Earlier This Week....

This week was not terribly exciting.

We finished reading Roald Dahl's "The Witches", which we all thoroughly enjoyed. Elijah has been reading "Treasure Hunters" by James Patterson. I bought it for him because it looked interesting. He said he wasn't interested in reading it. A couple days later I told him he HAD to read the first chapter. So he did. And then he was hooked, reading at the most inopportune times...like at midnight, or when I wanted to get his math started for the day. But since I feel as though his reading interests are a little fragile right now, I don't in any way discourage or interrupt it unless we have some place to go.

We did math, writing, and grammar each day this week. I love how Elijah is able to summarize readings the way he does, a skill I never developed. We are plugging on with grammar, although I'm not sure how much is getting through.

Toviel loves explaining to me how he figured out a math problem. Sometimes it takes a lot of time as he is trying to articulate, and it takes a lot of patience on my part to not rush him through it. I know that if one is able to teach someone else something, they will learn or retain 90% of it, so the best way to learn is to teach, which is what he is doing when he is explaining his logic to me.

Tove hates to be alone when I'm teaching Elijah 1:1, so he often ends up sitting at the table and finding something to do. Sometimes it turns into something fantastic and hours of fun.

This week he created a little restaurant with paper. Here he is in his restaurant kitchen.

He set the table up for fine dining.

And here is the meal that I ordered. Spaghetti with a side of salad.

Elijah ended up making collectible cards and selling them in his shop.

On Tuesday Cris and I started building a fence for one of his clients. The hope was to finish it that day, but the holes were dug wrong, so we had to redig them...4 feet deep. I say "we", but it was really "he" who did it. We got the posts cemented in and then I returned on Thursday to put the boards on the stringers, and then again on Friday to put the finishing touches on.

Ahh...what a beautiful fence. The client was over-the-top delighted with it.

On Tuesday the boys went to M's house in Devon for the afternoon. They had a blast and one of them was mad when I showed up to bring them back home. I'm happy that I never had to drop them off and leave them anywhere when and where tears were involved. That is a real gift to me.