President's Day

It's Presidents day & for some reason my #1 son is just as excited about today as if it was Christmas. He also enjoyed Febuary 12th-Lincoln's birthday. Lately he's been obsessed with President Lincoln. They started learning more about him at school this month, along with Harriet Tubman & Martin Luther King Jr. And he was very interested in the all the Presidents. His teacher started using a website called BrainPopJr.com. It's very informative & the kids just love it. I knew it was good stuff when he asked to play on it when he got home from school rather than his Star Wars game.
He's expressed great interest in all the presidents on coins too. He has them all memorized. One night he was quizzing us on them & when my husband thought he'd be all smart & ask him who was on the fifty cent piece. He smartly replied, "I don't know, but do you know who's on the half dollar?" Needless to say, we laughed at that one for quite awhile. As we checked out at his book fair last week he said "That's Jackson." The vounteer checking us out said, "I know your name". To which #1 son replied, "No, that's ANDREW JACKSON". Meaning the $20 bill I gave her.

He's also been very concerned about Lincoln & where he grew up and where his parents are. And Friday at school when they showed his class the new $1 coins being released with George Washington on it, he grabbed his play money penny all excited & shouted "Release Lincoln, release!" I guess he was hoping he might be released from the coin & come alive. He also refers to the Lincoln memorial on the penny as "Lincoln's house on the tail". And of course John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln. This is important to Lincoln's story & according to #1 son, makes him Lincoln's "enemy".

Being that my son watches & plays a lot of Star Wars games, he is now learning about death & dying. It's sort of neat to see him learn the lesson slowly & easily as a child should. Grasping the knowledge of someone not ever coming back. It's been following along with my father having died a year ago Febuary 12th. My son makes mention of this every time we go see my mother asking "Where's your Papa?". He waits for the usual answer he knows that comes with this question. "You know Papa died & lives in heaven as an angel now." To which he always promptly replies "I know." So now that his Star Wars characters are dying & the Jedi are turning into ghosts, he began to ask qustions. We finally put it in terms our literal thinker could get. Ghosts are pretend & only there when pretend people die, like in your game. When real people die like Nana2 & Papa, they are angels. You never see angels. That's the difference.

**"Is Lincoln a ghost or an angel?"
**"Why didn't Lincoln duel (like in SWars) John Wilkes Booth?"
**"Are the north soliders like the Empire? And the south are the rebels?"

#1 son got so into the Civil War from his Lincoln phase that he wanted to use his army men to act out the civil war. We found some army men that were "Civil war men from the battle of Gettysburg" at Hobby Lobby. He loves them.
So happy President's Day to you all and as my #1 son says "There are lots of way we can celebrate Lincoln's life."