January 5, 2014

Perhaps in the new year I can do smaller posts more frequently so I can avoid these huge photobombs and overgeneralized updates every three weeks??

We had a fun Christmas - I was scheduled to work Christmas Eve but was put on call, so that was a happy Falalalala. :)  For the fifth or sixth year in a row we spent Christmas Day at my Aunt Sue and Uncle Dave's house north of Muskegon - which just happened to be the teeny spot that got super-dumped with an unbelievable amount of snow a few days before Christmas.  The weather wasn't great heading up there - and my parents made the unprecedented decision to stay home since it was snowing so badly along US-31 to the north, but it sure was beautiful.

Christmas was a little more magical with a three year old in the house; before Thanksgiving he had started asking if Christmas was tomorrow.  We did do the Santa Claus thing but tried to more heavily emphasize the fact that Santa was actually a real man who loved Jesus and showed tremendous love and kindness to others (true story).  I had Pinterest-filled dreams of homemade advent calenders and special festive activities each day that were never realized.  We did have an advent calender, and I did wrap up a million Christmas books and he got to open one each day...but honestly I wouldn't do that again because many of the books didn't hold his interest for more than one or two readings, and he was totally expecting a present every day. Enh.  It was a neat (Pinterest-inspired, of course) idea.  He also got to stay up a little later a couple of nights and watch The Polar Express with us.  There were some scenes that were a bit more intense than we had remembered, but he processed it well and loved watching it.

Christmas with a three year old, while fun, is also exhausting.  Levi woke up at 0520.  Luke was pretty close behind.  Neither boy took a nap and both were running on crazy fumes by the end of the day, and took at least two days to wind down and reset themselves.

So here's Christmas morning - 

We gave the boys a couple of trucks to share (heh. aheh.) and a caterpillar tunnel, just because it's fun.

Luke's special present was this wooden puppy cart that made him do triple flips at the toy store.  It's just a little cart that he can fill with his toys and it has a puppy head with a jingle-bell collar on the front of it.

Levi's special present was his own backpack filled with Berenstain Bears books.  About fighting, manners, and strangers.  Deliberately chosen themes. ;)

He was most excited about his books, as usual.

Both boys received an educational gift too.  Levi's was a magnetic mosaic set and Luke's was a wooden peg shape sorter.

Like I said, the drive up north was p-r-e-t-t-y snowy.  This is just their driveway!!

Best Christmas venue ever. :)  Thanks so much for hosting us all again, guys!

2014 resolution: get Levi to look at the camera. LOL

We love the snow.  If the temp is above, oh, fifteen now, and the wind chill doesn't freeze skin on contact I try to get the boys out, even if it's just for 15 or 20 minutes.  They severely need the energy burn!

Bear hat from Auntie Lisa - he LOVES it!!

Direct quote from Levi after I had unintentionally heaved snow on him with my shovel:

Dude, that was pretty mean throwing snow on me.

Luke loooooves to help.  No, Molly is not doing her business there.  She's mid-leap but it sure looks like something else.

The snow plow (Nana calls it the Flying Dutchman, LOL) went by.  Can you tell?

We call Luke "Dinky Person." He's such a PERSON but he's so....dinky!!!  Just this little compact body housing this enormous personality.

Levi decided it was time to start potty training the other day.  I followed his lead.  It was an epically exhausting start.  I don't want to violate his privacy by going into any details, but he has had a great amount of success and wow...another step into boyhood.  

I scrapped our "schooling" activities during the holidays partly because it was just the holidays, and partly because I could tell he was getting bored.  He'd ask for his morning projects but then didn't want to do them and was resisting doing much else, so I let it go (less work for me, anyway!).  I did some planning over the past few weeks, retooled, and developed a new plan for the upcoming months - which will probably be pretty fluid as those months go by.

I'm still going to have a letter of the week, but it's not going to be THE letter of the week, as in that's not going to be the theme.  Levi was getting a little bored with the redundancy of that (and honestly, so was I).  He's picked up his letters more than I thought he would by this point.  (*The following is not my attempt to be all, "Look what MY kid can do!", it's for my 'scrapbooking' purposes so that I can remember what he did and when.)  He can identify them in words, identify them by sound, list words that start with a given letter, and tell me what letter a word starts with.  So I'm not going to hammer that over and over again.

I'm scrapping scripture memory for the time being - not that I for one second don't think it's important, it's just that I want to be teaching him things that immediately apply, and the verses each week weren't necessarily helping me out with that.  I'm going to go back to our Questions with Answers stuff and teach him the catechism (truth about who God is, how He created everything, what He's done for us, etc).

Our theme each week is going to be the fruit of the Spirit.  He's reading chapter and verse lately from the Three Year Old Book of Disrespect & Defiance and I want to hit on character qualities and how we can demonstrate them in our lives.  Thank you Mary for introducing me to OhAmanda!!  That'll take eight weeks, and then I'll start weekly lessons that will teach him the gospel, leading up to Easter.  I pray that his tender little heart is being prepared for seeds of Truth to be sown into it.

I'll continue with our morning projects (he's been asking for them again, and lately he's VERY into puzzles), focus on shapes and numbers a little more than we have been; manners and minding; helping out around the house; and reading. Lots of reading.  Oh, how he looooves to read. :)  In the background will be a letter of the week, and if he wants to do projects above and beyond our fruit of the Spirit projects he can do the letter printables I've run off.

Lukie will join our fun projects. He loves to paint and even color and do some puzzles.  

I SO can't WAIT for summer - I'm incorporating Hiking Tuesday and Farm Friday (I drive to a farm to pick up our milk on Fridays, and summer will be a riot for that.  Right now it's just bundle-drive-drive-drive-home.)  Woooooooot.

Loving his puzzles

He loves the I Spy puzzle game he got from Grandma and Grandpa Gouveia!!!

Sorry for the long boringness.  It's more so I can flesh out my thoughts and look back on them later on if I need to!!! Bear with me!