Reading Home Improvement 1-2-3 to Wyatt
Garrett has been maturing and growing a lot in the past year or so. Although I don't have as many catchy quotes from him anymore, it's fun to look back at many of the ways he is maturing and learning. Here's the latest from the past several months:
7/9/13
I walked into Garrett’s room to get him up from quiet time today, and he was working furiously on a lock for his door. He had a system that he told me about in vivid detail that included a rubber band that wrapped around the latch and then a “shooter” on the other end that had a rubber band to hold it on. He also confidentially showed me the McDonald’s Spy Gear toy that shoots a red “bullet” out of it. He had it in his pocket to “be prepared” and to protect himself from bad people who might want to take him. The bullet would shoot out and hit them in the eye. I think we have a future gun owner/engineer??
Garrett has been enjoying summer camp at Cross of Christ. He
likes being with the other kids even though they are younger than him. Today
when I picked him up, all the kids said, “Goodbye Garrett!” and waved at him, and another kid had given
him a paper of letters he had stamped.
Garrett is devouring books on the solar system right now and
can tell me lots of things I didn’t know about different planets, stars, etc.
It’s so fun to see him poring over books that are probably 3rd-4th
grade reading level, and loving all of the new information he is getting.
7/21/13
Garrett, who has apparently been reading everything in sight: “I notice that many of the things in the United
States of America are from the Island of China.”
8/19/13
Today we started our first day of Kindergarten home school!
I decided last-minute that this was the day, and so I told Garrett this morning.
He immediately looked up sharply and then said, “And let’s do full-day
Kindergarten.” He loved it and we all got tired out!
Highlights I wrote down one week (evidently it had been
tough and I was looking for rays of sunshine):
When I forgot to pray at lunch, Garrett noticed and said,
“Let’s pray.”
We’ve been doing round-the-table prayers and the boys pray
more readily when we do this, and enjoy it.
Wade folding hands by himself to pray.
The boys holding hands spontaneously.
All 3 playing sweetly together.
Garrett saying politely but
firmly to a bossy lady at the rec center playground who yelled at them to go
down the slide on their “butt”: “That’s not an appropriate word.” (Not that
butt is the worst word in the world, but I was happy Garrett stood up to that
lady and was aware that there are nicer ways of saying it!)
Tonight Garrett asked me out of the blue at dinner, “What
happens to the atoms, and even the protons, electrons and even photons when we
cut paper with scissors?”
Last year at school Garrett loved saving the cups and little
paper plates from the snack at school. He would sneak them into his backpack.
He loved doing “church service” for us. Standing on the bed,
he’d have a stream of consciousness song come out saying things like, “God
loves us, He does not hate us!”
Garrett: “The things that are hard I do first, and then I’ll
do the fun things.”
Garrett, starry eyed in his bed after reading: “Mom, someday
I want to build a model rocket that comes in the mail and fly it around the
world.”
Wants to be a chemist, like Daddy.
Garrett and Wyatt have named their mini-tower fans. G’s is
Joe Joe. W’s is Pee Wee. J
Garrett told me he really wants to learn more about the
Bible. Later that day I gave him the kids’ section out of the Answers In
Genesis magazine and told him it would help him learn more about the Bible, and
he ran upstairs to read it saying, “Yes!!”
Garrett notices that Uncle
Wiggly is a gentleman because he thinks of others and is nice to others. As Jim
was snow-blowing he said, “Our Daddy is a gentleman."
Garrett has been devouring "Home Improvement 1-2-3, and can spout off whole sections of memorized material, telling me how to fix things that I've never even considered learning how to fix! His memory is amazing.
Being an inventor is probably Garrett's greatest aspiration right now. He is constantly trying to think of new things to invent!
Before Thanksgiving, he started drawing some amusing cartoons about a turkey so I encouraged him to draw them in a book and he dictated to me what to write. Here are the pages of the book:
