Dada and Harvey time
letter formation
I'm on vacation this week and am very much enjoying getting to hang out at home all day and play with both the boys. Besides the regular fun times, though, Harvey and I have been able to do a couple things together that Zion wouldn't be able to keep up with, which I think is good for both of us. At least, it's good for Harvey if we act on the assumption that giving him more attention satisfies his desires for others' focus rather than inflaming it to ever-greater heights. The jury is still out on that one, but lets be optimistic.
Tuesday Zion wasn't feeling very well in the morning and took an early nap, and Harvey and I spent some time building with the big legos. They don't get quite as much play now that the little ones are an option, but they still have their advantages—they were perfect, for example, for experiments in creating letter shapes. Harvey got the idea after making an "H", and we stuck with it through the "Harvey" and "Dada" pictured above, as well as a "Mama", which didn't get photographed as well. We're working on our homeschooling plan for Harvey's kindergarten year (I think Leah has a whole lot more to say about that later) and I felt very pleased with myself at how much Harvey was thinking about letter formation as we made our way through the names. He wanted to keep going, too: Mama had to drag him away for their morning outing to the bounce house!
pushing on
Besides letters, my homeschooling hopes for Harvey also include some good outdoor activity, and the fine weather yesterday let us get an early start on that end of the curriculum too. As seen above in my horrible phone-cam photograph (seriously, it's like the early 2000s back again with the terrible sensor on my phone) we took to the woods for a nice long trek. Well, long for Harvey, anyways, and long for me in duration; but in Harvey's defense he was wearing his snowsuit against the damp and that thing must be hard to walk in. Hot too, since it was well above freezing at the time.
Even I got hot the latter part of the walk as we abandoned the well-trodden path to strike out in a direction where no one had been since two snowfalls ago. Harvey did his noble best to break a trail but got worn out pretty quick and let me take over; the snow was deep and wet enough that it was a fine workout for me too, and he had to work hard to even follow along. But we made it—in high spirits the whole time—and he even had enough energy to run most of the way home on the sidewalk.
All in all our vacation adventures make me a little worried about the homeschool planning: not that he won't be able to keep up, but that he'll quickly outstrip any expectations we come up with and leave us with nothing to do. It's mostly my fault, I think: I can't conceive of a goal without asking him to try the activity out. It was standing on one foot on Monday. Oh well, I suppose that's the beauty of homeschooling; if he finishes the whole kindergarten curriculum by October we'll have more time for dancing and board games—not to mention legos and walks in the snow.