What Do I Title This?

A couple of weeks ago I was walking towards the boys' bedroom. In the hallway right in front of their door was the following picture.

Notice that the sign says "worrier" (who's his spelling teacher?????)
(This sign was made by my Tyler)

Actually this is for a "warrior" club. Apparently they need money to buy their gear! I don't know how much they need for their club but it doesn't hurt to ask for donations! I secretly put a quarter in the little envelope at the bottom of the sign. Also notice that there is 62 cents in there.

I had to take a picture of this. I want to remember this sign from them being little.

Building Character

Sigh...my heart breaks because of things my children do that end up teaching them a very hard lesson.

Phyllip got a stereo last Christmas. We've told him that he can use it at night several times a week. He sleeps well with music playing. Tyler, on the other hand, HAS to have silence to sleep. And since they share a bedroom, this has been an ongoing struggle with them since Christmas night.

So, they were, once again, arguing over the volume of the stereo last night.

Tyler got out of bed to turn it down. Phyllip blocked him.

Then, Tyler said, "If I touch your stereo, I will give you all of my legos (and believe me, he has A LOT!)."

Phyllip said, "Ok."

Not 10 seconds later, Tyler gets out of bed again and TOUCHES the stereo! Yep, you read right! He now owed his brother ALL of his legos.

Walter and I knew nothing of this deal until this morning.

Tyler desperately tried to get out of the deal. Walter and I talked to him and pulled out all of the details and.......told him he had to be a man of his word and give Phyllip his legos. (Can I just tell you how heartwrenching it was to break Tyler's heart like that????? He sobbed for over an hour. His eyes were swollen half shut.) He did give them to Phyllip.

Walter and I told him he should have thought about what he was saying before he made an agreement like that. In the end, he KNEW that he was the one to be upset with and no one else. I think that's the thing he had the hardest time with; knowing that he couldn't blame anybody else but himself.

Building character in our children - it's hard sometimes. But when they're adults and they have good character, it'll all be worth it!

BTW, Phyllip has been kind enough to give some of the legos back to Tyler - now that's good character!

Flowers + Tyler = Happiness

Tyler has been pestering us for a couple of months to have his own flower garden.

Walter told him to clear out a section of the front yard from weeds and he could use it for his garden.




Last Saturday we took him to get his flowers. We let him pick out what flowers he wanted. When we got home, he planted them.

He is a happy little man!

Wiggle

Yesterday we picked up Lyndsey and one of her friends from college and brought them home for Thanksgiving weekend.

The morning started out normal/uneventful but progressed in the opposite direction a few hours later.

The boys and I left the house at 6 a.m. The drive was easy; very light traffic.

Lyndsey was to be out of chapel service by 8:30 and I wanted to get home before all the major traffic backed up.

We got up there a few minutes early. I looked at the outside temperature reading on the car and it said 38 degrees. Needless to say, the boys and I were NOT ready for that. Tyler and I had light jackets on and Phyllip didn't bring one. We were cold!

Lyndsey had a couple of friends she wanted me to meet. I was sitting in the car and rolled the window down but then decided to get out to meet them.

A few minutes pass and I'm heading down to the other end of the campus in the car to load the girls' suitcases. I pushed the automatic window button to put the window up and nothing happened. The window was stuck in the DOWN position and it was 38 degrees outside! I mistakenly hit the down side of the window button and watched and heard the window drop completely down inside the door. That was NOT a good thing!

We got the girls loaded up and left with the window down. We drove all the way home with the window d.o.w.n. It was a very cold drive for the first 90 minutes or so. When we got to San Bernardino the weather was warmer and it wasn't such a bad drive.

Walter 'fixed' the window when he got home. When we have more time he will really fix it.

It's got to be that normal uneventful outings are just plain boring! I think that's why we don't usually have them.

(We also seem to have cars that have quirks. For instance, our van's windshield wipers don't work most of the time when you need them to. But when they do decide to work they change speeds on their own. We don't have to turn the lever - they change from normal to warp speed to in between and so on all on their own!)

So...on to the title for this post.

We were still in the car. Lyndsey had her phone and it rang. After she hung up the phone, Tyler asked her, "Lyndsey, is your phone on wiggle?"

(Lyndsey has her phone set on 'vibrate' so that if she gets a call during class or church service, it doesn't interrupt. Tyler didn't know the word was 'vibrate' so he called it 'wiggle'.)

Our Anniversary Gift

Tyler decided he wanted to give us a gift for our anniversary.

He gave us a gift of time.

This young man wrote up a menu of meals that he knew how to cook and handed it to us and asked us to pick what we wanted for dinner.

The menu included the following:
Quesadillas
Ramen
French Toast
Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
Meat and Cheese Sandwich - with choice of mayonnaise and mustard
Toast
Oatmeal

How could we say no to that?!!!

He fixed our dinner and he went all out. The table was set with lit candles and music was playing softly.

Then the four of us sat down and ate.

It was the best anniversary gift I could have asked for!

What Tyler Learned Yesterday

Did you know you can burn leaves and kill bugs with a magnifying glass on a hot day (115 degrees with no end in sight)!

Yesterday he burned leaves.

Today, he figured out how to kill ants and centipedes! Ewwww! If that's not bad enough, he came in and told me he was doing it and proceeded with sound effects. For instance, the ants will pop when they get hot enough. Yuck!

Looking at life through the eyes of a boy is very foreign to me. I grew up with one sister and didn't know the first thing about boys and their imaginations. They have taught me well! I shouldn't be surprised at the things they do, but they still amaze me even at their ages today.

____________

The other day, Phyllip had a few friends over to celebrate his birthday. We were on our way to church when the boys were talking about the price for the xbox 180 (it's the newest xbox - the first one was the xbox 360) being $180. Here's how the conversation went.

Tyler: Dad, did you know that the xbox 180 only costs $180?

Walter: Wow! That would mean you only get half of an xbox 360! That also means you get to pick which half of the game you get to play. You can pick the top half or the bottom half of the screen.

Kirk: Or the left side or the right side!

We all laughed at that one!

Boys! They keep me guessing all the time!