Some of you are privileged enough to have met Mousie and Tiger, Drake's imaginary friends from several years ago. We rarely hear about them anymore, but for 3- to 5-year-old Drake, they were definitely important individuals in his life.
I figured that Drake needed imaginary friends because he was an only child until he was 4-1/2. And I didn't suspect Levi would probably ever have one, because he and Drake play together all the time. ALL the time.
But I was wrong.
So without further ado, I would like to introduce you to Levi's new friend...Baby Einstein.
(Yes, I'm serious.)
As far as I can tell, Baby Einstein (the imaginary friend version) looks like the little cartoon head on the Baby Einstein videos. And he fits in Levi's hand. And "He's - Nice - Boy" according to Levi.
We woke up this morning to a rain storm, and Levi came out of his room concerned that Baby "Ine-tine" was outside in the scary thunderstorm. I assured him that "he" was not, without realizing that he wasn't talking about one of the videotapes. Then again after nap, he worried that B.E. had been left outside in the rain. Since then he has played hide-and-seek with B.E., drawn a picture of him, and let me hold him. Right at this very moment, B.E. is in the playroom on an airplane.
Mmm Hmmmm...
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
7 years old!
We ended up celebrating Drake's 7th birthday for almost a week, because it fell on a Monday and we didn't have his "friends" party until the following Saturday. I think he enjoyed having a "birthday week" instead of just a day, though! Here are some pictures from the various celebrations...
Madagascar 2 - Drake is a huge Madagascar fan! This kid does movie quotes like nobody's business.
Since the boys are exactly 4 1/2 years apart, they each have a half-birthday on the other one's real birthday, and we give the half-birthday boy one gift, while the real birthday boy gets several. Levi got a puzzle rack and four new puzzles! He is a puzzler, just like his daddy!
Drake got books, coloring books, and a drawing book, too! Here he is with his beloved new "Dragons of the Deep" creation science book from our favorite Alaskans!
His big gift from Daddy, Mommy, and Levi - a Razor scooter! This kid was over the moon! He has been riding it daily for the past week.
We got a cookie cake for our little family party - it was really good! I had never tried one before.
For the friends party last weekend, Drake wanted a "rain forest" party...Adam cut up all the fruit and I made the cakes - lemon rounds with vanilla frosting and chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting. (Adam helped me with frog placement!)
A closer view of the cake. (That's a pineapple top that we used for a plant.)
It's finally party time! This is a shot of the kids playing an ice cube game...who can hold the ice cube the longest without dropping it? Drake's friend Kiley won - their ice cubes had all but melted, so I was relieved when someone finally won the game!
Make a wish....
Opening gifts
Drake loved the gifts from his friends!
Here's the "tree" we made to decorate for the rain forest party.
Drake in front of his tree! He colored all the animals in the branches during the week or so before his party. (The trunk and branches are paper shopping bags from the commissary, and the leaves and grass are construction paper.)
Madagascar 2 - Drake is a huge Madagascar fan! This kid does movie quotes like nobody's business.
Since the boys are exactly 4 1/2 years apart, they each have a half-birthday on the other one's real birthday, and we give the half-birthday boy one gift, while the real birthday boy gets several. Levi got a puzzle rack and four new puzzles! He is a puzzler, just like his daddy!
Drake got books, coloring books, and a drawing book, too! Here he is with his beloved new "Dragons of the Deep" creation science book from our favorite Alaskans!
His big gift from Daddy, Mommy, and Levi - a Razor scooter! This kid was over the moon! He has been riding it daily for the past week.
We got a cookie cake for our little family party - it was really good! I had never tried one before.
For the friends party last weekend, Drake wanted a "rain forest" party...Adam cut up all the fruit and I made the cakes - lemon rounds with vanilla frosting and chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting. (Adam helped me with frog placement!)
A closer view of the cake. (That's a pineapple top that we used for a plant.)
