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

Eleven ... when did that happen?

While I was pretty certain that Ethan just turned four the other day, I find that he is now ... eleven. He requested a turtle cake, although thanks to some miscommunication he got a regular turtle and not the sea turtle he had envisioned.

We took his cake to Grandma and Grandpa's to share the celebration with Avy, and Grandma knows how to throw a party! Hats and noisemakers are not optional for a good party.

And neither are gifts, obviously! 

Happy Birthday, Ethan! We love you so much!

October Highlights - Ethan

So the week-in-review posts haven't really been weekly. (Why yes, I do have a masterful grasp of the obvious! Thank you!) I am a bad mommy blogger, because I can't seem to manage *doing* things with the boys, taking pictures at the same time, and then blogging about it. (These people I live with think eating and clean clothes to wear are more important than blogging! Can you imagine?) Maybe if I conquer my time management issues, I will go back to the week-in-review posts. We have been doing school, though, so I thought I'd do a highlight post for each of the boys for the last month or so.

Ethan:

**decided that the middle of his spelling test was a good time to target practice with his dart gun. Mom was thrilled.

**is taking a break from doing his CLE math every day to do some intensive work on addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. He understands these concepts just fine, but he needs to build some speed and automatic recall with them. He's improving quickly, but if you have any good (fun) drill ideas, please leave us a comment!

**finished the first book in Geography through Literature (Holling C. Holling's Paddle to the Sea). He gave a presentation to the whole family, narrating the book and demonstrating the route that Paddle (the wooden canoe and Indian) took out to the sea. Note the laser pointer - that was Dad's idea. He's a cool dad - I would never have thought of that!

He's also been making great strides in his writing, both in content and willingness to complete his assignments - especially when compared with last year. He's been writing various types of paragraphs - how-to, descriptive, comparative, and persuasive. (He is sad to report, however, that his persuasive paragraph didn't convince us to let him get a poison dart frog for a pet.) This week he took a break from the paragraph writing and wrote some poetry instead! He wrote a funny one about penguins and then this one about one of the Transformers.

Soundwave

Warrior fast, warrior smart

Evil robot with no heart. 

Warrior silent in the night,

Soundwave, ruling in the fight.

(I probably would have chosen one of the paragraphs or the penguin poem, but he's pretty proud of this one and asked that I post it instead.)

He's been reading a bunch. He enjoyed Hatchet, has finished the Redwall series, realized that the library carries Calvin and Hobbes, and discovered the Mysterious Benedict Society series.

He would also consider the two squirrels he shot to be highlights of this month, so I'll leave you with a picture of Ethan and Grandpa and the dead squirrel. Because really, doesn't every blog need at least one picture of a dead squirrel?

Tuesday, the highlight of the whole day was the discovery of the new "suction-cup lizard". He's easy to use ... just peel his face back and stick him to any smooth, flat surface.

Then enjoy the noises he makes when you pop him off again!

Your little brothers will  not only laugh, they'll think you're about the best thing ever.

Not only that, but it's far more entertaining than something boring like math or writing!

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

What a name ...

"Ethan," I asked, "did you read this special feature on Carl Linnaeus? It says he's considered the Father of Taxonomy."

"Yes, I did," Ethan answered. "It was pretty interesting. I don't think, though," he mused very seriously, "that I would name my child Taxonomy."

Mom falls on the floor laughing, and Ethan looks very pleased at how well his joke was received.

Week in review, August 20-24

We've completed our first week of school! While I'll spend some time this weekend tweaking our schedule and possibly rearranging the schoolroom to separate Alex and Ben's desks, it's been a very successful week overall.

Ethan 
*completed five lessons in CLE math 

 
*completed four spelling lists from Sequential Spelling
*did lessons 1.1 - 1.3 in Growing with Grammar and decided he really likes having a workbook for grammar
*completed five lessons in Winning with Writing
* finished the first three lessons in The World of Animals, his first trimester science book
*completed the notebooking pages for the first two states in his state study
*finished Unit One of Paddle to the Sea in Beautiful Feet Books' Geography through Literature- he's really loving this course so far, and was disappointed that it wasn't scheduled for every day!

*completed his first "shop class" project with Dad - a side table to use while they are hunting together

 

Ethan's attitude was outstanding this week! He has shown a huge leap in his desire and ability to work independently, take on multi-step assignments with a cheerful, can-do attitude, and buckle down and do his work even if it's not something he enjoys much. I am so proud of him!

Alex

*worked on phonics with Mom and a whiteboard (we're loosely using AlphaPhonics)

*practiced phonics with Happy Phonics

*did bits and pieces of some handwriting and number writing

*enjoyed various thinking skills games with Mom

*turned his nose up at Rod and Staff's kindergarten workbooks, but did some anyway

*LOVED his Five-in-a-Row selection, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel 

A brand new sensory bin!

Drawing trees like Virginia Lee Burton's in the book

Seeing how steam can make things move

A Mike Mulligan cake (the Teddy Grahams are all the people who were watching)

 Together they did four lessons in The Bible Study for All Ages. We like that so far, but it needs some tweaking in how we actually work it ... pondering that this weekend.

Benny

* played, interrupted, rode his horse, shot bad guys, and generally was three. 

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!

Mornings

There's nothing quite like snuggling in mom and dad's bed in the morning, reading Lego comics together.

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.

Sprinkler Fun

We finally had some nice hot weather for Memorial Day, so we celebrated by getting the sprinkler out!


Ben was pretty pleased with the whole arrangement, it seemed.


Alex has decided to have a cheesy grin whenever you take his picture.


They got their hair cut Monday, too ... nice short summer cuts. It makes checking for ticks so much easier! And they like to rub their heads - both their own and each other's. Benny's never had his this short in front, but I really like it.


And of course, one of the benefits of being the big brother is chasing the little brothers around with the sprinkler! They all thought that was a great game.

Painting

The Chaney family rules for painting:

1. Concentration is required.
2. Shirts are optional.


3. The more tools for applying paint, the better.
4. Mom gets to clean all the tools, so use as many as possible.


5. Washable paint is important.
6. Paint is cold, so it really is best to use paper as your canvas rather than your skin.


7. Spill-proof cups are invaluable.
8. If you get your brush wet enough, you can make all your colors run together into a lovely brownish-grey color.