Letters from Pemberley

While Derek took Tommy to Disney California Adventure to visit Cars Land yesterday, my job was to come up with this update on our six year old!

It’s fun to have a six year old in the house.  One of the nicest things about Tommy is his enthusiasm for little things–his eyes get big and he cracks a huge smile when I tell him he’s going to get a treat like video chatting with his grandparents or going on a boys-only date with Daddy or getting dessert.  He’s been so genuinely thrilled as birthday presents have trickled in this week!

He’s such a great helper with his younger sisters.  During our horrible doctor’s office trip on Monday, he patiently read three insipid Disney princess books back-to-back to Elizabeth in the waiting room while I occupied Susanna.  He is so proud of being able to buckle and unbuckle his sisters’ carseats, and he will usually hold someone’s hand when I need help getting them across a parking lot.

This kid thrives on predictable routines and advance notice (have I mentioned how similar we are?!).  Our first year out here was such a struggle with extreme shyness in the church nursery, playground, and every social setting, but now that he recognizes the other kids at church and Bible study, he does just fine.  It’s been a huge answer to prayer to have him finally make a “best buddy” this year–he and Jonah (another 6 year old homeschooler) are inseparable at CBS (and the park days we do with several other homeschool families afterwards), and I think it’s given Tommy real confidence in bigger social situations, even without Jonah around.  Having been painfully shy myself (and changed schools, though not hometowns, several times in the early years), I know how much it can help your confidence to know that someone likes you as much as you like them.  We just signed him up for a couple homeschool enrichment classes through the local Parks and Rec department, and though Tommy didn’t know anyone, he jumped into Sports Class and Science Adventures right away.  I really hemmed and hawed about committing to five weeks of something right before the baby comes, but he loves it!  He’s looking forward to starting real soccer in the fall, especially with the cool new soccer gear he got for his birthday!

While he can be gentle and sweet with me or his sisters, Tommy still is all boy.  He likes to wrestle and sword fight with sticks, climb trees, and race his bike around the culdesac.  He really needs a brother to rough up with on a regular basis–I’m trying to balance the girls’ willingness to be rough and tumble with the need to teach Tommy basic standards like “We do not hit girls.”

School time in general is so easy.  It was really tough for me to have the energy to work with him in the afternoons during my first trimester, and it’s been a bit harder again now that my sleep is so disrupted, but he and I both love the one-on-one time together.  I’m glad we’ve persevered with Bible memory/recitation, because I think it’s going to help his public speaking skills.  In the fall, he really resisted my corrections when he did things like talking while inhaling or trailing off into mutters.  Now, he insists every day on reviewing the previous verses of Mark 3 or reviewing Mark 1 or 2, and he’s so much better at enunciation and volume.  He really gets a kick out of how much he has memorized!  He enjoys math and phonics, but he told me today that missions and geography is his favorite subject right now because he is learning about Uganda.  Having a world map up on the wall above the table means that we discuss geography all the time, too.  It’s fun to see him getting into nonfiction books (though he still loves picture books and chapter books like Narnia, Boxcar Children, Farmer Boy, and My Father’s Dragon).  Last week, he pulled out his solar powered car and wired it up with his snap circuits set and showed his sister and me how the sun can produce electricity.  It’s amazing how much he learns through play.

At his 6 year check-up today, Dr. Antall told us everything looked good, and Tommy’s infected ear is almost completely clear.  If we still have nightly bedwetting when the baby is sleeping through the night this summer/fall, we’ll probably try one of the alarm systems to train Tommy to wake up and go.  Tommy is 51 lbs and 46.25 inches, both around 75th percentile.  It’s always good to get a good report!