Renaissance Cures and Golf Ball Drops

We had a very full week, and the next three weeks are looking quite full as well.  We learned about Galileo in our history lessons and how he (supposedly, it's debated) performed an experiment of dropping two weights off the Tower of Pisa and discovered that they both landed at the same time despite differing in weight.  So, necessarily, we had to test it out ourselves.  We reached "desk height" and dropped a golf ball and a ping pong ball at the same time.  The two balls reached the floor at about the same time, but since ours was not a well-controlled experiment, we turned to You Tube to see if we could get some slow motion videos.  Not too surprisingly, You Tube is filled with ping pong/golf ball experiments.  We watched a few educational ones and then it quickly devolved into watching British professors exploding a trash can full of 1500 ping pong balls.  Entertaining.


You Tube is a great teaching tool at times.  Just this morning, Todd and Josiah were eating breakfast together.  Josiah asked the simple question of whether chicken eggs were considered meat.  Todd answered that question and followed it up by saying that not everything that comes from an animal is meat, namely cow's milk.  This got Josiah to thinking....about how a mother cow births its calf.  Todd gave him the generic answer of how and Josiah just wanted to press it further about where babies come from.  He wasn't satisfied with a generic answer.  At the end of the very detailed and awkward conversation, Josiah asked if he could watch a You Tube video of it.  (At least he was interested in a cow.)  I, for one, am extremely glad that the rest of us slept through this whole conversation.

We colored stained glass pictures, which Henry really enjoyed.

Since we are still in the Renaissance, we were reading about Edward VI and how he was sickly.  That got into reading about Renaissance cures.  Since many involved spiders, leeches, tree barks, and ground up rubies, we opted for the "boiled lettuce" cure.  We boiled lettuce (cabbage) with a bouillon cube and drank it.  It was supposed to help one go to sleep.  Basically it tasted just like soup broth with the bouillon in it, so it was quite tasty.  Caroline said it made her sleepy immediately.

 Caroline did well at karate this week.  I told her that if she didn't participate in every part of class that she couldn't play on the tablet while the boys did their class.  Guess who participated?  She even earned a new belt that day.

A friend from karate also gave us some girl clothes and shoes.  Caroline is a bit of a shoe hoard, so she was ecstatic.  It wasn't until we came home and she tore into the bag that she discovered there were two nightgowns in it.  This girl has fallen in love with nightgowns lately and she screamed in glee when she saw them.

Henry finished his week well.  When we picked him up from Awana, he had finished the extra credit book.  So, between the two books he's gone through just this Awana year, he's memorized 71 passages of Scripture.  The leader said they didn't have anything else for him to do until the end of the year because he can't get the new book until he's in first grade.  So, they're giving me some passages that adults memorize and I'm going to work on those with him.  Henry is amazing at memorizing things.  He can do so incredibly fast and with astonishing accuracy.

We finally made it to see Lego Batman this weekend.  We went to the same movie theater that we had been to in the past, but the particular theater the movie was playing in had fancy reclining seats.  Everyone had a recliner.  With my history of not staying awake in movies, this did not help that cause.  I can say that the children liked it a lot.  Caroline liked the recliners.  All the menfolk ate a ton of popcorn.  And I can say that the beginning and the end were cute.  The middle was a bit fuzzy...

We have a beautiful flower on our dining room table right now.

This was the only flower we had in our front yard.  I don't know where it came from, it didn't pop up last year.  I'm completely ignorant about all flowers, but we were enjoying how pretty it was.  Then, one of our children dropped their shoe from the top of the climbing tree "by accident" which severed the flower's stem.  So, we'll enjoy it a bit more inside.  It has replaced the giant handful of "wild flowers," as we call them, that Caroline had picked at CC.

And so another week begins...