They've gotta learn sometime...

We were working on our Saturday chores this morning, and Abi went to the kitchen to make some cocoa for Gideon (3). Gideon had been in the boys' room with Sammy (5) and they were doing their shoe organization chore. However, when Gideon realized his cocoa was ready, he bailed out and headed to the kitchen, with Sammy on his tail.

"Gideon is supposed to be helping with the shoe shelf job," Sammy informed Abi.

Abi absent-mindedly told Sammy, "He is just going to have his cocoa now, and then he can do it."

"But if he has his cocoa, he won't want to come back and finish the job," Sammy explained.

Suddenly, it clicked with Abi, and she realized the IMPORTANT goal Sammy had for his brother. So she and the boys went back to the room and got the shoes done, with the promise of cocoa awaiting the job's completion. Abi was very impressed with Sammy's budding parenting skills.

The ticks are in bloom, and we have three mounted on our "here-ticks" display card. Each tick is documented with: person bitten, person who spotted the tick, type of tick and date found. Joanna found the tick on her eyelid, but Sarah found the tick on Susanna's forehead. Tomorrow we may have snow, which may knock off a few mosquitos, but ticks don't really mind a few flakes.

Yesterday, we enjoyed having the Jay and Heidi Schaefer family over to our house for dinner, with their Grandma E and Auntie Laura. We met them at last year's Wisconsin homeschool conference. Their sweet boys are 7, 4 and 1, and Jay has started teaching the family "a verse a day" . They are having great times with that. Boy, we wish we had started that early with our kids!

We hope to soon post photos of the bus interior (since we finished the seats). We forgot to bring our still camera to Sioux Falls, so didn't get any photos of that event. We did get lots of video footage (is digital video footage or ???) -- mostly of Klein kids talking in funny voices.

How are the ducks, you ask? They are fine -- fun to watch, content, quiet, fluffy. They avoid us like the plague.