Good Things Come in Threes ...

So this should be really good!  Here are shots of my three children from each of three events that I’m overdue in sharing.  You can consider this a back-issue of the Sutherland Family Adventures.  Enjoy your 3x3 photo fun!  (As always, click on any picture to see the whole album.)

Picnic at the Dukes’ for the Fourth of July (7/3/09)







Visit to Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens on July 4th (7/4/09)







Luke and Emma’s Birthday Party (7/11/09)

Love and Sciences

Today in the van we had the following discussion …

Emma: I love Mrs. Tan and Evadne. [a close friend and her daughter, who is Luke’s age]
Mama: What about Jacqueline? [Evadne’s twin sister]
Emma: Yes, I love Jacqueline!
Mama: What about Mr. Tan?
Emma: No, I do not love Mr. Tan.
Luke: Emma, why do you not love Mr. Tan?!?
Emma: Because he is a man!  Luke, I can have Mrs. Tan and Jacqueline and Evadne, and you can have Mr. Tan and James and William. [older and younger brothers to the twins]

A long discussion then ensued which basically involved Luke and Emma arguing over which of them could “have” which of the Tans.  Luke wanted them all.  Emma wanted everything divided evenly.  We then talked about the blessings of having many different kinds of friends – people who are like you and people who are different from you.

Eventually, we wound up talking about the benefits of conversing with people who are a different age from you – both younger children and grown-ups.  I told the children that some children only like to talk to other people their own age (i.e. other kids), but reminded them that it can be a great joy to talk to grown-ups, too.  After some quiet reflection …

Emma (stated as if the final proof of the theory): Uncle Ryan is not two.  [i.e. “That makes sense to me, because I love talking to Uncle Ryan and I know that he is not my age.”]
Luke (clearly understood her point): Yes, it is a great blessing to talk to Uncle Ryan, because he knows many sciences, so then you can know many sciences, too!

Emma Talk

Emma: I have a new baby in my tummy!
Mama: Oh, that’s wonderful, Emma!  When will it be born?
Emma: In my month [August].  It’s my baby.  [Well, the theory holds true for Mama … this time at least.]
Emma (after more consideration): After the baby comes out, I will put it in my van in my car seat.  Then I will look to see if anything is coming and when it moves, I will drive.

Rescue Mission!

This morning, we found (what we later learned was) a baby Green Heron in our front border.  It was under one of our bushes and Luke spotted it after the children watched Daddy drive away to work this morning.  We took it to Hanover Green Vet, which cares for wildlife for free and then releases them into their original area.  He seemed to be having trouble walking, but I'm not sure if that was just because he was so little, or because he had some injury or ailment.  Whatever the case, we decided our front border was definitely not the safest place for him, especially because it’s where Charley likes to bring his catches.  We were afraid this fellow might become the next presentation on our doormat!  We have no idea how he wound up in our yard, though there is a pond just around the corner from our house, so we suspect he came from that direction.  (You can click on the picture above to see the other shots in the album.)

Wordless Wednesday

(Click on the picture to see two more shots.  Same sleeping baby, different angles.)

A Worthy Goal

Today a friend and her twin girls who are about Ruth’s age came over for a play date.  At lunch, she turned to Luke and asked him, “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?  Do you know yet?”

Without pretense, he replied, “A godly man.”

(Now that’s something for a Mama to keep in mind as she homeschools her little fellow.)

On Your First Day of Kindergarten

I don’t know what memory most kids have of their first day of Kindergarten, but I thought I ought to record a few for Luke.  Today was (I guess) his first day of Kindergarten.  By that, I mean that he began his Kindergarten school workbooks today.  Why today?  Well, mostly because he’s been begging to and yesterday he finished up the workbooks I had gotten from the dollar store that we’ve been going through.

So, Luke, your first day of Kindergarten was pretty non-eventful.  As usual, we got the girls ready and in bed for their naps.  Then you and I went outside and you played on the porch with your weed whacker while I trimmed the front yard with mine.  We pulled some weeds in the front border.  Then we went in and got started on your Kindergarten materials.

In many ways, it was much like all of our previous days of “school”.  My favorite part was when I asked you if you remembered what vowels are, and you said, “Yes, they are promises.”  We then reviewed the difference between vowels and vows.  Also, as promised, you got to crack open the brand new box of 64 Crayola Crayons as a reward for finishing your old workbooks.  I wonder how long this set will last.  Until your Kindergarten workbooks are done, I hope!

You also got lots of practice writing your name.  Interestingly, you still don’t know how to spell your own name.  You kept wanting to write “Luek”.  Today you had a light bulb moment when you said, “Oh, I see. The “e” goes at the end!”  Some day we’ll cover long vowels and silent “e”.  Not today.  Today in Math we worked on counting, same and different, and just getting used to the new math book (lots of filling-in-bubbles practice).  In Language, we reviewed the vowels, practiced writing the letter “i” and then worked on identifying the sound of the letter “i” in words.  At this point, it’s mostly all review for you, so we’re pretty much just practicing and having fun.

Of course, these workbooks are only a tiny part of your education.  You spend your whole day learning and doing.  Like this morning, when we had Bible time and we all talked about David and the ark being brought to Jerusalem on an ox cart, you recited the first ten verses of Psalm 132 and we sang Psalm 145.  Or a little later when you and Emma sorted all of the big and little paper clips for me.  And when you and the girls and I all snuggled up on the sofa for reading.  And then at lunch when we had more conversations about what foods are made from milk.  And then again at dinner, when Daddy brought out his little computer to show us all pictures of jelly fish (actually not fish, we discovered) and tell us all about them and how their tentacles cause stings.

So in some ways, this day was not monumental at all.  You have been learning for a long, long time.  You have been doing “school” for a year or so now.  But I didn’t want to let today go by without saying something.  You will always be my Little Boy, but today I watched you take a big step towards Little Man!

A Good Way to Use the Time

Overheard (Luke “reading” a Bible story to Ruth): So Samuel said to King Saul, “You wait here.  I am going to go talk to the Lord in a private place, like in the bathroom.”

The Beauty of English

Many nights just before getting ready for bed, the children have a chance to “fight” with their daddy.  This basically means that Matt hides and jumps out and scares them, and then they attack him with their weapons of choice.  Tonight, Emma had a wooden hammer.  She ran up to me and said, “This is my hammer!  I am going to ham Daddy with it!”  (She ran off down the hallway brandishing her weapon and yelling “Ham! Ham! Ham!”)

It All Depends on Your Range

Luke and Emma and I have been working on numbers – specifically the numbers 1 through 20.  So at this point, to Luke, “twenty” means “a really, really huge amount” or “the biggest number you can even imagine” as in “There were twenty bad guys under the table!”

Today in the car, Luke was retelling the story of Tiki Tiki Tembo.  He got to the part about Chang talking to the old man.  Luke added in the detail that this old man was really, really old, perhaps even as old as “twenty.”  I let him go on referring to the “twenty-year-old” old man.

After a while, I thought it would be interesting to throw in the piece of information that I, in fact, am thirty years old.  Luke wasn’t so sure about the validity of that information, though.  “You don’t look like thirty.”  (I liked how this conversation was beginning, though I must say that I don’t think it would be so bad to “look thirty” as I’m pretty comfortable with it.)  I asked Luke how old he thought I looked.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.  I think you are about eight.  No, I think maybe eleven.  Eleven is kind of medium-big.  It’s kind of more than medium.  It’s kind of big, but not very much.”  So, in essence, I am just over the hill.  I look (age wise) medium-big.  I have officially been welcomed into middle age.  As soon as I hit 14, I can become a member of the AARP!

An Office By Any Other Name ...

If you’ve ever been pregnant (or had a wife who was pregnant) I’m sure you understand how housework tends to pile up during the first trimester when there’s only energy enough for the minimum essentials … and sometimes not even that.  Even with Matt fixing dinner and cleaning the kitchen most nights, I sill hardly managed to pull my own weight (ha ha).

But now I’m living the high life of the second trimester.  Closets are being reorganized, rooms are being rearranged, and flowerbeds are being weeded and mulched (gee … wish the second trimester had hit a little earlier in the year, ya know, before it got into the 90’s during the day … but you take what you can get).

So last Saturday Luke and I made a project of the Office.  We have one bedroom in our house that is used for our desks and computers, several bookshelves, craft projects … and everything else that doesn’t fit into another room.  During the first trimester, this also became the “What do I do with this?  I don’t know.  The office.” kind of office.

Pending projects that I had not the energy to complete got relocated to the floor of the office.  Things that needed sorting, filing or repairing got relocated to the floor of the office.  When I ran out of space on my desk, things from the desk got relocated to the floor of the office.  You get the picture.  We didn’t allow the children in the room, mostly because their legs aren’t long enough to step over the piles of stuff they would have needed to navigate to get through the room.

But now the office has a floor.  Yes, there is still a corner of some pending projects, but even that is slowly shrinking, thanks to my new-found energy.  And I did a full vacuuming of the office in our back-of-the-house vacuuming this week for the first time in … don’t ask me how long.  Whew.  It makes me happy just to walk by the door and peek in.

And I got a reminder of the perspective little people have about time.  Luke said to me “Mama, our office isn’t an office any more!  Now it’s a room!”  So I asked him, “So what does the word ‘office’ mean?”  He said, “Dirty and computers and mess.”  Though the office has only been this way for a matter of months, apparently it’s been long enough to functionally change the meaning of the term “office”!  So, now I sit in my room-formerly-known-as-the-office and enjoy the open air as I post to my blog!  J