Shoe Fetish, first writing, and tithing

Ginny has a real fascination with shoes recently. She wants to wear hers all the time, and come up holding them in her hand saying, "shoes!" I think she knows that when we put her shoes on her it usually means we are going somewhere. The other day she decided that we ALL needed to wear our shoes. So, she kept bringing me different pairs of shoes to put on, and when Trevor tried to take his shoes off she shrieked! Then later when I lay down on the couch for a bit I kicked my shoes off and she spent about 20 minutes trying to slide my birkenstocks onto my feet, which kept slipping off. Finally she got distracted by a bandaid on my toe, and gave up on putting on the shoes. Too funny!
Also, Sam has taken a sudden interest in writing and a little bit of letter recognition. He hasn't shown much interest at all up until this point, and so I haven't done much with him, but this week he sat down and made a puppet with 2 little eyes, nose, mouth, and hair. Pretty good! So we sat down together to make a birthday card for his cousin, and he drew some little balloons, and then I asked him to try to write his name, and he actually did pretty well! The S was backward, but he managed to get a pretty legible A and M. And then later we were reading a book with Max and he recognized the letters we had practiced together. He starts preschool in a couple of weeks.
Yesterday Max took his tithing money to church--to pay on the money he had earned from the garage sale. All week long he kept saying that he didn't want to pay his tithing because he wouldn't have very much money left, but we talked about it a lot--what Heavenly Father does with the tithing money, how we pay our tithing to help people and be obedient, show our faith, etc. Well, anyway, right before church without my asking him he went and got $1.30 out of his wallet, and brought it to me to pay his tithing. Then, Trevor helped him fill out a donation form at church, and he took his money up to the bishop before the meeting started. The great part came later after church, though. He came up to me as I was making dinner and said "Mom, I really felt the Holy Ghost when I paid my tithing." A happy moment for my mother's heart!