I got up early this morning and coincidentally solved a mystery. Some creature has been nibbling the leaves of Dave’s seedlings, and it’s not a squirrel, and I haven’t seen the groundhog around. As I approached the kitchen window with my coffee, I saw a big brown rabbit in the backyard, munching clover. A-ha!
When Ben woke up he asked for bacon, and while I made it I mentioned to him that there was a story title in the Ernest Hemingway book (from the free shelf at church) that intrigued me: “The Cat in the Rain.” I suggested he take a look while I cooked the bacon & eggs, and he happily agreed. It’s a three-page story. He read it and said, “I liked that!” I asked him what happened at the end, and he said, “Well, it’s hard for me to tell for sure, but the innkeeper brought the cat inside and up to the people’s apartment.”
I told him that we may do a road trip with friends soon to visit a library that has an Egypt Room with a real mummy, and that the town also has a cool miniature golf course and an alpaca farm.
“You know,” he said, “the word alpaca is Latin for llama.” And so we looked up the word alpaca to see. As it turns out, the word origin is Spanish, from the early 19th century, derived from the Peruvian name of the animal known as alpaqa.
We somehow got on the topic of handicapped-access buildings and rooms (I remember- he suddenly asked what people do if their wheelchairs don’t fit through doorways), and we discussed why it’s important that buildings allow access to wheelchairs, and why many people who need to use wheelchairs are actively campaigning for more access. Later, on a website, I found the symbol with the wheelchair and showed him. He is all for total access.
We looked up activities to do in the beach town we’re visiting in September, and I read him some interesting background on the lighthouse we plan to see. He experimented with magnets and attraction while we talked, and stuck the magnets together in different ways to form 3-D structures. He was excited to get another Highlights magazine in the mail later, and while he read that I moved his new given-to-us desk into the playroom from its spot on the front porch.
It’s a cool drop-leaf desk, and he told me he wants to use it as his bug study area. So we set it up with his equipment- binoculars, bug keepers, bug vacuum, rubber bugs, notebook and paper, and added a separate little table for bug books and nets. He added his small glass aquarium of caterpillars. He’s thrilled.
For dinner, Ben & I went to his friend Chloe’s house. He & Chloe drew a reeeeeally long chalk “race line” down the sidewalk and had races, drew pictures on the sidewalk (one of Ben’s was a hockey rink), and played hopscotch after P. and I finally sort of remembered how to draw the hopscotch. We had ice cream for dessert and then Ben & Chloe watched episodes of Zobomafoo and Barney, and read books, while P. and I drank coffee and chatted. At the end of the night, silly fart talk had us all giggling like crazy.
Yesterday afternoon, while I was out at the voice recital of some friends, Ben hung out with Dave upstairs. While Dave played guitar, Ben played a matching game with the Old Maid cards, read books, built stuff with Legos, and made up his own cool “country & folk riffs” on the guitar. “I wish I could plug this baby into an amp,” Ben said.
At church yesterday, he did his second work of “abstract art,” in which he colors randomly on paper (or in this case, a napkin). He was also incredibly happy to receive the surprise gift of a Lego t-shirt from some friends, which he had to wear IMMEDIATELY.
On Saturday (working our way backwards here, aren’t we?), Ben & Dave were driving home from a party in a windy storm with a torrential downpour and arrived soaking wet from running up the driveway. Ben actually told me he thought the lightning all around the car was neat. Dave told me that dodging flying garbage cans was not so neat. The storm lasted a while, and we had the pleasure of reading books while listening to rain & thunder.
Friday we hung out at one of the parks for about four hours with homeschooling friends, met some cool new friends in the process, and the kids spent most of the time collecting caterpillars & inchworms, which were dangling from the trees in record numbers.
Thursday evening we hit a homeschool book sale as a family and then went for ice cream.
We’ve had discussions, initiated by Ben, about magma vs. rock under the earth’s surface, about the effects of flames, and about prices. “I’m going to call Toys ‘R Us,” he said, “and tell them that if they lower their prices, more people will shop there, and then they can avoid inflation and I can buy more things.”
The other night we had the following exchange:
“Can you help me, Mom? I have a BIG PROBLEM!” (gesturing with arms outspread as far as possible)
“What’s up?”
“I have fifteen dollars, and I want to save for that $89.95 Mars Mission Lego set, but I can’t resist spending all my money on Legos right away. What do I do?” (looking desperate)
“Well, I understand your dilemma,” I answered. “We all feel that way sometimes. I wonder if there’s a way to spend some and save some?”
And so he chose to spend $4.99 on a small Lego set, and save $10.00 in an envelope toward the Mars Mission set. We figured out the tax for that and wrote the whole amount on the envelope, and subtracted what he’d saved so far. He thrust his arms into the air and did a victory yell because he could do both things he wanted to do. And he is motivated! When he got $3.00 from Grammy on Friday, he put it right in the Mars Mission envelope and asked for the subtracted result.
Let’s see…that brings us back to Friday…or was it Thursday…or are we up to Monday again? Does it even matter?
In our lives, not so much. 