23-Jul-08 - Graduated!

Yesterday evening Liam finished lesson 100 of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Towards the end there, we were really just trying to get through it, although the regular practice time was certainly beneficial. They ended with a pretty stupid story about an old man hunting a tiger that turned out to be tame. Liam much preferred the mouse and the bed bugs. I'm rather glad to be able to move on to my own material now, although I was certainly impressed with the way the book transitioned him from non-reader into being able to sound out completely new words.

Today the boys got their final Matchbox cars - Liam got one every 10 lessons, as promised early on when he found the challenge of learning to read to be too frustrating. Liam got a dark green Land Rover [Excuse me, RANGE Rover; this distinction is important to Damian. But he admits that he did tell us originally it was a Land Rover to avoid confusion - ha!] with a trailer hitch and Parker got a gold Porsche convertible. But the crowning touch, as a graduation celebration, was that Liam got his own UPS truck. He came to me a little while later and said, "Now we have two UPS trucks... Now we don't have to fight over the UPS trucks anymore!"

*****

Liam seems very tired lately. At least, he says he is. I tell him to get dressed and he cries out, "I'm just so tired of putting things on and taking them off!" You would think I ran a 3-hr daily fashion show. He is tired of having "10-minute church," which we usually do twice a day. He is tired of this, tired of that.

I had to send him to the brown chair again. The policy has become more clear cut lately. Whining automatically gets the perpetrator 10 minutes in the brown chair. Fighting gets them both 15 minutes. The timer is set, and there is no more "Can I get down yet?" to deal with (or at least, there is a pat answer). As Liam went to the chair just now, he screamed, "I'm so tired of climbing up in this chair!"

I notice he is not tired of swinging a tennis racquet on the courts in the 101-degree sun.