the gift of music

As I have mentioned once or twice, my boys LOVE to sing. we sing everything. we use music to cue them to what we are doing next and what we need to start doing.  we sing together literally all day long. but we have not, until today, listen to recorded music together.  this was an amazing development. J lit up with delight when I played ringtones off my cellphone and we all danced and jumped together.  we also watched a few babyish videos off of youtube which was like magic.  J is very interested in learning his colors.  B is interested in running and throwing things.  Just to illustrate the developmental differences, I will tell a quick story. 
Today I thought of a new station we can add to our already existing playdough and coloring/drawing stations.  We have these little domino-sized blocks they come in 5 colors.  I set up a game where they need to sort them into colors.  Johnny LOVED it and tried very hard to sort them correctly and say the names of the colors.  Benny watched us for a minute and then started swinging his bag of blocks around and then dumped them on the floor and starting running around the room...lol.
Johnny is really so into cleaning it is amazing.  He is in love with cleaning up.  He slammed his brother's hand in the toy box today because he was so eager to clean up a toy that Benny was still trying to play with... hummm. we will see how this develops. 

Dad just reminded me of a cool thing that happened today at church.  it was a church where they call up the children and pray for them during the service. so I walked the boys up to the front to join the others.  we were in the last row and the church was Very long so it was pretty conspicuous since I was one of 4 white people in the room walking the boys up to the front.  I crouched down when we got near the front and told the boys they should go up to the very front but they were resistant. two ladies who worked for the church took their hands and walked them the last few feet.  It is not as if it would have been possible for me to have drawn any MORE attention to myself just by having walked to the front.  I was trying to just wait by the side but the vicar thanked me personally for bringing my children to church and invited me to come up and join the children in front.  I thanked him and started to kneel with the children but he said "will you pray over these children for us" and he handed me the microphone that he was using to lead the service with thus far!  That was more than a bit unexpected but I did get to pray over the entire church's children. What a privilege!