“Um…I don’t think so,” he’d say.

And then, someone asked me, “Is Elijah’s voice changing?!”

“What?!” I said, “I don’t think so, I think he just has a cold.”

But they were right, of course, unless he’s had a cold for the last two months, and Elijah has a rock-solid immune system, so that’s unlikely.

They saw what I didn’t want to see: My baby boy – little Eli-guy – is on the threshold of becoming a man. Can you believe it?

And the crackily, hi-low voice? It’s really cute!

P.S. This pic makes me laugh… Hmmm, maybe that’s a little too high, Elijah?

I love being able to look out my patio door and see a bunch of boys playing a game of pick-up football. (If you look closely at the first photo, you can see our apartment in the background with flowers still stuck on the living room windows, leftover from Phoebe’s birthday party.)

Many hours so far this summer have been spent in fierce competition between all these brothers. For the most part they’re really all quite mature about handling defeat, although, occasionally an impending loss causes one team to storm off. It’s kinda fun to be an observer and just be able to watch kids handle conflict. In my opinion, it’s really good for them.  I definitly lean more towards the “disorganized” side of childhood. I think nowadays kids are in too many organized activities and they aren’t able to have squabbles, and disagreements; they never get a chance to figure out “real life.” I’m immensely grateful to be living in a community where all this can happen!

And it was so special that Grammie Potter was here from Canada for their recital…

One of my all time favorite photos.

But you know what I did? I got so preoccupied with the girls’ hair that I forgot the boys’ hats. These hats…

Arg! I bought them especially for the photo shoot too. *sigh* So, to alleviate how bummed I feel about my forgetfulness, I had to capture their handsomeness in their hats myself.

Sa-weet!

Yesterday, as we were reviewing our geography and history “grammar,” I grinned quietly to myself.  It’s simply astounding how much they’ve learned about these subjects this year.  They’ve far surpassed me!  While I am loving learning everything right along with them, the fact is that I’m just not in the “grammar” stage anymore and memorization doesn’t come as easily to me.  They are able to draw rivers and mountain ranges with precision across the continent of Europe (Europe was our focus this year).  Pin-point European cities and locate tiny countries like Luxembourg, Cyprus and Portugal (which I seriously thought was in South America! *Hangs head in shame*) in a second.

History, though, is my favorite subject.  We’ve memorized 24 history sentences this year and we had fun doing it too! Here is one of their favorite sentences…

World War II. Axis. Ally. I remember learning something about all that in high school.  Probably just enough to pass a multiple choice test!

Another component to their history grammar is all about being able to grasp the scope and sequence of history, from Creation to modern times.  At the beginning of the year, I, grudgingly, purchased this set of history timeline flash cards.  NOT cheap!  BUT…invaluable.  By memorizing 10 cards a week, Elijah and Zeke know 180 events in history… in sequence. I took 30 cards out of the middle of the pack yesterday, shuffled them up and threw then on the floor.  It took them a good 15 minutes…

But they were able to put them in order…

Love it! As a side note, I needed to refer to curriculum guide to check their work. Again, I’ve definitely grown out of the grammar stage! This history grammar, though, is repeated yearly. So I’m hopeful.

Among the many things for which I am extremely thankful for is that Dave has taken on the math portion of homeschooling.  We use Classical Conversations (I’ve blogged about CC before) for the bulk of our homeschooling, and while math “grammer” is part of the “grammar” stage, it’s all about memorization of multiplication tables (skip counting for the young’uns), geometric formulas, conversions and laws.

So, what math curriculum to use? we thought.  It didn’t take long for us to settle on ACE PACES, since this is what Dave grew up with.  They’re really enjoying it so far.  They love that they get to correct their own work.

This story, from March 2009, is one of my favorites too  Elijah has certainly always always had a lot of zeal for truth and justice.

A Series of Unfortunate…Uh Words

If you’ve been reading DJ and the Prophets for a while you might remember this post, my “Series of Unfortunate Events” that happened just about a year ago.  The series of events ended with a rather embarrassing scene at the Bloomington Ice Gardens that involved Noah being carried out against his will screaming, “Me have pee!”  …Oh my.  Too funny.  One of the post’s commenter’s said, “Give it 10 years or so, and I’m sure you’ll giggle.”  Well…it only took a year.

Ok, so, after what happened yesterday, I’m considering avoiding the Bloomington Ice Gardens from now on.  It was again the venue of a rather embarrassing scene; actually, a scene ten times as embarrassing as the one from a year ago.  Mostly because I know (kind of) the people who witnessed it.   Oh dear…

Elijah was invited to a classmates birthday-skating party which was held yesterday at the – you guessed it -Bloomington Ice Gardens.  I dropped him off without incident, helped him lace up his skates and then went of to pick a few things at the grocery store during the party.  I arrived back at the tail end of the party, just as the birthday boy was starting to open his gifts.The scene was quite calm until the third gift was opened.  It was some sort of Pokemon/Digimon oddity. Very strange looking in my opinion and Elijah lost no time pontificating:

“Ok…I really don’t like those things!  You know those are just a fad, don’t you?  It’s like…the media tells us what we’re supposed to want!”  I think he was about to launch into why he didn’t like Pokemon, but I managed to catch his eye and subtly stare him down.  (Ok, so it probably wasn’t so subtle. )

The other kids just stared at him blankly and the parents looked kind of puzzled too.  I just stood silently, willing the floor to swallow me up, not exactly sure what to say.  The hostess broke the ice after a few seconds and said with a chuckle, “Well, Elijah, I guess you should be glad you’re not the one getting the presents then.”

I lost no time in skedaddling from that little scene, obviously, and was thankful to be driving back home, where Elijah’s very zealous words about that third birthday present made perfect sense.

So, I guess we can cross “Immunity to the media monster” off of our parenting check list and move on to tactfulness.