Growing Up

Destroy is really growing up. Tantrums and tears are becoming fewer and fewer. At least for now :) And as a side note: Search left a permanent reminder of himself- the little black smudge that you can see in every picture we take with the camera. I have no idea how he did it, but I'll always remember him now :) Well, at least until we have to money to buy a new camera.

This picture of him is right before his baseball game finishing a Magic Tree House book he had started that morning. We have to have a stack of chapter books on hand for him to read on the bus so that he stays out of trouble. Funny, huh (he got kicked off the bus for a day last week. It seems that he very proficient at making annoying noises and driving the bus driver nuts :) He also enjoys taking books for recess. Yeah, he's a little strange. He had read so much of this book during the day that he just wanted to finish it! I'm so glad that he loves reading so much. And it's something that I LOVE to do with him. Hopefully it will stick!

Destroy has also started taking showers completely by himself. We tell him to go upstairs and take a shower and he does everything. He turns the water on. He gets in. He washes his body and his hair. He rinses. He turns off the water. He dries off. He gets his jammies on. He brushes his teeth. Last night we heard him screaming, "The bathroom is flooding!" I failed to mention that he needed to make sure that the shower curtain was on the inside, not the outside. So... 8 towels later after cleaning up a half and inch of water off of the entire bathroom floor, now we know :)

He's playing his first year of T-ball this year and he's really enjoying it. He needs some work on his catching and throwing but he's pretty good at hitting the ball. In this league the coaches give the kids 5-6 pitches and then get out the tee if they can't hit a coach-pitch. Destroy has only had a use the tee a few times. He's getting better at paying attention to the game and not talking to everyone in sight :)

A few weeks ago I was trying to coax Destroy into sitting down to do his homework (all 5 minutes of it twice a week). He doesn't really like doing it. So I decided I'd try to make it fun. "Let find a hat and call it your 'homework hat'!", I said. He readily agreed so we went off in search of a Homework Hat. Once he had selected The Hat, a red one, we sat down at the table. We got out his homework and a pencil and he got to work. After a few seconds of doing his homework he puts his pencil down, looks at me and says, "This is dumb." Thinking that he was talking about his homework, I looked at it and asks him which part he thought was dumb. He looks at me and says, "No, mom. The Homework Hat. It's dumb." And he took off his hat and gently set it on the table. He picked up his pencil and continued with his homework. As I looked at him I realized how grown up he really is becoming. He's not my little boy anymore who I can finagle ways around doing things to make them more fun. He sees things as they are now with his own pair of eyes, and not through mommy-eyes. He spends most of his day away from me now (and has a lovely new language to prove it :) and makes his own decisions and choices. Decisions and choices that I don't get to be there to see. This transition is hard for me because I'm not a part of his every move anymore and I can't guide him as easily now. I just hope that the things I've taught him will encourage him to make the right decisions and be someone that others look to and think, "Wow, that is a great kid". He is a great kid, I'm so proud of him and I love him lots.