Lego Star Wars

Gabriel was introduced to the Lego Star Wars video game at my friend Josh's house. I have resisted purchasing a video game system so far, but I have upgraded our PC with a nice graphics card and monitor. I went online and quickly found a free demo of the game for PC with enough characters and levels to keep a 6yr old busy for awhile.

It has been fun to watch him learn to play the game. I'm no fan of obsessive gaming, but I do think that some casual playing develops certain skills in a person. Human-machine interaction is a constant fact of life today and it helps to develop a knack for it.

I find it interesting that we can work with Gabriel for hours to teach him something he is not interested in with little success. However, dangle a video game on the carrot stick and he will suddenly be able to type long addresses into Internet Explorer, navigate the Windows menu, etc. Ask him to clean up before he can play and the den will be free of toys in seconds rather than the typical hour and a half.

Family Vacation While Dad Works

Elizabeth went with the kids and her mom to visit her aunt, uncle, and cousins in Marshall, TX. They live on a big plot of land and have animals. There are ten kids in the family so there is a lot going on down there all the time. The boys are shooting guns and enjoying some nice weather. They drove down and are making a little over week of it.

I am working on the main bathroom with my friend Josh I grew up with in Manchester. He is very good at hanging and finishing sheetrock as well as trim carperntry. Those happen to be the two parts of the job I am weak on so it working out well. Today (in a mere 16 hours) we replaced the subfloor, framed in and hung the window, and sheetrocked the ceiling and two walls. It is coming together nicely. In a week the sheetrock should be finished and I'll start laying the tile floor.

Isaiah walks

It has been awhile since I've posted and in that time Isaiah has really become a good walker. He walks all around the house now. He keeps his hands out and takes his time near obstacles, but he doesn't fall often anymore. He loves to dance and play pots and pans as musical instruments while walking. He is getting into everything and getting a mischievous grin. He mostly says no and stop it. He has started answering a sweet little yes to many questions, though. Like his brothers he already has an affection for speaking words clearly and precisely. We don't try to make them speak properly - they insist upon it. Elizabeth and I can say "yeah" 400 times a day and our kids still prefer "yes." Whatever. I just know I'm going to have three little smarties correcting my conversational English in a few years and it's going to be annoying....

Our little visitor

Last night Elizabeth came home from a walk in the dark and found a little friend was visiting our porch swing. She wasn't exactly happy to see him at the time. He was just eating a stick of butter he found in our garbage. Later we had a flashlight on him while banging on our door and he didn't budge. To keep him from making a big mess on the porch I decided to get him to move on down the road by shooting his butt with my BB gun. It is an old spring-powered gun so it doesn't even break skin - just stings pretty good. Well, I shot him and he fell over as though dead instantly. Puzzled by this, I was trying to figure out what had happened when the most obvious thing in the world came to me. Opossums play dead! He wasn't going to scamper away like I'd been hoping - he was going to lay there for hours now! An hour later he was still laying there. Finally, later that night he took off without making a mess on the porch. Hopefully they have good memories....