Yoka and other Fiction

This morning I drove Alyosha to school. He usually rides his bike with Roman, but Rome was up late working so I took the car. It was raining…Anyway, Ms. Ansell, Alyosha’s teacher, sends out a letter every Monday saying what they will be doing during the week. This week’s focus is real versus fantasy stories. I told Alyosha about fiction and non-fiction and he thought about his interests for a moment. Then he said that he couldn’t read fiction yet because he didn’t know enough facts. He is a scientist and facts are important! Thinking about the books he has chosen on his own at library time from school—they are all the same type: Snakes, Fossils, and this week Eagles. He said we should go through our books at home and arrange them into fiction and non-fiction—putting the fiction on the lower shelves because those are the kind of books Luka likes. Kindergarten has taught him so much but obviously not enough. The other day he asked me if he thought OMSI would want him to come in and talk to the other scientists and paleontologists. He said that he knows that he still has a lot to learn, but he is a scientist already and they might need the help. I told him it wouldn’t hurt to ask.This is the picture that Alyosha drew in school today. The purple is his heart—a purple heart is very special and Alyosha knows all about it. We told him how important purple was when he refused to use a purple toothbrush. Now either purple hearts or purple rain, Luka’s favorite, come up anytime you say the color purple. Try it out on Luka next time, just say the word and he will start singing “Purple Rain, Purple rain” You might not be able to read but the words are “time stone” Alyosha told me he learned what that was from the Halloween Arthur book—it is the stone that is in the cemetery that says your name after you die. The person in the picture is Pra, Roma’s Babushka. It is actually a picture of her spirit.

Alyosha has a spirit house night light in his room that he made at art camp over the summer. Now, we have been talking to him about spirits for a long time and he said many times that he knows that the spirits of Big Fish and Stop and Go and Pra come to the spirit house and he is really glad that he has it. Sometimes it seems like he knows more than me, I hope I can get him to talk more about what he is thinking.

Meanwhile both kids are on a ‘yoka’ fit. They want to do yoga every day, and honestly so do I. Luka’s favorite is the tree pose and Alyosha loves Warrior III, or he calls it flamingo pose. I think that we are going to do some Yoga videos soon. I hope that will make it easy for us to fit it into our schedule.