Wil got in to the spirit of 'The Silver Chair'. One night after reading he said he was looking forward to learning what happened. Then he said 'I jolly well want to know what happens next'. :-)

Wil is a sweet boy

Wil is, in many ways, at the perfect age. He's so helpful right now, it's crazy. Christine's got him earning money based on how many chores he does and he's absolutely looking for ways to do more. Yes, he's earning his way to a Nintendo DS. But he's also pretty happy doing the work. You might now believe it, but I promise you it's not all about the money.

When he wakes up in the middle of the night, he usually comes to our bed. These days, he's putting on his school clothes first so he'll be ready! When we wake up, in our bed, he's dressed! It's crazy!

He's often funny, too. Tonight he was being funny about me telling him what's going to happen in The Silver Chair.

They're learning patriotic songs at school, and he sang My Country 'Tis of Thee, just lying there in the bed, and it was beautiful enough to make you cry.

Then he got to talking about how people must be crazy to think Texas is sandy and has cactuses and cowboys, because he's been to Texas and he didn't see one grain of sand! In fact, he saw snow! It was so funny!

(I did tell him there were some big parts of Texas he hadn't seen :-) He said 'Oh')

And then I had to tell him it was time for bed. I said 'I'd rather keep talking with you and listening to you sing, but you've got to get to sleep so you can have a good day at school tomorrow.'

He said 'Are you serious?'

Oh yes, dear boy. I'm serious. I'd love for this moment to just go on and on and on...

2 in 30 minutes

Wil lost two teeth today - one on the bottom during supper and one on the top when we were clearing off the table. It hasn't been so long since he pulled one during lunch at school. We've lost track, but we think that makes 7.

Wil's Frends and the Time Mushen* by Wil

Wil was walking in the woods and fell down a hole. He was about to fall down into water and stop. Wil thought he was flying. Then two friends of his, the Dukes, appeared. I mean out of nowhere. But a time machine was with them.

"Where'd you get that?" asked Wil.
"Stole it," replied Rachel.
"Why?" asked Wil.
"The villain stole it from our dad," said William.
"The who?" said Wil.
"Villain," replied William.
Wil's eyes bugged out.
"What?" said Wil.
"Villain," said William.
"Did you say villain?"
"Yes," said William.
"Villain?" repeated Wil.
"Last time yes!"
Wil thought he would puke.
"Anyway," said William, "let's go get Beth."
"What?" asked Wil.
"You know," said Rachel.
"I do? I do!"

After they picked up Beth, they picked up Aubrey. Then Beth asked, "What did you pick us up for?"
"Bowler Hat Guy is on the move, and he's looking for you, Wil," William replied.
"Why me?" asked Wil.
"You've got the time machine he needs."
Wil remembered his time machine. But they were driving in William's time machine that Wil helped build. Wil thought that the Bowler Hat Guy was wanting to be king.

And he was right. Not too far away was the Bowler Hat Guy. He was following them, hoping that they would give him directions. Then Wil saw him and said, "To my house!" Then they zoomed to his house. (Picture of) four time machines in the races.

Doris went out of the ship and chased Wil. He operated time travel and poof disappeared.

To be continued.


*Wil's Friends and the Time Machine, edited for spelling and punctuation by Momma. The editor regrets that the original may be too hard to decipher for the uninitiated.

He's always Harry Potter-n to me

The twins don't pronounce his name 'Harry Pottern' anymore, but I still prefer it. Two stories that come from Christine having recently read them Prisoner of Azkaban:

1. Christine loves Jim Dale's reading of the Harry Potter books. She basically listens all the way through all of the books and then starts over. Sometimes she throws in a Jane Austen book on tape in the middle. And she mostly listens in the kitchen while she cooks or washes dishes, so, hey, she can listen to whatever she wants as far as I'm concerned. (Well, not Rush Limbaugh or similar...).

Anyway, we often describe Jim Dale in passing as 'the best reader in the world' or some such. But Bethy is firm that she likes Christine's reading better than Jim Dale's. I think, in Christine's estimation, this is about the nicest compliment she has ever gotten.

2. One night Wil said 'If I was a student at Hogwarts, and they had Guard Boys, and a dementor tried to mess with me, I'd be, like, 'Oh yeah, well I know a lot of spells! EX-PECT-O PA-TRO-NUM!'