It's finally party time! This is a shot of the kids playing an ice cube game...who can hold the ice cube the longest without dropping it? Drake's friend Kiley won - their ice cubes had all but melted, so I was relieved when someone finally won the game! 
Make a wish....
Opening gifts
Drake loved the gifts from his friends!
Here's the "tree" we made to decorate for the rain forest party.
Drake in front of his tree! He colored all the animals in the branches during the week or so before his party. (The trunk and branches are paper shopping bags from the commissary, and the leaves and grass are construction paper.)***
Our big boy had a great time turning 7!
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Moving and School
I was planning to write a blog post about our first week of school, and well...that didn't really happen. There's been some major busyness going on at our house. We have orders to Montana, and we'll probably be moving in October or November. Seriously, words cannot express our excitement! A new start has been a long time coming, and Adam was accepted for a special duty assignment at Malmstrom AFB, near Great Falls, MT. So there's a lot going on with getting ready to move!
We were planning to start homeschooling the first week in August, but when we got our assignment, we decided to bump it up yet another week to provide some extra wiggle-room. So we're toward the end of our fourth week of school now, and I have to say, it's - well - busy! Wow. I feel sorta like Drake when Levi was born. I always say that Drake knew he was going to have a new baby brother, and he had a grasp on what newborn babies are like...but he didn't quite internalize how much the new baby would affect his life. Yeah, that's how this whole homeschool "adventure" feels to me, now that we've almost finished our first month. It has been a major adjustment! I had all the details planned out pretty well, and I did suspect somewhere in the fuzzy recesses of my brain that it wasn't going to be all that easy. But suspecting and experiencing are two very different things!
Anyway, school is actually going quite well, aside from the fact that I feel like I more than earn my keep nowadays! Drake's reading is improving so much, and his desire to do it has improved ten-fold since I shelved his nemesis, the hated reading/phonics lesson book that we'd been using since March. (Planning to start a new phonics program soon, but for now we're reading lots of easy reader books from the library, and he's doing great!) He also no longer tells me he's "not good at math" like he did last year - he actually seems to enjoy math, and he gets at least some satisfaction from successfully mastering new concepts in math. I am very, very thankful that I chose the math curriculum we're using - it seems to fit his learning style very well. He is so not the worksheet type. Not at all. Also, his handwriting is actually legible now, and he forms all the letters correctly, most of the time! (Last year, he had no instruction in "how" to form letters, so he did it in the wackiest ways, like detached balls and sticks all over the place...not conducive to writing with any speed or legibility down the road.) So his handwriting has been "reworked" and I think it's pretty much fixed now - yay!
So all that to say...it feels like a snail's pace sometimes, but now that we've covered enough ground to look back a little bit, I can see a lot of improvement and a lot of learning that's happened over the past 4 weeks. And I pray it will continue to get easier as we get our "groove" even more deeply established! I'm so proud of my wiggly, imaginative, talkative, loving, very-much-a-boy first grader, and all he has accomplished so far! I believe he's in the ideal place to learn without destroying those very traits that I love about him.
Excited on the first day of school.
Drake was taking a break and played with Levi for a few minutes. Getting out the dried beans keeps Levi occupied for a L-O-N-G time! (As does filling the sink with bubble water...)
Experiencing fox ears...having large ears really does help you hear better!
That yellow strip at the top of the wall is our history timeline, labeled 5000 BC to 0. (It goes around the dining room and just barely into the kitchen.) This year in history we're doing ancient history, or "Creation to Christ". History is Drake's favorite subject so far, and definitely mine too! It's amazing to actually study history in order and see how the Old Testament lines up with other events and civilizations around the world!
Close-up of our timeline after the first three days. (There are a lot more timeline figures now!)
Hmmm...
It's a "minibeast trap" - our first flopped science experiement. What is the only minibeast ("bug") you can attract in Florida? Ants. We were hoping that maybe we could catch a beetle or something if we checked it early in the morning. Nope.
