5/52: Legos and a New Band

I was treated to QUITE the "performance" the other day. After hearing Peter, Elizabeth, Mary Claire, and Edith thumping around upstairs for a while, they came downstairs to introduce me to their band! They only perform original songs, and they have a LOT of them, because the twins have spent much of their childhood making up kind of ridiculous songs that everybody has memorized because they are SO catchy.

As you can see, Mary Claire is the lead, on the improperly-held ukulele (I know, I know, I've told her how to hold it, but she wants to be able to see the strings, so the music teacher in me just grits my teeth and bears it). Elizabeth had two legos that she scraped together as some sort of rhythm section, and Peter had a baby jingle bell. Edith was clapping together some Tegu magnet planks, I think? But she kept rolling around on the ottoman so I didn't get her in the picture.

The best part was that Lucy LOVED it! She kept bouncing up and down and trying to sing along, so at some point every song just became the "Ba BA!" song, because Lucy kept saying "BA! BA! BA!" and the kids couldn't help but encouraging her.

It was loud. And amazing. And one of these days maybe we'll have money for real music lessons!

The twins begged for a subscription box of some sort that they could share, so I took advantage of sales a couple months ago and ordered them an Atlas Crate subscription (that's my affiliate link, they almost always have a sale going on so don't pay full price!). It has been really cute so far - I'm not sure how much geography they've really learned, but we've got a couple of other things in the works for teaching geography (a long-neglected subject in our homeschool), so I think with everything combined, they're getting a pretty good idea of what our world really looks like? This month was Italy, so they made a pizza parlor and made postcards of landmarks in Italy. The back of Elizabeth's says "The something" so as you can see, we are REALLY nailing it over here.

When Andrew cleaned out the boys' room to move Lucy in with them, the legos moved from the little play area under John Paul's loft bed to a more open area in the room, and Peter has renewed his undying love for them. He plays with them all day long, and spent two full weeks playing with one of John Paul's old 3-in-1 lego sets over and over again, to the point where John Paul just told him he could have it, since John Paul is on to bigger and better things. He really, really has an eye for engineering and construction-type things, which is fun to see!

The kids have sifted through the giant bin, full of sets from Andrew's childhood (and adulthood, let's be honest), and Cecilia put all the Star Wars-ish pieces into a "lego museum" which Peter and John Paul then raided to build awesome ships. There has been not a small amount of anger and fighting but in general the lego playing has resulted in many quiet hours and less teasing than usual, so I'll take it! Now if only they would stop carrying them ALL around the house...