What's better than working on one laptop?

We drove about 6 hours Friday night, heading back home from visiting my baby brother, Ryan, and his family in Houston. We finally made it to Vicksburg, Mississippi and up to our room in the Holiday Inn Express. The twins were ready for bed, in their pajamas, and I pulled out my laptops to start working. I said, 'Hey Bethy, do you know what's better than working on one laptop?' ;-)

I had supposed when I got my new work laptop that I would switch completely to it and pass on my personal laptop to Christine.

But I don't like my company Dell Latitude D620 as well as I like my personal Compaq Presario V5000. I much prefer the Compaq's HD widescreen and the 'touch' of the touchpad and the wider keyboard layout.

Plus, I can only access the company intranet on the company laptop because it requires VPN. And the company network requires Internet Explorer which I can use, of course, but which I do not like to use regularly. I'm a power Firefox user, using many keyboard shortcuts and keyword bookmarks that don't work in IE. There are still many things I can do for work outside of the company intranet, with Firefox, but going back and forth between VPN/IE and normal Internet/Firefox is annoying.

Solution: Work on both laptops at the same time. And it's working great.

Question: Is Christine left in the lurch? I don't think so, but she can comment here differently, if necessary. I can easily make one laptop at least partially available to her almost any time. And she still has the desktop...

We'll see how we adapt going forward, but that's the current configuration.

What can make you happier than opening your son's door to check on him and finding him reading his new Bible that he got for Easter?

Nope. I can't think of anything, either :-)

Probably too early to call him Bible Boy, but it has a nice ring to it ;-)

I said, 'Someone in this van has really good taste.' And Bethy said "Who, you and me?"

;-)

The Little Lepercon
by Elizabeth K. Meade
(all spelling, grammar and punctuation are original to the author)

One day a little lepercon named Lucky was looking for a good place to hide his gorld. He was defently, defently not goning to put it at the end of a rainbow! The last time he did some one stole it! He did not want that to happin agin. So, he set off to fide a plase. Now, after he had ben looking so, so long he finly fond a plase to hide it. Then...

he went back to his secrat cave to rest. When he wock up, he went back to his gorld, brot it back and, went to town. But Lucky forgot how to get thear. Can you help lucky get to town?

Hint: the right one has a fork. Take the left one. (Momma's note: the original story has a maze drawn here.)

Well, when he finlly go to town he went to a secret shop to buy some food, for his dinner. He had chang left so he bot ice cream for dsert. Then he went home, so he cold eat. It was a good diner.

The next day was veary difent. In the morny he had what he always had. Lucky Charms! They were good! Then he had his moring walk in the woods. He fond some gorld! He was in luck!

Lucky toke the gorld. He went to his cave and put it in his gorld mine. Lucky had a lot of gorld!

Bye that time he was ready for some lunch. It was good. He desided to read some tips form his Tips On How to Be a Leprechaun book. He was on tip #1,005. He LOVED reading his book. Well, this is prity much waht he did for the next 5 days. No one knows what hapened ater that. So you can see I cnat tell you what happed. So your going to have to fide that out from Lucky the little lepercon.

Momma's notes: I love the twins' stories. I can't remember a time that I didn't enjoy writing, but I certainly don't remember writing such elaborate stories when I was 7-years-old! I am very pleased with how much Elizabeth's spelling has improved since she started speech therapy in December. The obvious exception here is the r- before l- in "gold," but that's fairly close to how she says it. Some of her other misspellings, I think, are still a factor of a slight southern accent, e.g. "going to" often pronounced "gonna" becomes "goning" because she knows from reading how it's suppose to be spelled but that's not how she says it. "Finally" gets spelled "finlly" because the "a" is slurred or skipped. I also think it's interesting to note that she looked up how to spell "leprechaun" for the title of a book but not for the title of her story. I love, love, love watching my kids learn!

Last night Wil and I dropped off Sean at the airport for his trip to DC and NYC. On the return trip from the airport, we played Clone Wars in the car. Sean was an Arc Trooper (?) leaving for battle. Wil's and my mission was to go pick up the princess. I was the pilot. Wil was the gunner. We had two "pretend" missile loaders in the back. The UPS trucks were on our side. We saw a lot of UPS trucks headed east on I-26 so that was fun. This morning Wil continued the game with a new mission of destroying the shield generators at the Leaphart base from the inside. I made a big point of saying that today was only a spy mission. They were there to collect data, not to draw attention to themselves, to behave, stay on green, and keep their undercover secret. It would really spoil the game to have Wil destroy anything at school.