Drake writing in "cuneiform". (Not really; just pretending. Cuneiform is the oldest known written language, produced by the oldest known civilization, the Sumerians. Cuneiform was actually an alphabet - unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese characters - but it had 600 letters!) Drake had fun with this one, and dried his "cuneiform tablet" in the sun to keep.
We were planning to start homeschooling the first week in August, but when we got our assignment, we decided to bump it up yet another week to provide some extra wiggle-room. So we're toward the end of our fourth week of school now, and I have to say, it's - well - busy! Wow. I feel sorta like Drake when Levi was born. I always say that Drake knew he was going to have a new baby brother, and he had a grasp on what newborn babies are like...but he didn't quite internalize how much the new baby would affect his life. Yeah, that's how this whole homeschool "adventure" feels to me, now that we've almost finished our first month. It has been a major adjustment! I had all the details planned out pretty well, and I did suspect somewhere in the fuzzy recesses of my brain that it wasn't going to be all that easy. But suspecting and experiencing are two very different things!
Anyway, school is actually going quite well, aside from the fact that I feel like I more than earn my keep nowadays! Drake's reading is improving so much, and his desire to do it has improved ten-fold since I shelved his nemesis, the hated reading/phonics lesson book that we'd been using since March. (Planning to start a new phonics program soon, but for now we're reading lots of easy reader books from the library, and he's doing great!) He also no longer tells me he's "not good at math" like he did last year - he actually seems to enjoy math, and he gets at least some satisfaction from successfully mastering new concepts in math. I am very, very thankful that I chose the math curriculum we're using - it seems to fit his learning style very well. He is so not the worksheet type. Not at all. Also, his handwriting is actually legible now, and he forms all the letters correctly, most of the time! (Last year, he had no instruction in "how" to form letters, so he did it in the wackiest ways, like detached balls and sticks all over the place...not conducive to writing with any speed or legibility down the road.) So his handwriting has been "reworked" and I think it's pretty much fixed now - yay!
So all that to say...it feels like a snail's pace sometimes, but now that we've covered enough ground to look back a little bit, I can see a lot of improvement and a lot of learning that's happened over the past 4 weeks. And I pray it will continue to get easier as we get our "groove" even more deeply established! I'm so proud of my wiggly, imaginative, talkative, loving, very-much-a-boy first grader, and all he has accomplished so far! I believe he's in the ideal place to learn without destroying those very traits that I love about him.
Excited on the first day of school.
Drake was taking a break and played with Levi for a few minutes. Getting out the dried beans keeps Levi occupied for a L-O-N-G time! (As does filling the sink with bubble water...)
Experiencing fox ears...having large ears really does help you hear better!
That yellow strip at the top of the wall is our history timeline, labeled 5000 BC to 0. (It goes around the dining room and just barely into the kitchen.) This year in history we're doing ancient history, or "Creation to Christ". History is Drake's favorite subject so far, and definitely mine too! It's amazing to actually study history in order and see how the Old Testament lines up with other events and civilizations around the world!
Close-up of our timeline after the first three days. (There are a lot more timeline figures now!)
Hmmm...
It's a "minibeast trap" - our first flopped science experiement. What is the only minibeast ("bug") you can attract in Florida? Ants. We were hoping that maybe we could catch a beetle or something if we checked it early in the morning. Nope. 
Drake writing in "cuneiform". (Not really; just pretending. Cuneiform is the oldest known written language, produced by the oldest known civilization, the Sumerians. Cuneiform was actually an alphabet - unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese characters - but it had 600 letters!) Drake had fun with this one, and dried his "cuneiform tablet" in the sun to keep.***
Anyway, that's a brief overview of our first few weeks of school. Drake's birthday was on Monday, and he's SEVEN years old now! (How did this happen??!?) His party will be this Saturday, and I'm hoping to post birthday pictures when "birthday week" is officially over.
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