Call Me teacher and Bring Me an (Iced Beer) Apple

The other week as I took Xavier to school, Ashe asked me what his older brother is doing at school.
"Well", I said, "he learns things. Like how to read and write. he learns science and math and all sorts of stuff."
"I WANNA LEARN TOO, MOMMY.  I WANNA GO TO SCHOOL."
"You can go to school when you are 5 and start kindergarten."
"NO MOMMY I WANT A SCHOOL AT HOME. YOU CAN BE MY TEACHER." He grins at me.
"Oh yeah? I think we could do that." I had done homeschooling for Xavier when he was the same age and we had a lot of fun with it. I let him decide what he wanted to learn and we ran with that. I figured I could do the same with Ashe. "So what do you want to learn?"
"WRITING."
"Well in order to write you need to learn how to read. You want to learn that too?"
"YUP!"
"Ok then! Anything else?"
"YEAH, I WANNA LEARN ABOUT VAN GOGH.... AND MOZART.... AND BUGS!" (thank you, Baby Einstein. Now, when Xavier wanted to learn things he wanted to learn about police cars and fire trucks. And bugs. I should have known Ashe would have picked something from Baby Einstein, but it still took me off guard.)
"Errrrrm..... ok"
"AND I WANT OUR SCHOOL TO BE CALLED THE BLUE SCHOOL!"
"Sure, we can call it whatever you like."

and thus I became a teacher.... again.


Last weekend i spent hours pouring over websites, relearning about vincent Van Gogh and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I bookmarked music from Mozart, to play on my computer as we learned about the boy genius composer. I found online games about bugs, made puzzles out of artwork, coloring pages printed out of van Goghs Sunflowers and Starry Night. And on Monday morning I taped a bunch of artwork and portraits of the things we were going to learn about and held my breath.

I admit it. I didn't think we'd last a day. There is a big difference between Baby Einsteins videos and real life information on artists and musicians. It took me almost an hour to make ashe understand that Baby Van Goat is NOT, in fact, Vincent Van Gogh. But he soaked it all up and wanted more.

He even insisted on getting biographies on his 2 historic figures when we went to the library. And made me read them over and over and over.

By the end of the week his curiosity was sated on his chosen subjects. We did try writing but he decided he was too young and would try again later. He did like tracing letters on my phone app though.

And come the weekend I asked him if he liked school and wanted to keep going.
"YEAH!"
"Ok, what do you want to learn next week?"
"I WANNA LEARN ABOUT BACH!"
"OK. Would you like to learn about a cool artist who was also an inventor?"
"OH YES PWEASE! WHO IS IT?"
"His name is Leonardo Davinci and he's awesome!"
"OK! OH, AND I ALSO WANT TO LEARN ABOUT DRAGONS."
"Dragons, huh?"
"YUP!"


Oh he is so my kid.

RAWR!