03/22/12

1.  It was a good day!  Schoolwork and practicing got done pretty efficiently.  No major meltdowns or standoffs.  The boys had fun with our art group.  For P.E. today we went outside and the boys did sprints along the stretch of road in front of our house.  Joseph really does not like competition with his brothers, especially Brigham.  I can see why, I think I would have been exactly the same way.  So I had them run in opposite directions.  From what I could see, they are exactly the same speed, so I don't think he needed to worry about being beaten, but this way they couldn't see when the other boy reached his destination, and by the time they got there, stopped, turned around, the other boy had already reached his ending point, so it worked out well.  I love to watch them run-- first of all so I can live vicariously through them for a little while, but mostly because they are so cute!  I know they wouldn't like me saying this, but they are.  Their sprinting form is not terribly refined, and so their arms kind of go all over the place and they're just cute.  I need to video them next time we do sprints, just for posterity's sake.  :-)  After sprints, I attempted to teach them proper form for pushups and situps.  Kind of hard when I can't demonstrate.  But I think they all got it.  Brigham is a wiry, muscly little guy and can knock out the pushups and situps pretty well.  Joseph's not far behind, and Mosey mostly just got frustrated.  :-)

2.  The boys, spearheaded by Joseph, are making a giant mess in the backyard.  When it rains, the water runs down the patio roof, and hits the grass just bordering the concrete patio.  There is no raingutter--as a result, the grass doesn't grow well there.  Add to that the fact that Sandy also likes to dig around there, and it's not in great shape.  Today when the art kids were over, the small hole that had been there turned into a GIANT hole.  They dug down until they hit limestone.  In the process they found "Indian stuff"-- a bundle of string, some old knitted material ("Indian cheesecloth"), and who knows what else.  The digging was so enthusiastic that they broke the blade off of our big shovel.  Oops.  So Joseph and the boys did the obvious thing-- they wrote a "curse" on a piece of paper, "cursing" its future finder, and buried it under the broken shovel blade down in the bottom of the pit.  Of course there is mud and dirt clods all over the back patio, which get tracked inside every time anyone comes inside.  I told Joseph to enjoy the hole all he could this afternoon, because tomorrow it's getting filled in and cleaned up!

3.  Brigham was very entertaining this afternoon.  He's been hard at work on a drawing the last couple of days.  And when Brigham gets focused in on something, the soundtrack to his life can't help but come out.  I wonder what it would be like to have a musical soundtrack running through my mind all the time?  I can usually tell what he's thinking about based on the music issuing forth at any particular time.  Apparently something very exciting and dramatic and a little dangerous must have been going on in his drawing.  :-)

4.  Mosey has been playing around with the voice recognition software on the computer.  He's got it working pretty well!  It's fun to hear him talking with such a commanding voice, telling the computer what to do.  "Open this!"  "Delete that!"  That kind of thing is right up his alley-- he's such a gadgety little guy.