Sunday, June 22, 2008

Summer lovin'

We could spend lots of money and go to the real swimming pool. Mitchell does need to keep practicing his 'ice cream scoop arms' (direct quote from his swim teacher), but look what we can do instead! Just blow up our pool, put it in the basement and everybody's happy. We don't get sunburned; we don't drown; we don't have to put our head in the water (Ethan brags that he still didn't have to do that in his pre-swim lessons). And the real great thing is we are not wasting our precious resource of water. Pats on the back and on the wallet all around. Speaking of swimming lessons, isn't it my great luck that the second my kids were done the weather got nice and hot again? They actually had swimming lessons in the pouring rain this year. Glad Hub was the spectator on that day!
On another note---a major accomplishment has occurred. I have actively been trying to get Isaac into reading. He reads just fine but he doesn't enjoy it. This drives me slightly crazy since he would cause much less havoc in our home if he was just in his room quietly reading. That's not really the reason why I want him to read, but wouldn't it be a nice bonus? I have tried all the different series and he likes them enough, but not enough to want to pick them up on his own to read. He picks sports books when we go to the library and that's great that he knows where Grant Hill was born, but you can't really lose yourself in that kind of book. So in addition to our own reading program (Ike's prizes are an icee, a can of grape soda, a trip to the dollar store---isn't it great how simple that is?) I told him I would let him watch the Harry Potter movies once he had read each of the books.
He read for two and a half hours yesterday to finish and watched the first movie last night. Half the fun for him was telling his brothers they couldn't watch it yet. (They watched The Neverending Story a couple weeks ago and now Mitch won't go downstairs alone and Ethan likes to bring up how scary it was). So yay. Ike read a whole big book with little prompting on my part. He starts on the second book tomorrow.
The End.
confessional: We will be putting water in the swimming pool tomorrow. The wasted water is worth ending the indoor wrestling mat.

7 comments:

Reg said...

That's great for Issac.

I love Harry Potter too. Once I poked fun at one of my college instructors for reading it a second time; then I got sucked in and waited very impatiently for each book to come out.

Of course it can go too far. I spent many an hour reading Louis L'Amour and The Black Stallion under my school desk.

hOLLIANN said...

Well, since I am not much of a reader either, unless of course there are pictures, I do have to say that after reading the title I was pleasantly surprised of the contents in your blog post, albeit reading. And to quote your comment on my blog, "I think that's romantic how it can have more than one meaning."

cold cocoa said...

We do ice cream scoop arms too! And airplane..motorboat?

So the real question is, do you like HP now? I know you were being contrary just to be different. Which isn't really different at all...

The Allreds said...

Fun to see how a pool can be used for different purposes! Hopefully filling with water tomorrow will be from the hose and not rain droplets. I'm beginning to wonder with the thunder I just heard!?!?
Sooooo proud of Isaac for finishing his BIG book! Maybe I could join your book club and you could teach me how to enjoy a BIG book. The ladies sitting with me at the YW dinner were talking about the Vampire series and couldn't believe I hadn't touched one...
guess I'm NOT as cultured as I had hoped but at least I'll complete the cover to cover challenge for RS : )

LC said...

I'm having the same challenge with Kate. She only likes Junie B. Jones. I'd feel better if she was learning something besides sassy backtalk. I know she would just love to sass her sisters about being the only one able to watch HP. It would have the added benefit of scaring her into stop begging for her own room in the basement.

TisforTonya said...

there are so many good series for kids... Harry Potter is a surefire winner of course, and just don't mention that the last few movies aren't made and maybe he'll finish reading them anyway... wait, hmmm... maybe you'd better preview them first given his young impressionable age (T&W loved them all... Po hasn't gotten past Magic Treehouse and Timewarp Trio yet)

Sherie Christensen said...

My problem with Connor is that he reads too much. We actually had to take away his books the other day for reading them when he was supposed to be sleeping. (There is a bit of a story with that but we'll skip it). Now I just need to convince Jake and Dan to love to read too. I'll keep your method in the back of my mind just in case.