This refers to tonight at Colorama (senior citizens) when our entire family minus Leah helped Matt lead worship.  The older folks love to meet the staff families, to hear special numbers from a variety of people, and of course they adore anything that involves kids.  So we thought it a good audience to break the kids in on.  The boys and Anna first helped dad with the motions on "Upside Down" a youth camp favorite.  Then Anna did her first solo with dad accompanying on the guitar "You Are my Sunshine".  She did VERY well and sang confidently...and on key!  Then we sang one of the worship songs from our Sovereign Grace album....Anna and I did the echo part.  Then Matt and I closed with "Be Thou My Vision".  Everyone did well.  David was cracking me up...I had given them strict instructions on being polite and all during dinner and session.  I had mentioned not picking our noses unless we had kleenex (David's been struggling with a runny nose and congestion still).  So they are all up there in a row, and I notice David dropped his kleenex out of his pocket on the way up.  I can see that he wants badly to wipe his nose, but he can obviously hear my words ringing in his ears.  His hand inches up there and then back down, then instinctually inches back up...he's just dying to pick it, but no...back down.  Finally after much internal struggle he turns away from the audience and takes a quick swipe with his sleeve.    I appreciated the fact that he was trying. 

We've gotten 3 full days of school in, and are slowly inching our way back on the laundry.  Some school highlights include the boys learning how to use the < and > signs in Math.  Oh, and also they learned how to carry the one in double digit addition!  Exciting stuff!  We started learning some prefixes in phonics to add to our list of suffixes.  I decided that I am incredibly tired of the never-ending parade of illogical sounds.  Why does "ea" have to make three different sounds....two of which make absolutely no sense at all??  (as in leaf, steak and thread)  I will be glad when we leave phonics behind next year. 

Anna has now learned all of her vowels and will be starting to put them together with consonants at the end of this week.  I'm looking forward to that.  I think it will be easier for her to nail the vowel sounds when she starts regularly blending them with consonant sounds.  Did you ever think about how similar the short vowels are?  There's barely a difference btw. short a and short e....or short e and short i for that matter.  She gets better at it each day.  Math has been very easy for her so far, hardly anything new.  Oh, you know what's funny?   She's known the abc song forever, I assumed she knew all her letters....BUT when we actually broke it down and I had her pointing to each letter, I discovered that in the middle she was kind of saying "elemenopee" all together.  She had no idea how that divided into letters!   SO we slowed it way down and now she can actually say AND point with confidence "L, M, N, O and P".  Cute. 

Lastly, Matt got me the new Beth Moore Bible study for my birthday...the one on Daniel.  I've been enjoying getting into that.  Borrowed the session CDs from a friend.  The first session...I wasn't so sure.  Beth is such a southern girl to the core....she's full of "Amens" "Do ya hear what I'm sayin?" "Dear sister"...."beloved", etc. etc.  It always takes cynical me a bit to get used to her speaking style again. I have an annoying tendency to be suspicious of people who express alot of emotion...I need to get over it!  I really should know better with Beth Moore....goodness, I feel like she's family after all the Bible studies I've done 'with' her!  Session 2 was on Daniel 2....nebuchadnezzar's dream.  It was breathtaking!  I loved seeing how things were written in the Bible 100s of years before they actually happened.  There's even a prophecy in Isaiah which used the NAME of a ruler (Cyrus) many, many years before he ever came to rule.  Wow.  And Beth is so good about cross referencing things in the NT as well as the OT.  She always wants us to see how things fit together in the big picture.  We looked at all the places where Christ is referred to as a stone.  Also a place in the OT where the altar of sacrifice had to be built from UNCUT stones that had never been worked on with human hands.  (this is all referring to the uncut stone which toppled the statue in the dream)  Love it.  I think I will enjoy this study.  The first half focuses on integrity in the culture of "Babylon" and the second half is more on eschatology.  Thanks to my hubby, who knew how much I wanted to do it!  What a great guy!