What did we even DO this week?

Calvin finished reading Charlotte's Web, started and finished reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and then started two more books, Mitt the Michigan Mouse, and The Waterhorse. This has me wondering whether I need to encourage him to delve into one book at a time, but he seems to be comfortable this way, so I'm going to sit back and observe for a while yet. In the meantime, I finished two books to review for Booklist, one that I would highly recommend to anyone who enjoys esoteric counter-culture fiction (Herself, When She's Missing comes out in late May), and one that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.

We started reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane as a bedtime book.

The week was mostly cold and questionable, so we played chess, we played Mammoth Hunt, we played with Legos, with tangrams, with Pattern Play. I hear that this is the first time on record that the month of March was warmer than the month of April in the Northeast, but we did make it to the park twice.

My favorite moment of the week was Calvin and Jon discussing phone lines and the Hubble Space Telescope.

We researched a lot of ancient Egypt. We read about it, we drew about it, we acted it out. We played with iPad apps (Encyclopedia Britannica for Kids), we watched videos (Building Pharaoh's Ship, and Egypt's Golden Empire), we almost finished our mummy project. That's turning out to be a four week project!

Lots of time playing Totally Tut kicked us into the world of multiplication. Calvin started the Gamma book of Math-U-See a couple of weeks ago, so he's already got a head start. On Friday at HAA (our homeschoolers gathering), another mom suggested a some iPad math games, two of which we are happily trying out: Math Bingo, and Hungry Fish.

We were home-bodies on Monday and Tuesday, went to swimming and the store on Wednesday, sorted books at the library on Thursday, had HAA with play practice and art on Friday, and were home-bodies again on Saturday.

And that's a wrap.

One of my favorite things about homeschooling? It's so age intergenerational.

Non sequitur?

Meet our oddly metallic purple and blue jumping spider. He was tiny and cute and very happy in our garden. Five years ago I would have rapidly fled the scene, but yesterday I used my own (gloved) hand to carefully coax him into a cup so we could get some pictures. This makes me happy.

And on an unrelated note, but entirely worth mentioning, about seven months ago Calvin became determined to play Monopoloy. At the time he knew his numbers, but we hadn't spent any time on math as a subject because it hadn't held much interest. The frustration of Monopoly without prior arithmetic sparked that interest and got us trying Math-U-See, which has served us well in its own way. Now, seven months later, Monopoly has made a comeback, and to drastically different results. The learning wasn't a rush—it was all on his own schedule, and of his desire and determination, and he is pleased with the results, or maybe he just takes them for granted. That warms my heart.

That is to say...life is going well.

Help from a friend

Please not the sump pump

The rain, the rain. We received almost three inches of just yesterday, and then more today. We did not suffer any truly violent weather, and in light of the happenings around the country I will not complain. My only concern here is for our new trees, who seem to be struggling to get established in such a deluge, and for our basement. I keep listening for our sump pump, which is running several times an hour, and thinking about the backup pump with battery that we bought not even a month ago and have not had a chance to install. Fat lot of good it will do us still sitting in the box.

I have precious few pictures from today and yesterday, mostly because of the dark, dark weather. Yesterday the thunder rumbled pretty regularly from two in the afternoon until long after my bedtime. I actually love that sound, and in the absence of violent storms this added some amount of enjoyment to an otherwise dreary day. Today it was just rain. Rain, rain, rain. We used the time to explore many things. We built with Legos: houses, castles, cars, carts, and everything under the sun. We played game after game: Carcassonne, Camp, chess, and other games that don't start with that same letter. We watched birds out the window. Very wet birds. We watched old school Sesame Street and a video about ancient Rome. We did many, many quiet things.

I am cursing the rain because of our new trees, and because I have several friends with flooded basements, but a rainy day can add just the right amount of melancholy to color a day for art, for books, for napping, for enjoying each other. Of course I say this now because the weather report shows sun, sun, sun, for the next seven days, if we, and our sump pump and our trees, can just get through tomorrow.

Getting up and doing

Most of our days start exactly the same way—with some quiet reading while we slowly wake up to the day's possibilities. I vaguely remember days, before Calvin was born, when waking up on a weekday morning meant rushing to get to get to work where I spent most of my time doing what needed to be done, then getting home in time to eat and retire for the night. Waking up in the morning to a day that can hold almost anything our hearts desire is a new and rather expansive feeling for me. What can we do? Almost anything! But the other side of that coin is that it is surprisingly easy to end up doing almost nothing. I (and now Calvin also) can get too lost in a book that we start in the morning and end up spending most of the day there. At the end of days like that, even being the book lovers that we are, I feel like we have failed to use our time well.  With all the rainy, dreary weather that we've been treated to this spring we've had more days like that than I care to count.

But maybe those days have their place, too. Activity in waves. We've spent much of the past couple of weeks (when we weren't on vacation) lost in books, our imaginations wending their way through other places and times, then today the sun came out and our energy to get up and do came with it, and so, after our usual morning, we got up and did. And it turns out that the things we've been reading make their way into the things we are doing, and vice versa. Plus, after so many languorous days we were ready for a busy one or two, and then again we'll be ready to recline in repose.

Today we played volcano games on the iPad, we made Roman face pots (an activity from our ancient Rome explorations), we played Qwirkle, we watched birds and Calvin wrote in his journal about them.

Qwirkle on the back deck, where we could watch the birds in our birch.

And at the end of the day we're still reading while we watch for our bird friends out the front window.