Making Invitations

Ryan is very excited because he is going to have his first "real" birthday party this year! We have had a friend or two over before, but usually we keep it really low key and just do a family activity to celebrate. Now that we are settling in to our new church and neighborhood, he has enough friends to have a larger party. He chose a fishing theme for his party, and yesterday he helped me make his invitations.

Enjoying His Job

How this big of a tube is deemed to be only
one inch of precipitation is beyond me!
When we first signed Ryan up to report the rainfall I wondered if he'd soon tire of it and have to be prodded and threatened to go do his daily reading. I have been pleased to see that that isn't the case. Though I do remind him most days, he eagerly runs out at 8:00am to read the gauge, then reports the numbers to me so I can submit them online. He's learned how to read hundredeths of an inch, and this week he got a lesson on a different kind of precipitation...snow.

After correctly reading the gauge for a few weeks, he's been
released to read it on his own without me hovering over him.
Normally he just reads the numbers on the tube to see how much rainfall we've had, but when we woke up to snow yesterday, he had to bring the gauge inside so we could melt it and then do the reading. It was a bit of a cumbersome task, but fun nonetheless.


Replacing the gauge after melting the snow.
Of course, he couldn't wait to get back outside to play in the snow. Unfortunately, he ended up having to wait a few hours, but at least the sun was shining when the went out to play.

Gaining Confidence

My dad got Ryan this gear building set for Christmas. At first Daddy or I were helping him and doing most of the building, but recently he wanted to play with it and I didn't have time to help him. After a little persuasion, he tried it on his own, and now he builds like crazy with it! Though you can't see it in the picture, it is remote controlled and even has flashing lights.

First Reading

Promptly at 8:00 am this morning Ryan and I went out to read the rain gauge so we could submit the data to the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network (CoCoRaHS). It didn't rain at all, but we had freezing fog this morning (yep, weird but true!) and the fog was all frozen on the outside of the gauge. We submitted our data online and an hour later I looked out the window and it was snowing! So much for a dry day today. So tomorrow instead of 0.00 rainfall he will get to report a T (trace).


He is pretty excited by his new job, and we're all having some fun with it. If you want to see our station on the map and see our precipitation for any given day, click here. Currently there are four stations in our county, and we're the northernmost station.

Gauging the Weather

I've mentioned before that Ryan is fascinated by all things weather-related, so when I saw an ad on our local news website looking for people to measure and report on rainfall in their area, I submitted an application in Ryan's name (with me as a helper, of course). We were assigned our station number, we ordered and received our rain gauge, I mounted the gauge to a post, and today I got the post put up in the back yard! Tomorrow at 8:00 am Ryan will go out, read the gauge, and commence his "career" in weather reporting for CoCoRaHS! Unfortunately, it's not supposed to rain for the next three days. Hey, I had to wait for a dry spell! Who wants to go dig a hole in the rain?

Lots of Reading

Almost every January hubby and I have made a decision to not watch movies or television or anything for a month. Usually we don't include the children, but this year we decided to have them join us. Ryan is not really much of a watcher anyway. He'd much rather be playing with his toys or a game or something, so this wasn't a big deal to him...at first. Abigail has said every day that she wants to watch something, but this week was the first time Ryan has admitted he would like to watch a movie too. I suggested I could build a fort for them or they could play one of their new games, but next thing I know, Ryan is reading to Abby out of a Disney storybook we have. He was reading Toy Story, just the movie he wanted to watch! I got a kick out of them huddled over the book enjoying the story. I have noticed this week that he has been reading to her quite a bit and he's even been reading more to himself than usual. I'm loving the quietness and am ready to get rid of the television completely, but I think I'm the only one!


Reading the Tale of Cuffy Bear.
It's also been neat to see how much progress Ryan has been making in his reading. He is loving a series of books written by Arthur Scott Bailey. A few are included on his reading list for his homeschool curriculum, but I've printed out more of them from Gutenberg.org (love that site!) since they are old, rare and usually too expensive to buy. When he first started reading his first book in the series it took him about 20 to 30 minutes to get through one chapter, and today he whipped through five chapters in 30 minutes!

He Can Tie His Shoes!

I have been negligent. I've never taught either of my children how to tie a knot or bow. I just simply don't buy shoes with laces! But since Ryan is approaching six, I figured it's probably something he ought to know, so we got out the book I've had for ages that has a bunch of shoes with holes to lace up and comes with a string. I sat down on Saturday and showed him how, then we reviewed it on Monday. Voila! He now knows how to tie his shoes (should he ever have shoes with laces). Why did I put that off for so long?

Sunshine Sunday

Since the sun was shining and it was nice and dry after church, we decided to head to the zoo for a couple of hours. The zoo is up in the hills though, and it was still pretty cold, even when you're walking for miles. We first went to the Lorakeets since we have been missing them the last few trips to the zoo. Then we went to the jungle area where the jeep is to let the kids play on it for a while. For whatever reason, they love this jeep, but Mommy and Daddy usually skirt it so we can see the actual animals when we come. But they played for quite a while today and had a good time.


It's amazing to me: we don't watch television except for a couple of shows on PBSKids or Discovery Channel a couple times a month, we took the kids to exactly three movies last year (Artic Tale, Ratatouille, and Meet the Robinsons), we always skip the commercials when we watch DVDs, and we don't get any magazines or newspapers or catalogs that the kids look at, but STILL when Ryan saw this telescope at the giraffe exhibit the first thing he said was, "Look, it's WALL-E!" I have to admit, it does look like him. It's just incredible to me how easily kids pick up on things...I've barely heard of the movie, let alone remember the name!