Elijah turned 8!

I cannot believe this boy is 8 years old!  We celebrated his birthday (which was the 29th) with lots of laughter, food, family, and of course, creme brulee.

My big 8 year old - showing off his newest gap.

Here is Eli with the AT AT he built.  This was by far the most complicated LEGO set he's ever done. He did a fantastic job on it, and was very proud.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from our family to yours.  May the joy of the birth of Jesus overwhelm you this holiday and into the new year!

Grading

Chris is teaching this semester - an upper level statistics course containing a lot of actuarial content.  His least favorite teaching task is grading.  This semester, he has 103 students, and his final consisted of 13 questions - you do the math.  Watching him grade is always interesting.  Daniel's physical stance in this picture represents Chris' internal stance.

I do not like finals week, even now.  Take a look at the piles and piles and piles of tests.  He uses 4 forms of the final, each printed on a different colored paper.  No word on how his students are doing so far.

Pressure Cooking

My mom used to pressure can a lot of things when I was a child, and that canner and the noise it would make would scare me to death.  I have gotten past much of that, and have been using a pressure canner for a few years to can things.  Tonight, I am finally experimenting with pressure cooking food - a beef roast.  At 15 pounds, we are hearing some crazy noises.  Not as bad as the when I was small, but loud.  My kids didn't even bat an eye, and all asked me to lift them up so they could see what was going on with the vent valve and the dial.  I explained what I had put inside of the chamber and asked Eli what was causing the valve to stay up - he almost immediately responded, "Pressure!  The steam is creating pressure."  Smart boy.

I hope this works out - I didn't thaw my roast in time, so I'm hoping this will method will correct for lack of cooking time using my normal methods.

Creativity and Imitation

Daniel is the child I have observed most closely transitioning through his stages.  That may seem a little odd, but due to the very close spacing of the first three, I felt like I was in survival mode much of the time.  I missed a lot.  Since Daniel is almost 3 years younger than Isaac, and the other kids are off at school, or in Isaac's case, very independent, Daniel is who I hang out with now.

He has always been a creative child, evident in how he talks and the things he points out.  But recently he entered a stage which I absolutely love!  And no, it is sadly not the "potty train by yourself so mom doesn't have to do anything" stage.  Still waiting on that one.  He has started constructing pretend scenarios and scripting his attendees.  We've seen pretend play in him for quite a while, but this is definitely something different.  Here is an example:

The Ogre, T-rex, and triceratops were placed in this configuration.  He set up their chairs around the box, his "table."  So far today, he has offered them scrambled eggs, and most recently he asked them if they wanted to play Tokyo.  Daniel watches Chris and the big kids play a game called King of Tokyo, and it must have left a huge impression on him.  He is using a handful of variable sided dice as eggs, by the way.  Purple eggs.  I love it!