Episode VI: The Return of the Wii

Most of the criticism of this blog has centered around the notion that we are simply doing this to brag about our children. That's really not our intent. Take this incident that happened a few weeks ago, for instance. The wii behavior had gotten completely out of control. Riley is at an age where he has a hard time pulling himself out of the fantasy-game world of the wii, and he'd gotten particularly sucked into the Lego Star Wars game. It is a really great game, and Katie and I have actually spent more than one night up for hours after the kids go to bed playing it. We had to download a guide to help us get through and unlock some of the levels. It wasn't just Riley, though. Haley had been arguing a lot with Riley, and the family fun time playing wii had given way to too much arguing and bad behavior.

Anyway, things reached a real boiling point about three weeks ago when Riley pretty much lost all ability to separate reality from the video game world. His obsessive behavior about the wii leaked into the real world and he had a complete kicking, screaming meltdown about a mistake he made on a picture he was drawing.

So, the wii went away, along with all the games, the controllers, wii wheels, etc. It spent three weeks in the attic, and the kids were reminded for the entire three weeks about the behavior that led to its disappearance.

So the wii finally came back tonight. There's a new set of ground rules and there will be even more severe limits on the amount of time the wii can be played. We still won't really play it on most school nights, and we won't play for long periods on the weekends. We'll see how it goes.

Sister, I'm a Poet

During Black History Month Haley's class was going to study Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and write poems about him. We had an interesting conversation one night where Haley was curious about whether their poems would have to rhyme, or at least whether the "best poems" rhyme. I played "Suzanne" by Leonard Cohen and let her read the lyrics to show her that even the best poetic songs sometimes don't rhyme. Ok, so maybe this was a stretch for a 7-year old, but she pretended to like it, anyway. So when the poem came home in the bookbag one day, we (two completely unbiased poetry critics/parents) were pretty impressed. The whole class was asked to write an 18-line poem where the first letters of each line spelled out "Dr. Martin Luther King." (Theses days, of course, they do things like this on the computer, instead of on lined paper. ) Haley was proud and excited because Mrs. Beyers had selected her poem to give to the Principal, Mrs. Sudbury.

Snow Day

We don't usually have that many snow days but we've had a few this year so far, which already means school will now go resume after Memorial Day and go through the rest of that week. On one of the snow days recently, Katie and I took the afternoon off from work and took the kids sledding. The notorious sledding place in Bloomington is the "the hill" at Tri-North middle school, but there are a few places closer to home for us. On this day we went to Southeast park, which was pretty busy. It was really freezing out, so we didn't last that long.

Reading is Power.

When Haley was in Kindergarten she decided to start reading the first Harry Potter book, which was quite a bit above her reading level. I think Katie probably read nearly half of it to her, but Haley pushed through a lot of it herself, slowly, page by page until it was finished. Nowadays she's reading them entirely on her own. She just finished the 4th book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which has 734 pages. I still don't think her teachers actually realize that she's reading this much or that she's reading stuff this advanced, but that's ok. When she finished this one she started immediately on a non-fiction (well, depending on what you believe) book about the Loch Ness Monster, and she read the entire 47 page book in one quick sitting.

Not to be left out, Riley is also starting to read at a pretty amazing pace. We keep telling him that we're going to have him reading completely on his own by the time he starts kindergarten next fall, and he seems to be a bit ahead of where Haley was at this age. We started him off reading books with only 3-4 words per page, or having him help with only a few words in each sentence. Now he's reading those stage 1 readers almost totally on his own. He's a pretty stubborn little dude and insists on persisting. So the other night we pulled out a classic, The Treasurey of Dick and Jane, and he's already about half way through it, on page 90 out of 160.

In the last few weeks Riley has also started authoring and illustrating his own books. Titles in the catalog so far include "Princess Leia Made a Ship", "Save R2-D2", "General Grievous Captured Obi-Wan Kenobi", and "The Invisible Monster".

Nice Morning

We're lucky to have kids who sleep really well and don't wake us up at 6:00 a.m. every day. However, this makes it a little tough to get everyone up and moving and out of the house on school days, particularly in the winter when it's so dark and dreary. We might miss a lot of beautiful sunrises for all we know. On the day this photo was shot, I came downstairs to start packing some lunches and saw how amazing the sky looked. It was only about 13 degrees outside, but I pulled some boots and a coat on and was lucky to get a really cool picture. It almost makes me wish that I was one of those people who could wake up every day early and accomplish a lot of stuff before the day gets into full swing, but I'm not.

Riley Makes the Paper!

We're guilty of reading the paper online instead of reading the hard copy, and when you do that you sometimes miss out on the smaller headlines. Take, for instance, the one that appeared in the Neighbor News section of the Herald Times on Saturday, January 17th: "Celebrating the Holidays By Giving"

Yep, that's Riley's pre-school class. The caption reads, "Ready, Set, Grow Childs Preschool collected and presented Backstreet Missions with donations during the 2008 holiday season." We didn't know about it until Monday when we saw it posted at school, and our copy of the paper had already been recycled. I guess he'll have a copy of this blog post in his scrapbook instead of a tattered and faded piece of newsprint.

OK, so here we go, off into the blogosphere. We thought this might be a good way to stay connected with family and friends, and to keep everyone up to date on what is happening with the Paulins.

We are getting back into the swing of things following the holidays. The kids are back in school (Haley is in 2nd grade and Riley is in pre-school). Haley is still doing horseback riding once a week and taking piano lessons. She is also very excited to have her first role in a Bloomington Stages production. They will be presenting Sleeping Beauty (Haley is one of the palace guards) and the Aristocats (Haley is WaterLouie, one of the dogs). She has been working very hard learning her lines, the songs and the dances and she has rehearsal every Saturday afternoon. Check out the Stages website to find out more and to see some photos from their rehearsals.