Paidion hellainikon

(That's a HORRIBLE Greek translation for 'Greek children'. Anybody want to help out, I'll accept it :-)

We're into Greek Myths around our house these days. It started with the Disney 'Hercules', but happily progressed nicely into the real classics. It's sent me to the library to pick up some good kids' books and to Wikipedia, etc to refresh my own memory. And I found this cool site as a result: Theoi Project.

Eirainai ;-)

I didn't mean to make Bethy cry.

I asked the twins last night at the supper table if they would still love me when I have robot hands...

It's just a nod to the fact that I use my hands and arms a lot, especially for computer work, and they alternately burn and hurt in different places from the shoulders down (especially across the backs of my hands these days). I think it's a live possibility, if not a certainty, that I will need surgery someday.

And I've said this to Christine before. She said 'yes'. ;-)

But it made poor Bethy cry. Of course, she'd had a big day, so maybe she was emotionally fragile.

She came and sat on my lap for a little while. Poor Bethy!

After school Elizabeth said, "I bet I can make my tooth fall out today." I had no idea what she was talking about. Sure enough, she lost her tooth while eating a snack. I thought she was throwing up. I didn't even know her tooth was loose! That makes #7.

It's a big week for our second graders! Today was Bear Day. It started with a 2-hour delayed opening because of snow! Once at school, they had a teddy bear parade and snacks including Teddy Grahams and hot chocolate. They've been learning lots of bear facts and riddles. Wil's favorite - what bear does not need water its entire life and why? A teddy bear! Because it's not alive, of course.

Tomorrow is the big Habitat presentation. Wil studied beavers and Elizabeth chose sea lions. It's been frustrating at times coaching them through it, but in the end I am very proud of their work and how much they learned. Next up - famous Americans. Stay tuned!

Elizabeth received big news at ballet today. Her teacher would like her to start practicing with the next class up (D1) beginning next week. Her teacher said Elizabeth is progressing rapidly and that if she works hard over the summer, she could move up another level (D2) in the Fall. Elizabeth was quite overwhelmed by this development and isn't sure she wants to move up so fast. I told her she didn't have to do anything but try next week and see how she feels. It'll mean 75 minutes of ballet on Mondays with a 30 minute break between classes. I'm not sure she has the stamina at this point, but her teacher told her she could just start off with the barre exercises in the second class and go from there.

I suggested we go out to eat tonight to celebrate the good news. Elizabeth picked Wendy's chicken nuggets and frosty. Oh so glamorous.

Ten, 20, 30 years from now, I want to remember how the twins looked as they raced across the wet grass to get into the car to go to school. Lunch boxes in hand, their school bags, half as big as they are, bouncing on their backs.

Wil and Elizabeth are 7-1/2 years old today. Happy half-birthday!

Bethy was looking at Wikimapia over my shoulder and said 'I didn't know Canada was a country. I thought it was a state.'

I said 'It should be...'

No, not really ;-)

Then she said Daddy, who's the president of Canada and I said I have no idea.

Update: She's lying on the floor right now waiting on me and she said It would be fun if the house was upside down.

Hands in pockets

Wil's got this incredibly cute new habit where he puts his hands in his pockets. It doesn't seem to be out of insecurity. It just looks like it feels comfortable to him. He does it so much that when I put my hands in my pockets, it reminds me of him. I *feel* like him. Makes me smile :-)

Wil to Sean: What if a kid went to college before he was even finished with first grade, and when he finished college he got to stay home until he was grown up.

Sean: That's the part you'd like.

Wil: Yeah.

Elizabeth's "Lightning Share"

At school on Wednesday: I have some good news, some more good news, some more good news, and some bad news. The good news is I finally got my room organized, yesterday was my Daddy's birthday, and I got another American Girl doll for Christmas. The bad news is that my Barbie mall is in the middle of my room and all the stuff fell out, so it looks like my room is messy, but it really isn't.

Update: The Barbie mall got cleaned up and put in the closet. Elizabeth's room is now the cleanest, most organized room in the house. It's inspiring. If she can do it, anyone can.