Disneyland Part 1

Well... we decided to take the kids to Disneyland again.  We wanted to wait another year, but since we had used Disneyland as bribery to get Jaden and Kaleb to do reading lessons at home, Bradley knew it was his turn.  

In fact, I wasn't even planning to do reading lessons with Bradley.  Call me lazy, call me pooped out on my 3rd child, or whatever you want.  But I worked hard forcing the first 2 kids to sit through those lessons and learn to string some sounds together into words.  But.  Here's my issue.  Was it worth it?  Yes we got to go to Disneyland, but come on... it's Disneyland.  We would have taken them anyway. 

I decided to teach them to read at home, because I have noticed that boys struggle more than girls in that area.  I figured that math and science would come easy to them, so I wanted to give them a jumpstart on literacy.  And they did.  They were "ahead of the class."  

For like 5 minutes.  

Now neither of them are ahead and they are struggling.  Not only that, but both Jaden and Kaleb hate to read.  I mean hate it.  It is a fight to get them to do their reading for homework everyday.  Neither of have the joy of reading books.  Which I think is sad.  I hope this will change.

So I guess what I'm saying is that, I'm not sure those hours and hours of working with the kids early on even did very much for them, and I'm not sure if my forcing them to do these lessons played a role in the way they feel towards reading today.  Who knows, maybe they hate it so much because they are boys.  Maybe it's because they are young and still learning.  Maybe it's because they would rather be out playing with friends.  I don't know.  What I did know, was that I was no longer motivated and so I wasn't going to push Bradley.

I didn't push Bradley.

I didn't even take him to the store to pick out little prizes for him to earn along the way.  He brought the lesson book to me.  Everyday.  He wanted to read.  He wanted to go to Disneyland.  There were days when I was just exhausted from being a mom and had to tell Bradley, "No, we're not reading today."  What?!  How does that happen? But Bradley wanted to learn.  

And so I taught him.  

I was a little nervous because I didn't want this to squash his desire to read, but I also couldn't turn him down.  When we were about 2/3 through the lessons, we realized that if we were going to take them to Disneyland it would need to be in a couple weeks, or wait till October.  I kind of think we should have waited until October, but there were some issues going on at Charles' work that swayed my decision to go sooner than later.

Bradley wanted to surprise his brothers with the trip.  He actually did the first half of his 100 lessons without them even knowing.  But... he was excited.  And the news slowly came out.  So Charles and I decided we would surprise them all since Bradley hadn't actually completed all 100 lessons, and we needed to make the trip earlier.  We let it slip so many times, we were amazed that the kids didn't know what was going on when we pulled up to our hotel in Anaheim.

Poor Jaden was torn.  He wanted to  go to Disneyland, but he had just spoken with his Grandma Socci on the phone a few days earlier and had told her that we would be there that day.  He was worried about hurting her feelings by not showing up.