Five Random Things Monday: Jude

I almost forgot about this again, since today is the Family Day holiday. Fortunately, I still remembered in plenty of time to think of the Five Things!

  1. Food: Jude is my "meat-and-potatoes" kid. He loves roasts, mashed potatoes, gravy, the works. Unfortunately, he is also fairly addicted to wheat products and sugar. He doesn't get to indulge his addiction often, because Mom and Dad keep him down to a reasonable amount, but I wonder what will happen when he is out of the house. Hopefully, he will understand the value in limiting his own consumption by then (and have developed the self-discipline to do it).

  2. Cooking: Will Jude follow in my creative cooking footsteps? I don't know. However, I was a little astounded a few weeks ago when he invented "Chocolate Oatmeal Pudding" out of his head, wrote the recipe down, then bugged me until I let him make it. I guided him into a few minor changes, but for the most part we created his original idea. Did it taste good? Um, I didn't care for it, but Jude liked it! What I liked was that he came up with the whole thing, then went for it! I hope to see more stuff like that in the future.

  3. Stewardship: Since the New Year, we have been studying various units under the character trait of Stewardship: Environment/Ecology/Conservation, Time Management, and Money Management. In the Money Management unit, we read one of the Financial Peace Junior children's books every day. In one of the stories, Junior visits an orphanage and discovers that they have very few toys to play with, so packs up many of his own toys and gives them to the orphanage. I figured this would be a great thing for us to do, too. I had originally planned to tackle the "toy-editing" process myself in a few months, but now changed my mind to allow the kids to have a say in the decisions, allowing them to not only learn about giving, but also NOT being a pack-rat at the same time. So, today we sorted toys, requiring that the toys we kept all must fit within a certain size box, and the rest must be given away. I was surprised and impressed with some of the decisions Jude made, and the maturity he displayed. (I thought he might be the most selfish with the toys, not wanting to give any away, since this has typically been his response in the past--thus the reason I was going to do this all by myself, preferably on a day the kids were elsewhere!) I like those kinds of surprises.

  4. Phobias: Not long ago, we discovered that Jude has a fear of bears. This is probably not unrelated to the fact that a few weeks after we moved onto this land, Jude and his friends happened to see a black bear at no great distance while playing in the trees. However, Jason did not know the reason that day in January for Jude's irrational wailing when he left him behind in the field to try and get back to the house quickly, as he was carrying Jabin. (Jabin's short legs and short boots don't mix well with 18"-deep snow.) It wasn't until Jude finally got into the house as well that Jason was able to address the whole situation, discovered the reason for the overreaction, and sat down with the boy to have a lesson about bears. I don't know if he is less afraid of them now, but he is at least relieved to know that the chances of being attacked by a bear in an open field, in the middle of winter, are slim to none! I guess we'll see how things go come summer...

  5. Animals: Jude loves reading, and he particularly loves reading about animals. "Mom, did you know that an octopus can change the colour of its skin?" "Mom, did you know that moles clean their worms before they eat them?" "Mom, look at this picture of a house made with mammoth tusks!" It's so cool to see him just delve into stuff like that. We don't have Discovery Channel--but thank goodness for the local library!

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