Just Some Stuff

Today was the WOL Conference. The name was changed to Flashpoint, I guess they are trying to keep us on our toes :) It was really exciting, I learned a lot. It used to be 2 days, but I liked the quick 1 day, and I feel like I learned so much in such a short time. There was a video message from Mike Calhoun, which was really great, gave me so much to think about and learn. The Conference got me excited about a whole new year of Olympian Club (and Gopher Buddies and Teen Club, too) starting up again. Of course, when I got home and started working on the actual work for tomorrow night's meeting, I started to get a bit nervous. I have a lot of work to do still! I am excited to see where this year leads our church, team, the kids, and the families we work with! New year's are exciting, new quiet times, new lessons to teach, new ideas to implement.

Calvin has really been enjoying his new Quiet Time. I love how he likes to "read" the Bible scripture for his Quiet Time on his own. Well, he more then likes to, he almost demands to. Of course, "reading" it on his own means that he holds his Bible (we found a little Bible that is just his size, that is actually a real Bible, Old and New Testaments, and not just a Bible Storybook) and then me reading over his shoulder one or two words at a time and then him repeating after me. It is really cute to hear him pronounce some of those big words, he says them so carefully, obviously trying to be very grown up.

Listening to Calvin "read" his Bible each night, has got me to thinking about how different my three kids have been with reading. I am a BIG believer in reading to babies pretty much from day one. I like 1st Birthday presents to be mostly books (they are too young to complain about a lack of toys.) and actually if you keep giving books they get so used to it, that they like it for a long time, hopefully forever.

I think maybe the major reading to my kids started when Diane was a baby, and I was nanny/babysitter to Clay. Clay was 4 years old and would bring me literally like 30-40 books at a time, and I am telling you that is NOT an exaggeration at all. Then he would sit next to me, Diane on my lap (and I mean she was a little baby, not even one) and then on the other side of me was the giant stack of books. Then I would read and read to them both for hours and hours at a time. (Of course, Clay's Mom liked to read to him as a baby as well, which helped to create this book-loving 4 year-old). Not only was he a book-lover, he was the smartest kid, I mean SO smart. He used to only not want to read, if he could watch Bobby's World or Where in the World is Carmen Sandigo. And this 4 year-old knew the answers to those Geography questions, too. He would also work on his "inventions", and I mean he would say, "Well, I have to go and work on my inventions" at 4! Then he would take all these odds and ends of toys and make some kind of creation and it would actually DO something every time. I tell you, everyday was an adventure. Someday, we will all be using something, that is quite a wonderful new convience to us all, and it will have been invented by Clay, I promise you that.

Anyway, I quickly learned that the only way to read that many children's stories at a time, without slowly losing your mind, was to read the stories really dramatically. So I would kinda make a game out of seeing just how dramatically I could tell the stories. I would give all the character's voices, read fast when they were running, slowly whisper when they were falling asleep (the characters not the kids, they stayed awake for all the stories). Clay and Diane both would just sit and listen so well. I thank Clay for the fact that Diane from before she was even 1 year old would literally sit, quietly, and listen to anything I tried to read her. And I can probably give him a big thanks that my little baby spoke in complete sentences before she was even 1 years old. She probably got that great vocublary from all those books.
When Andrew came along he was totally different. He didn't want to hear the "Real" story of "The 3 Little Pigs" as told by the Big Bad Wolf (which was one of my favorites), he didn't want to hear about Rainbow Fish's adventures, Amelia Bedelia, and he really didn't care for green eggs and ham, and he really did mean it Sam-I-Am. But, much to my great delight- I hope you added a sarcastic tone when you read that last part- Andrew LOVED to read about sharks, whales, dolphins, other sea-life, but mostly sharks. And his favorite books to read about sharks was non-fiction. Yeah. Do you have any idea how interesting reading book after, non-fiction book about sharks is? Not much. He memorized exactly where the non-fiction books about sharks were in the Children's Department of the library by the time he was 2. He would run to that spot, and pull a half a dozen of the books off the shelf to take home. I would read them, and then if I would try to do that cheating thing that parent's do where you try to just shorten the story and just tell it by the pictures, you know, "There was a gray shark, a black and white whale, they were swimming.." Anything to get done with that book that seemed so long! (Some of them would take a good hour just to read one book!) Andrew never fell for that, he would say, "NO! NO!" and cry if I didn't just read it right. So here I was with my 2 year old, reading about how sharks have cartilage instead of bones, and that the whale shark was the largest, and how many different species there were and how to identify them, and where they were from, and what kind of water do they like, and how they find their shark dinners. I would like to tell you if you need any info on sharks I can help you out, but it was so boring to me, that I literally just read it and didn't really put it in my mind as I read. (Maybe just like what you are doing if you are still reading this blog.) Still, it is a good memory, because it was time spent with my little guy. The cool thing about it was that when he was about 2 1/2 we took him to an aquarium and when the other kids were asking the guy that worked there what some of the fish were, Andrew answered them. Seriously shocked the aquarium dude, let me tell ya. Then when we took him to the movie "Finding Nemo" and please don't judge him too harshly for doing this, he had never been to see a movie in the theater before this.. . It was the part where the little fish are swimming to the light, and trying to figure out what it was, and this little kid somewhere behind us was saying, "What is it? What is it?" and Andrew turned around and yelled, "IT'S AN ANGLER FISH!" When they had the chance to touch sting-rays at Sea World, Diane reached right out and touched, but Andrew refused absolutely, he would not go near it. Months later at my parents they were arguing about who was braver and Diane said, "You wouldn't even touch the sting-rays!" and Andrew said, "Uh-Yeah, why would I? They are STING-rays!"

Now, I have Calvin, and I am experiencing a completely unique reading experience once again. Calvin loves books, and all kinds, the only thing is, he has to read them to you! He can't stand to have you read to him, it drives him crazy. He doesn't even do well with storybooks, having me tell him the words, like he lets me to do with his Bible. He has to just take the book, look at the pictures, and "read" the story himself. He does do quite well at Toddler Time at the library relinquishing control and allowing them to read to him, but at home, there is very little that he lets us read to him. It all started with these books about babies which were his favorites. He loved books that had pictures of real babies in them. And these books would have a picture of a baby on one side, and the other would be like one word. Like a baby with a fireman's hat- FIREMAN. Calvin would memorize these and then "read" them to us. Now he just takes any old book and reads it to us. It is really interesting to find out what is really happening in these stories that I thought I knew. But then again, everything is pretty "interesting" in Calvin's world.