I didn’t know that karate would be such a big hit with Lance. He hadn’t had as much exposure to it as I was taking him to grandma’s house or leaving him at home with daddy while taking the other boys to class. I was surprised in October when we started him and how excited he was. He wanted to go every day for the first little while. He didn’t understand that his class was not every day. I was very happy to see his excitement. He is totally loving it.
Tonight was a reminder of that excitement. He hadn’t been in a couple of weeks because of the holidays and all the stomach bugs going around the family. He went back tonight and he was just as excited as he was the first night he went. It brought a big smile to my face when I asked him to find his karate uniform while I was making dinner and he ran off and immediately found it. He returned and excitedly asked if he needed to put it on yet. I told him he could get dressed after dinner.
He was more than happy to get dressed and find his belt after he forced down half of a grilled tuna fish sandwich. If only grilled tuna fish would get as much excitement out of the children as karate does. Tuna fish was only a hit with Kyle tonight. Lance was complaining about it and I told them that if they didn’t quit complaining I’d feed them fish again tomorrow night. That brought the complaints to an almost screeching halt.
I am so glad that we have managed to find something that each of the boys enjoy in their own special way. It is something that they can share, yet it is something that is unique to each of them. Andrew is a total swordsman. Kyle favors sparring. Lance hasn’t found his niche yet, but he LOVES it.
I am proud of Lance. He is full of surprises sometimes. He’s a rather stubborn child in the sense that he does not necessarily want to let you know that he knows how to do something. So knowing what he knows is hard to determine on most days. I am surprised that he can recognize some letters of the alphabet because he continuously gets them wrong and trying to get him to repeat them is more likely to send me to the loony bin than to yield the results I want.
Today I managed to trick repeated successful counting cycles out of him. Thank goodness for red and green M&M (holiday mixed bag). I heard him count all the way to 7 without hesitation this afternoon. He even managed to tell me how many groups of 3 M&Ms there were. Go Lance! We won’t discuss the number of M&Ms he actually ate as a result of the exercise, but mommy was happy to hear that he could actually count to 7 without hesitation.
We picked back up the “reading book” today as well. I started him in the book How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy lessons shortly after Andrew and Kyle went back to school. It was slow going with him. He doesn’t want to focus at all. Sometimes we’d only get through maybe a quarter of the lesson before I was ready to put it away. Today we did pick it back up though. We started back 1 lesson from where we left off. Most of the lesson was review and he was able to tell me all the sounds that were in the lesson so I decided that was where we would start.
We managed to get through 2 lessons today. We didn’t do the writing portions of the lessons, but I wasn’t going to press my luck with him. He was kind of focusing and paying attention and he was willingly doing part of it. I was going to take as much as I could get out of him. Today, he managed to read 3 words all by himself – mat, sat, and am. I know this is nothing spectacular to most people, but Lance is so proud of himself. I am stinking proud of him too. Of course, he did surprise me that he already knew what sounds “t” and “r” made before I even got through the start of the corresponding lesson.
Speaking of reading, I may have to soon start taking donations for Kyle’s book fund. Notice I said, Kyle’s book fund and not Andrew’s book fund? Not too long ago it would have been Andrew’s book fund, but he’s slowed down considerably and he’s content to reread books repeatedly. Kyle on the other hand, I can’t keep the books in front of him long enough to take a breath. I only find this amusing because it wasn’t too long ago that he simply would not read anything that was put in front of him. Now he can plow through a book at stunning speeds. I am delighted to feed the hunger, but between the literal hunger and the belly hunger of 3 growing boys…
The weather is unusual in the greater Houston Metro area right now. Harsh winter conditions would not be what I would use to describe what we are experiencing right now when you compare it to other areas, but for Gulf Coast Texas this can be considered harsh. As of 10pm tonight, the temperature was already at 36˚F and falling. They are expecting us to hit about 26˚F tonight where we are out in the far northwest quadrant of the metro area.
The strange twist to our local weather is that they are saying that there is once again a possibility of snow in our forecast. We just got snow about 4 weeks ago. We had snow last year and the year before. That would put us with snow 3 years in a row. I am not sure that this happens. Typically, snow is a rare and novel phenomenon that occurs every 10-12 years. Yes, this is all very strange to us Texans who don’t normally experience more than a few hours of “hard freeze” conditions every winter. We’ll be pretty darn close to that tonight.
They are saying (currently, as this could change as it is already colder than they expected) that by Thursday night we will be experiencing temperatures in upper teens. The same is likely for Friday night as well. The freezing temperatures are expected to stick around (overnight lows) through Sunday. They are saying snow is possible on Thursday or Friday.
It will be interesting to see what the weatherman has to say about the weather in the morning. All I know is that my toes are cold. My toes were so cold last night that I had to lay the heating pad over my feet to warm my feet up enough to fall asleep last night. Yes, my feet were that cold. I had a comforter and thick wool blanket on the bed and I still had to get the heating pad out to warm my feet. I am sure tonight will be no different. Just thinking about the temperatures that are still on the descent is bringing on the shivering and the aching coldness in my toes.
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