traveled with his own Trio creations, and learned about frogs and toads for science. The highlight of that theme was probably the frog egg ice pops he made with me. At the end of the week, he sat down to tell me about what he remembered about frogs. This is unprompted his narration:

They can jump. 

They have smooth skin.

Some have round fingers. They are tree frogs.

Some have webbed feet.

Some have claws for digging.

Toads have bumpy skin.

They're tadpoles when they're babies.

Baby frogs have legs and a tail and are called froglets. 

Frogs have slime.

At this point, I asked him if he remembered why frogs have slime. He thought for a moment, then said, "Because they're mostly for boys?" 

Ben tried to get Alex to run away from me so he could play pirates, listened in on most of our frog books, built lincoln log houses, teleported and time-traveled with Alex, and declined to wear a shirt most days.

They all started back at AWANA with our church, loved spending the weekend with their cousins, and had a blast at the Central Wisconsin Children's Museum with some friends.

Week in review, August 27-31

We had another great week of school! I tweaked our schedule a bit this last weekend, and it helped Alex and Ben's day move along a little more smoothly. Ethan continued with his AWESOME attitude, even {imagine me falling over right here} doing schoolwork in the evenings just because he wanted to!

Not that the week was perfect or entirely conflict-free ... you can probably imagine how well the day went that started out like this:

Jumping games aside, Ethan:

*completed five lessons in CLE 500, moving him into the second Light Unit. (We started this earlier this summer, so he's a little bit ahead of where he would be otherwise.)
*completed six lessons in Winning with Writing
*completed three lessons in Growing with Grammar (and likes only having grammar scheduled three times a week!)
*completed three lessons in The World of Plants - among other things, he gave a short presentation on why plants are important in industry, dug up grass to inspect the roots, and constructed a model plant cell (no pictures of any of that because I tend to forget to take them.)
*continued work on Geography through Literature. This week he studied ponds and sawmills, did more mapping, completed vocabulary work from Paddle to the Sea, and more.
*continued with Wordly Wise vocabulary
*blew through three more spelling lists with Sequential Spelling
*studied Georgia and New Jersey in his state study

*read lots of books. I forgot to mention this last week, but we're not doing a formal reading or literature program, he's just reading a lot and talking to us about it. This week his favorites that he finished were Swallows and Amazons and Rakkety Tam. He was thrilled to find out that Swallows and Amazons was the first in a series, declaring it "one of the best books I've ever read." Rakkety Tam is another book in the Redwall series, a long-standing favorite of his.

Alex:

*worked on fun thinking skills games with Mom - his favorite this week was Trucky.
*studied the water cycle. We read lots of books and also did several fun activities and experiments, including making a water cycle bracelet with glow-in-the-dark beads, making it rain, seeing water vapor on a mirror, and watching food coloring move through shaving cream to simulate rain coming through a cloud.

For some reason, this is the only picture I got of Alex other than the jumping ones.

As you can see, that last experiment was mostly a fun way to make a mess. I saw it here, and if you click through to the link you can see that they made lovely prints with the colored shaving cream with they were done. My boys? Made - and I quote - "swamp water". Alex narrated the entire water cycle to me at the end of the week, though, so it would seem he did learn something!
*played more math games
*once again turned his nose up at anything that came in workbook form.

Ben:

 
*made faces
*played with little cars
*colored a couple of pictures
*stuck popsicle sticks in slots in a box
*saved the world several times (I know this because he went around yelling, "Don't worry! I'll save you!")
*wore his shoes on the wrong feet on purpose

Together, they

*completed five more lessons in The Bible Study Guide for All Ages. They seem to be enjoying this, and I'm a little surprised at the amount of detail Alex (and even Ben) are recalling.
*played some strange game where they couldn't step on the floor of the school room (during school), so they had to hop around from crate to pillow to chair to crate and back again
*didn't wear shirts and showed me their muscles

First Day of School, 2012

Today was our first day of school for the year! This year, for the first time, we officially have two students. Ethan is in 5th grade (and boy, does that seem impossible!) and Alex is in kindergarten. I not only remembered to make signs for them, remembered to actually take the pictures, and blogged about it, all on the same day! You may take that as proof that miracles still happen. You will notice, though, that my writing didn't show up very well on their little signs, so I've added captions to the photos.

Ethan, 10yo, 5th grade, 2012

Alex, 5yo, kindergarten, 2012

Ben, 3yo, play school, 2012

Our first day went pretty well. Hopefully that's an indication of how well our year is going to go!

Ooblek revisited

We made a summer bucket list at the beginning of the summer. The first thing the boys wanted to do was make more ooblek. 

Benny played with his so long his hands were smurf-like blue when he was done!

Ethan opted not to color his, but Alex and Ben both added food coloring to theirs.

They left this terrific mess and went outside to play. It took me a loooong time to clean up, mostly because I kept getting distracted and playing with it myself. It really is a fascinating substance!

Bubber

Before Christmas this year, I saw a box of really cool-looking Bubber on sale. I did a little research on the messy factor, and everything I read said it was cleaner than play dough. Since we use play-dough all the time and that's well within my tolerance for a mess, we went ahead and bought the boys some.

The reviews that said it was cleaner than play dough?

They LIED.



Do you see all those tiny little pieces that break off? Bubber is really an interesting sensory experience, but it crumbles. A lot.


It may not help that the boys think that they need animals, men, play dough tools, AND kitchen tools with which to experiment.


Maybe it's too harsh to say the reviews lied. Maybe my kids are just weird.


Huh. Yep, that might be it after all.

Just because it made me laugh ...

Ah, spring!

When a {very} young man's thoughts turn to .... well, piracy.

And chasing your brothers while defending your "ship" ...

... and wearing helmets askew ...

... and utterly mischievous smiles, too.

Preschool Week-in-Review, January 9-13

Last week's preschool theme was Robots! Again, we read lots of books, but one of their favorites was CookieBot by Katie Van Camp.

We had boys (and a mama) sick off and on throughout the week, so we're short on pictures. We did get most of our planned projects done, but we kind of limped through them. Ethan decided again that he'd like to participate in some of the activities and projects, so he made a toilet-paper tube robot with the boys.

We colored robot pictures together, and talked about what our robots would do, what they would be named, and how they would work. Unfortunately, I didn't write down their ideas and I don't remember what they said. (That was the day Mama was sick.)

Ben's picture:

Alex is really making progress with trying to color in his picture completely, and trying to stay in the lines.

Other activities included making edible robots out of graham crackers, m&ms, pretzels, and frosting, playing with finger puppet robots, and watching videos of people robot dancing.

We also do some slightly-more-academic activities just with Alex after Benny lays down for his nap. This week we used, in addition to our alphabet activities, the Robot Preschool Pack from Homeschool Creations.

**Note** I'm having problems with uploading pictures to blogger, so I've been using Photobucket and just putting the code for the picture in my post. But the only options I can figure out for size are either so-big-they-get-cut-off or thumbnails. You can click on the picture to see it larger, though. I think. Hopefully I'll get it figured out soon, but any advice is welcome!

**Note about the Note** I think I have it figured out ... :-)