Ehlana and Ethan:
Happy 22nd Birthday, Martin Rice!
Happy 6th Birthday, Marcus Mallow!
Congratulations, Tory and Kyle Denninger – you’re pregnant again!
We had breakfast chats with Martin and the Malloys, and sent gifts ahead of time, but our day was not filled with non-stop birthday-party-level fun.
Okay, there was a fair bit of post-birthday fun this morning for Ethan, Aiden, and their buddies at Joshua’s house before they met up with Naomi and me for our home-school day with Mom and some of our cousins and friends; they enjoyed that blast of guy-rated weirdness; and we were happy to have a much-quieter morning at Naomi’s house. For us, that was entirely because Zack and Eli stayed up too-late; didn’t want to get up; and we only had to deal with them while eating breakfast because they slept through our Tai Chi workout; we got ready for the day before they were ordered to life by Naomi’s parents; and we escaped and came here to our house as soon as we finished helping with most of the breakfast clean-up.
Ethan and Aiden didn’t catch up with us until a quarter-to-nine, so we needed to get right into our digital lessons and assignments for the day and catch up on their party recap as we went along through the morning. We worked in the dining room today while Mom helped the younger gang in the sunroom and kitchen. The studies weren’t newsworthy, but the weather ended up better than forecast because the rain held off until this evening instead of being with us for some or all of the day. This ended up being the warmest high of the week too, which is why we took our studies outdoors after lunch; and went out for a bike and play afternoon with our friends instead of going to the lab once Mom set us free and we had our assignments finished.
We biked the trail around town and also out along the first section of trail being built to Quarry Lake because that was finally an option for us. The work on that trail has resumed this week, but we didn’t go far-enough to actually see the equipment and crew working on that project. There was an Emporium treats snack break and playground time mixed in with the biking; and we stayed out as late as possible before heading to our homes for dinner.
We were home for the rest of the night with Mom and Dad; dinner was of the quick-and-easy variety; and then we spent the evening working and studying in the office with just one break for a walk with Silkie shortly before the first wave of light rain moved into town. Our Magi lesson was the highlight of our studies, but we got a fair bit of work done on our doctoral research too; so it was a productive few hours of effort – including the time-phased parts of that little adventure. We needed bath or Jacuzzi time after that; and we’ve been chatting and playing on our computers since meeting up again on my bed. Now I’m going to pass this over to Ethan for a few minutes to wrap it up with his birthday party report; and then we’re going to crash and get some sleep.
***
Ehlana and Naomi have already assured me that they’re happy to have missed Joshua’s party, but I’m going to take the lead from some of Cassie’s pre-teen journals and write about some of the social interaction among our friends instead of very much of the ‘what’ we did. We should do that more-often, but since Cassie and Uncle Adam have already done such a great job with studying Magi and our interactions with latent and normal peers – along with everything else they’ve worked on in that project; it seems repetitive and unnecessary to write about that sort of thing with our friends.
I was thinking about that more than normal last night because there are differences between us, but while we usually think about that in terms of Magi kids needing to act ‘normal’ for our age; every person develops their public persona regardless of the reasons for doing that; and those faces that we show to the world are often different from our inner selves too. That’s true for our Magi, latent, and normal friends; and that dynamic was one of the things I focused on last night.
Cassie basically developed the ranges of talent for each group, and we’ve all learned a lot about how each person is affected by how strong or weak they are regardless of the group they’re in, but I was thinking about that in relation to how we each act in public. I didn’t come up with any major insights, since there wasn’t a notable pattern to what I sensed and saw, but it is interesting that some of the strongest Magi and latent kids play down their talents – as Aiden and I usually do – while comparatively-weaker friends can be very aggressive. That didn’t prove to be a pattern because there are too-many exceptions where that wasn’t true; though that was more-likely among latent and normal friends – probably because all Magi need to hide their most-impressive abilities anyway. Zack and Eli, by the way, are two of the most-obvious exceptions; and it’s a bit funny to think of their overt personalities while also knowing that they still also downplay their true abilities.
This seems to be rambling along without getting to any points – and maybe there is no point to be made here. To any spectators at Joshua’s party last night, we looked like any normal group of guys our age with the good and bad that goes with that. Miles and Joshua are our leaders; the food, drinks, and other games that scare our favorite girls kept us entertained – even for the group with Aiden and me that didn’t participate in those contests; and there were the ‘good’ kids like us that helped out with the work before and after dinner and who stayed out of trouble all night. That overall dynamic isn’t really any different from any normal group of kids our age – though our small-town lifestyle is different compared to kids growing up in big cities or elsewhere in the world.
Finally, I’ll add that I don’t sense that the changes we’ve made over the past ten years or so with allowing more Magi kids to know about each other has caused any major changes in how we relate to all of our friends. That might not seem true to some of the adults when Ehlana and I spend most of our friends’ time with Naomi and Aiden, but we have good relationships with the rest of the kids around our age; and expect those friendship dynamics to change as we all head into our tween and teen years. We’ll be able to do more together as – and if – we can get back to normal life after the pandemic too, but that’s a sociology issue for another night – especially when discussing that from the perspective of kids that have spent a significant percentage of their self-mobile lives in varying levels of social restrictions. We really notice that at nine and ten; and it is even more-true for the younger kids like Brianna and Faith. In percentage terms, their social distancing would be the same as decades for our grandparents – or at least a handful of years for Grandma Eleanor! ;^)
Okay, that’s enough rambling tonight, and I’ll only add that Joshua had a very happy birthday; his parents and the other adult helpers survived the night and this morning; and we’ve moved on to life-as-semi-normal again today. Let’s hope that our March Break will be this awesome too – though the girls will hope for that without any of the pre-tween drama or the grossest of the favorite games that were so popular last night and at breakfast this morning. That isn’t a mental picture that we want to go to sleep with tonight, but we’ll come up with something else to think about between now and then; so we’re out of here and back to the real world so that we can do that.
This is Ehlana and Ethan Proctor; live from the hidden home of the Magi of the Light – and May the Magi Force be with you!
