Thanks, my old and new friends, for your patience while I took care of some family business. I hope you felt comfortable checking out my blog home while I was gone. If this is your first time here today, you'll need to read the post underneath this one to know what I'm talking about.
Mama on the Edge, I'm NOT complaining at all. I hope as every one gets to know our family better you will discover we are always excited to have unexpected guest stopping by. As long as you don't mind the mess and can jump into the flow, we love having you around. Just ask the 20 plus teenagers who stopped by last winter for an impromptu snowball fight, hot chocolate and X-Box Guitar Hero match.
Now, back to my originally scheduled post for today. (Boy, this diversion was exciting for me, how about for you?)
Jonathan still acts like a reluctant reader, but in reality he is probably my one and only reader in the house. (Sigh. I had saved so many books to share with my children.) The number of books I pull out of his bed once a month, the dash to the mail box to get the comics and children's pages and the book that comes along with us in the car all make me believe he actually likes reading, despite what he thinks.
But, now I'm afraid I've created a terror in my home. It started off with nebulous things like referring to his write instruments as "Frindle" after reading the book with the same title. Then he started creating games and trading cards based upon the stories he read. I started becoming alarmed when he came home from taking a scan-tron test and talked about the bubbles playing baseball. Since the "baseball game" had very complex rules, I was more than alarmed about the potential test scores. I immediately emailed the teacher, "If Jonathan's test scores are not what you expect, I fear he had a
Calvin and Hobbs moment." The teacher talked to Jonathan about this and came up with a future solution. Teacher cut a hole in a piece of card stock so that Jonathan could only see one line of the scan-tron bubbles at a time.
Then Jonathan ratcheted it up a few notches. Unbeknownst to me, the entire set of Magic Tree House books made their way out to our "tree house" on the playset...the night of a very big rainstorm. Because, of course, everyone knows the Magic Tree House series (all 28 books) belong in a tree house and not on the basement shelves. Fortunately, I found a sale and was able to replace the entire set for half price.
The most recent thing Jonathan learned from reading books about precocious-students-who-outwit-adults-by-thinking-outside-the-box (his favorite genre)...
Well I should just show you first:
Yes. One night Scott and I went to bed with Jonathan still reading a book. About 2:00 a.m. he knocked on my door and asked where the extra toilet paper was stored. Groggy, but happy that he wasn't going to wet the bed that night, I told him to go into my bathroom. He came out and showed me two rolls. "I got an extra in case I need it."
I didn't think too much about it, mostly because I was already going back to sleep. But I did think, "That's strange. But maybe he knows I try to keep an extra one in the bathroom at all times."
The next morning my husband comes in to wake me up to get ready for church. He has a mug of coffee in his hand, which is not usual. He sits down beside me as I'm clawing my way out of dreamland. "We had a visit from some little imps last night."
"Really?" I said, still haven't opened my eyes.
"Yes. Someone T.P.'d the kid's bathroom in the middle of the night."
"Ah! That's what he meant by needing an extra roll."
It seems Jonathan got this idea from his book. He was bored because he couldn't sleep, so the decided to try. He apparently woke up Faith by the bathroom light shining in her face, so she joined in. They didn't wake up the older brother, who sleeps right next to the bathroom. They didn't wake up mom or dad. (Which is unusual because one of us normally keeps an ear open for children in the middle of the night.)
So Faith asks Dad, who is taking pictures of the handy work, "Are we going to get restricted? And, by the way, what is restricted?"
Apparently, this was something else discussed in the evil book Jonathan read the night prior.
Who thought getting him to read was a good idea?
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Comments (1)
BRILLIANT! At least it was just toilet paper. You should have seen some of the stuff I did when I got bored... never give a kid a roll of toilet paper, an ash pot from a wood burning stove, a roll of caps and a magnifying glass in the middle of the afternoon... unless, of course, you want to cook your lunch on a fire in a pot. :) (I think I was 17 at the time.)