Daily run-down for Sept. 25

Fridays are our short lesson days.  Normally we go to the library, do an extra history project or science lab, work on Spanish, do reading and music practicing.  Today we only really got around to music practicing and reading...  I can spend more time with the boys in their practicing on Fridays because I'm not also having to supervise math lessons at the same time.  I was really proud of Joseph-- he had a really great piano practicing session.  Brigham still struggles with accepting my corrections.  He hears all my corrections as criticism.  It's hard to combat.  Mosey is coming along on piano.  He's practicing a Halloween song that he's excited about.  And he's coming along in violin, too!  Each day is slightly less painful than the day before.  :-)  He has a very good natural violin hold-- something I remember struggling with when I first started.

Mosey got out the walkie-talkies we bought a couple years ago and the boys all had fun playing with them this morning.  They were playing spies and were sneaking all over the house and around the back yard, conspiring with each other on the walkie talkies.  Cute.  There are four of them, so the boys each have one, and I have one too.  It made it convenient to call them all back inside for lessons!

Mosey has become obsessed with a Jacob's Ladder he got at Olvera Street last year at Grandma Camp.  He's played with it so much that nearly all the ribbons have fallen off at one point or another and I've had to reattach them with black duct tape.  He keeps wanting me to explain how it works.  It's hard to figure out!  He carried it around with him all day today. 

We went to horseback riding lessons this afternoon.  Their teacher whom they have only been with for a few months, is moving to another stable and won't be at Ramaker Stables anymore.  She'll be at a stable in Georgetown which I'm afraid is going to be too far away.  I've emailed the other western teacher at Ramaker, but I'm not sure what our chances are in getting a lesson time on Friday afternoons-- really the only time we have during the week to do it.  I will be seriously disappointed if we have to drop horseback riding lessons.  The boys really love it.  Joseph has been writing a story and in it there is quite a bit of horseback riding going on.  He even writes at one point, "Luckily we had been taking horseback riding lessons..."  I know that this is one activity that really means a lot to my animal-loving boy.

After horseback riding lessons we met Ben at Half-Price Books.  This is another great reason to move to Texas.  Half-Price Books is a chain bookstore, like Barnes and Noble, but with used books.  The bookstores are big and have a really good selection of good-quality books.  They are all very cheap, which pretty much means I feel justified in buying a whole bunch of books.  :-)  I get my book-buying compulsion from my dad.  I envy his bookshelves lining the family room walls.  I need more bookshelves so I can buy more books!  :-)  Anyway, Mosey wanted to use some of his points to buy a book at Half Price Books, which he did.  And I bought another $50 worth of books to go along with it.  I found this awesome book of American stories and folk songs, and another of classic fairy tales.  We have a book of fairy tales already-- but it's in Spanish.  Mosey asked me just this week if we could get one in English, and there it was!

Then Ben took Brigham and Joseph to their first basketball practice.  It's an instructional league, so the first half hour is only instruction, and the last hour the boys are divided into teams for practice games.  I took Mosey home and we perused SkyMall.com (Mosey became enamored of the catalog on our flight back from L.A.), and read a few more chapters of "Little House in the Big Woods," which Mosey is loving.  Joseph and Brigham were not particularly interested when I tried reading it to them a couple of years ago, but Mosey likes it!

And now it's bed time.  Mosey has his first soccer game in the morning.  Joseph and Brigham are not playing soccer, which makes Saturday mornings much less complicated.  He'll be in the older 6-8 year age group and I hope he can focus a bit better than last year.  :-)

It was a good day!