Rand update

Rand has been an absolute delight for the last couple of weeks.

A couple of days ago I asked him what he wanted for dinner, and he said that he would like to go to Chick-Fil-A. We rarely go out to eat, but Werner wasn't home and it was 110 degrees outside so I agreed. He was so sweet and thanked me several times for getting us milkshakes and letting them play at the playplace.

On Thursday he got up extra early and wanted to make pancakes for breakfast. He did pretty much everything -- measured, mixed, even poured the batter into the pan and flipped them all on his own.

Yesterday he got his first loose tooth! He was excited, started crying for a moment when it hurt to eat his corn on the cob, and then was back to excited. He told me that it had already been a really great day and after he found out about his loose tooth, it was even better.

His handwriting is starting to look really nice, and he likes staying for the whole school day. They are reading "Stuart Little" at school and he thinks it is so funny. He loves dictation and enjoys the "specials" that they do at school (art, music, yoga, and spanish, one each day).

We took a break from reading The Chronicles of Narnia and are now reading Little House in the Big Woods. He loves it! After we read about churning butter he wanted to try it, so we got some cream and shook it and shook it and shook it and made our own butter. Then we added honey and both of the kids thought that was delicious. I told Ella to stop eating the honey butter so we would have some left for dinner and she told me, "I'm not eating it, I'm just licking it with my tongue."

They are studying the planets at school and now he is full of ideas for building a rover that will be able to go on Jupiter.

We sponsor a little boy through Compassion International and Rand spontaneously wanted to send him a letter, so he wrote Enoc a letter all on his own. He's also been reminding me to pray for him every night, which is really cool.

He finished up his first ballet/jazz class and loved it, so we'll be continuing that in the next couple of weeks. (He liked watching himself in the mirror a little too much.)

Last week was Rand's snack-and-share day at school, and since we had made homemade chocolates a few days prior, he wanted to bring those to school. I said sure, but we didn't have any candy left so he would have to get up early to make enough for his classmates before school. Normally he is not such an easy person to get out of bed, but when I woke him up he jumped out of bed and got ready in a flash. He was so careful stirring and painting in all the crevices with chocolate and tapping them gently. He was definitely the happenin' man at school that day and the other kids loved his demonstration!

He likes to take books and copy out their words on a sheet of paper. He figured out yesterday that Mo Willems (he pronounced it "moo") wrote several of his favorite books. Last night he was playing Angry Birds with his friends by shooting themselves off the couch onto heaps of cushions. He can read my friends' facebook statuses over my shoulder and loves our weekly trips to the library.