10/07/2013

All in all a pretty good Monday.  Not nearly enough sleep.  I thought I was in good shape with my lesson, and I was, but I decided at the last minute to give the kids all a copy of the scripture mastery mnemonics that I have been making.  Well, I needed to finish 2 of them on the computer in order to fill up the page (I put 6 on a page) and not waste my card stock, and doing that and then formatting all of the other ones to fit on the page and then printing them out took FOREVER.  I ended up getting to bed well after midnight which meant about 4 1/2 hours of sleep which is just not enough.
But I made it through the day.  The boys were pretty good although I did have to mention 2 or 3 times during the day that if they would simply put HALF the amount of effort into finding ways to be kind and helpful that they expend in finding ways to be annoying to each other, our home would be a far different place.  :-)  Seriously, it's like they plot at night, brainstorming weird things they can do to annoy each other.  Patting each other on the head (hard) every time they pass.  Making high-pitched squealing sounds from the far corners of the house and then claiming it wasn't them.  Sitting as close as possible without actually touching the other person, but invading personal space nonetheless.  Making faces across the table.  The list goes on.  Oh well, as long as they aren't hurting each other I guess I should be grateful.  :-)
Mosey and Joseph have been getting more and more involved in World of Tanks, an online computer game.  Ugh.  All last weekend it was a battle with those two over computer time.  I have such mixed feelings, though, because Joseph has started a "clan" (meaning he formed the group and is in charge of it), which is kind of cool, actually, a way for him to practice leadership skills, and the description he wrote about the clan is really good.  It reads like an adult wrote it, and he says that any bad language will get members kicked off the clan (they can "chat" with each other during battles).  He organizes battles and works on recruiting people to his clan.  It shows quite a bit of initiative on his part, and I know he feels responsible for his clan.  They can only fight battles when they're all online at the same time, and as group leader he feels like he can't skip scheduled battles.  I'm proud of him for doing all of this, and it's great for him to feel responsibility toward other people, but still it's a COMPUTER GAME and not real life.  It's not real-life leadership and social interaction with other people (including his family), and on the good-better-best scale of how he could be spending his time, I'm not sure it ranks that highly compared with other things he could be doing...  Sigh...
OK, I've got to get our science lesson ready, so that's it for now.