Nostalgia

After dinner tonight, the boys and I spent about 20 minutes reading old letters that I wrote back when Joseph and Brigham had just turned 4, and Mosey was 1 1/2.  They were sooo funny!  Oh, Joseph and Brigham were such NAUGHTY little boys!  It is so fun to read about now, though.  The boys were all so interested to hear these stories about when they were little-- Joseph has a great memory and could remember a lot of them.  It reminds me that in another 6 years, I'll be looking back on these days with nostalgia.  I hope I'm recording enough of it.  I love going back and reading those old letters.  There are so many things I would otherwise have completely forgotten, and others I HAVE forgotten-- those memories and those days would be completely lost to me if I hadn't written about them.
I have more trouble doing a daily log type record now, because honestly my days are a lot more boring.  In some ways, that is a good thing!  In the summer of 2005, within about a month's span, the twins painted the inside of the van with makeup, poured an entire bottle of maple syrup all over the living room rug, emptied a container of sunscreen on the floor of the exercise room, flushed a pair of scissors down the toilet (necessitating the complete disassembly of the toilet to retrieve), did an "experiment" with a bag of Splenda and a bottle of 409, and made a "treat" for the dog with leftover oatmeal, dirt, leaves, sticks, grass, and, of course, their own pee.  They were such scamps! And I promise I was an attentive mother!!  They were just the busiest, most creative, irrepressible, and NAUGHTY little boys!  If ever I was doing anything in which my eyes were not glued onto them (i.e. laundry, putting Mosey down for a nap, making dinner), they were invariably up to no good.  :-)
These days my concerns are less about mess making (although that still concerns me), and more about more serious parenting conundrums, which I'm not quite as prepared to write about in the ironic, humorous tone that I could use to detail the chaos that sometimes reigned supreme in our house full of little boys.
Posts agonizing about whether I'm too much of a tiger-mother, or detailing behavior by one or another of my boys that is worrying me, are not quite as much fun to read.
I wonder if this is reflective of a personality change on my part, or simply the change in my life circumstances?  Maybe both. 
Anyway, I have been saying this periodically for a long time now, but I need to do better at recording the little details of our life, and especially in noticing and remembering the funny things, and sweet things that are definitely worth remembering.

This week has been our first full week of summer.  I have grand plans for getting into a good schedule so we can make the most of our time, and so I'll have time to make a dent in my ever-lengthening "when I have time to" list of projects.  We definitely haven't hit our stride yet, but we're only one week in.
I want the boys to do music practicing, 15 minutes of math, and, ideally, one more academic item every day before they are set free.  Somehow, still, it took until 4:00 this afternoon before this was completely accomplished!  We didn't have breakfast until after 9:30, so there's that, but still, I definitely have to streamline the process.  Mosey's 15 minutes of math turned into more than 45 minutes as he dilly-dallied (he is so much like Joseph), needing to eat a handful of popcorn between each individual multiplication problem (he's doing 3 digit by 2 digit multiplication, so a handful of popcorn between each individual fact can stretch one problem out to 5 minutes or more), getting an orange section and eating it as slooooowly as he possibly can, dropping his pencil on the floor about 10 thousand times, etc., etc...  Each boy didn't spend too much time individually on their tasks for the day, but the cumulative time for me supervising everything was too long!
Once we were done, though, we had a nice afternoon with the boys playing legos and swimming and riding scooters around the neighborhood with their friend Jason who lives 2 doors down.  I worked a little bit on our family scrapbook (I'm up to September of 2005-- that gives you an indication of the truly colossal length of my "when I have time to" list of projects!!), and actually made dinner.  We had black beans and rice which Mosey moaned and groaned about.  "These are disgusting!  You put mashed bananas in them that have been sitting outside for a YEAR!"  Charming, huh?  (ETA: there were no bananas in the black beans, he just likes to claim that I put something really horrid in whatever food he deems "disgusting."  This time it was mashed bananas that had been sitting outside for a year.  Other times it is pieces of dog poo covered in cockroaches.  You get the picture.)  I cut a watermelon, too, and Mosey would have eaten watermelon and nothing but watermelon if I had let him. 

See?  This is kind of boring.  Maybe in 5 years I won't think so...

Other things to make note of from the week:
Joseph is working hard on a story he's been writing for a few weeks.  It's called "Lightning the Dragon" and is already more than 10 typed pages.  He loves writing and is good at it.  He talks about wanting to write a book someday, and asks me lots of questions about publishing and how writers get paid.  I remember wanting to be a writer when I was his age, but I soon learned that I actually like reading stories a lot more than making them up. :-)  He also has been working on perfecting his dragon drawings.  This is his current favorite thing to draw, and he finished up a really good one this week, completing it by outlining each one of it's approximately 5000 scales in a red metallic pen.
Brigham has been plowing his way through our "The New Way Things Work" book.  Yesterday he was determined to master how electric motors work.  I am made aware of the huge gaps in my knowledge base when he asks me things like, "How does electricity make something move?"  I had no idea!  I know the basic theory behind combustion engines, but I really had no idea about electrical motors.  But now Brigham knows all about electromagnets and coils and brushes and commutators (except for how to pronounce this word!  COMmutator?  ComMUTator?  CommuTAtor?  I have no idea).  Tomorrow he's going to figure out how machine guns work.  He asked me if I thought he might get onto an FBI watch list for googling how machine guns work.  I told him I thought he'd be OK.  :-)
And Mosey is busy, busy, busy.  Building legos, running his hexbugs around, playing with his dragons, reading Highlights magazines, trying to sneak onto Webkinz World (the rule this summer is only 30 minutes of computer time per day and that is only AFTER the rest of their daily duties are done), listening to his MP3 player.  Did I write about that?  I don't think so.  Mosey got it into his head that he wanted to buy an MP3 player.  He spent several days looking at MP3 players online, debating what he could afford.  Finally he and Ben struck a deal and Ben sold Mosey his old Sansa, and got himself a new one.  Mosey loves it, and has downloaded a few audiobooks he is listening to.  He is my gadget guy and has figured out exactly how it works.  I have mixed feelings about it though, because I really don't like him to be disconnected from the rest of the family, listening to his MP3 player while the rest of us are interacting.  I've told him that I reserve the right to tell him when he can't listen to it.  So far it's been OK, but as a matter of principle, I'm not really excited about my 7 year old having an MP3 player.
Well, that's it for tonight.  I will try to notice more funny and interesting things about my life!