My current calling at church is teaching Sunday School. My class is the now 13-year-olds. It is a lively class - I get to hear some pretty funny stories. While it's quite often difficult to hold their attention for more than a couple minutes at a time, I have found some more success in recent weeks.
With that said, my lesson this past week was on "Turning the heart of the children to the fathers," including family history and journaling. I have to admit, I haven't done a great job at doing family history. For the lesson, I brought a large book about the Brown Family, on my dad's side, which included a large history of my family as well as Volume 1 of the Twincredibles Blog Book, covering 2006-2007. I came to the realization as I looked through the blog book that Volume 1 did a good job at occasionally giving observations and descriptions of the kids in addition to being an activity log. So, with that, I will spend a couple posts talking about the kids - this will be Claire and Jacob's post.
The pictures below are Jacob and Claire's decorated 'ugly sweater' cookies and a picture of them before opening their ornament to hang on the tree. Notice that BOTH of them were smiling AND looking at the camera!!!
CLAIRE
Claire is in a fun stage of life right now. She loves being around our family and is generally quite cheerful and is quite funny. She is loving and cares about others.
She is excited to learn and seems to pick things up very quickly. Claire is very into reading, and grasps new concepts quickly. She reminds us of Amber in that she wants to learn completely and do assignments completely. She sometimes gets frustrated quickly if she can't pick something up quickly (like handwriting). Her teacher says she is quiet (though not shy) in class and is always on task. When we do some puzzles or problems at home, Claire won't answer until she knows she has figured it out.
She loves playing with Jacob. They love to play in their room building things out of wooden blocks, legos, trains, animals, etc. The have some fun, elaborate train sets. I enjoy working with them to try different things with the trains. She is very good play mate for Jacob. It is interesting to see how their stories evolve, with both kids adding different elements.
Some of her favorite foods are macaroni and cheese, salmon, hot dogs, shrimp, certain types of nuggets. She prefers foods without sauce (other than pesto and marinara) and will often complain about her food before trying it, only to discover she likes it.
Claire is quite skinny right now! Even her leggings and yoga pants are a little loose. She has long, skinny arms and legs and has a narrow torso. I promise we're feeing her well!
Reading is probably Claire's biggest interest. She likes singing and often is heard quietly carrying a (high-pitched) tune. She sang with her friend, Taylor, in Sacrament Meeting a couple weeks ago, and was quite confident standing up at the podium in front of 250+ people. Lately, she has started trying to figure out songs on the piano. She likes to play with the babies and color. Her drawings are typically quite full of color and have lots of details.
JACOB
Jacob is also in a fun stage of life right now. He continues to be very passionate, inquisitive, energetic, and outgoing. He has a sensitive spirit and has had definite experiences feeling the influence of the Holy Ghost. He has a very strong sense of right and wrong.
He has a great memory and surprises us occasionally with what he remembers. While he is not at Claire's level, his reading has improved quite a bit since school began. He is confident about it and isn't bothered that she is reading at a higher level (which is something we worried about affecting him). He sometimes wants to give answers right away without really learning the concept, his focus has improved and we can see the rate at which he is learning increasing. For example, I saw some work he did at school where they were supposed to draw dice and make addition problems out of them; Jacob was making multiplication problems (3 X 4 = 12), which is a concept I had taught them at home a few months ago.
Jacob's eyes seem to be doing well. We are now patching only 1 hour per day. Going from 2 hours to 1 has been helpful because Jacob was getting tired of patching, and going down to 1 hour seems to have made it a little easier. Though his vision in his bad eye has plateaued, it seems to be working quite well. Jacob had 2 pairs of glasses break this year. Lucky for us, they had a lifetime warranty. Unlucky for us, the company that makes the glasses is out of business, so the current pair is the last one we could find!
Some of Jacob's favorite foods are salmon, hot dogs, shrimp, pizza, salad, the end piece of crusty breads, and just about anything that looks interesting. He likes just about anything and often comments how much of an adult eater he is. He likes adding spice to his foods and trying new things. He often compliments Dani's cooking.
Jacob is very interested in sports. He loves to play, watch, and practice baseball, soccer, football, and basketball. He has also become very interested in Star Wars. Though he's only seen the original first episode (Episode IV), he talks about Star Wars all the time. He also loves to tell stories and jokes, and makes books and colors them.
