My Darlings...

I love being a mother. I especially love my darling children. Lately, they have all been relatively well behaved, cooperative, and just plain sweet. :)

Sabrina volunteers to do the dishes and finds other things that need to be done around the house and just does them without being asked. What a dear! :) She also is one of those people who was just born organized...must've inherited that from Jeff's mother. :) Her room is nearly always clean. I mean really clean. The boys try to play in there sometimes when their room is too messy to play in. Eli's drawers are currently kept in Sabrina's closet and she'll organize his clothes every now and then. Sometimes she tidies up the big desk in the office, just because. Occasionally, she'll attempt to work on tidying my bedroom, but that's where I draw the line.

Leif helps out a lot with Eli, especially since I told him the secret to getting Eli to love you forever: give him yummy food. Leif had one bite left of his cinnamon roll the other day when Eli walked up, held out his hand, and sweetly said "please." Leif broke his last tiny piece in half and shared with Eli. Since then, Eli has been Leif's little shadow.

Leif and Sabrina are both really awesome at coming home and doing homework without being asked. Leif even practices the violin without me having to remind him. I hope to have him start piano lessons next summer. I think he would really like it and we already have a piano! :) I know, concert pianists start lessons earlier, but that's not what I have in mind for Leif. I would love to give all of our children the opportunity to learn, in my opinion, the most useful instrument to know how to play. It is a gift they can share with others in their home, at church, and elsewhere on a potentially regular basis.

Anders had declined opportunities to read with me during the summer months, so I was a bit concerned with how he'd fare starting out 1st grade. He's more willing to read now that school has begun and has surpassed the level I thought he was at. In retrospect, I believe it was our 2-volume "complete collection" of The Far Side comics that he had his nose in almost every day this summer that helped him improve his reading. Isn't that crazy? Only once in a while did he spell a word out loud for one of us advanced readers to tell him what it read. Smart little cookie! He was reading the whole summer and I didn't even realize it!

Eli is the biggest little darling in our family right now. He's talking in adorably cute complete sentences and is really hard to say "no" to. The other night when I asked him to pick out some PJs to wear, he saw his swim suit and said in his cute little voice,"May I please go swimming?" So darling! But it was past bedtime and dark out side so I had to say we can swim tomorrow. He was fine with that. He seems to understand everything we say and does an amazing job at piecing words together. His favorite DVDs are the Signing Time videos (Vol. 1-3) we gave him for his 2nd birthday. We bought the video cassettes when Sabrina was around 18 months and she really picked up on speech after that. I was hoping the DVDs would help Eli communicate better verbally and reduce whining. Sure enough, that's exactly what has happened. I rarely have to remind him to use words or ask nice now. I love it! :)

There was something else I wanted to write about, but now I've forgotten...Oh, well, next time. :)