April Fools

Caroline had her 4-year check-up with the doctor this week.  We confirmed that she is one tall kid.  When the doctor came in the room, he asked, "Whose 4?"  She very excitedly exclaimed, "Me!!  I am. I'm 4!!"  She had a hearing test this time.  The kind with the head phones and you have to raise your hand when you hear the beeps.  Well, the nurse explained it all to her, had Caroline practice raising her hand up and down, up and down, put the ear phones on her and began the test.  When she wasn't getting a reaction from Caroline, despite having obviously started the test, she asked Caroline, "Are you hearing anything?"  Caroline shyly smiled and nodded her head.  "Ok, then raise your hand."  She did just fine after that.  She crushed the eye chart as well.  We weren't too concerned about her eyes or ears, unless you count selective hearing which is a malady for all kids under 5 (or 10, or 18).

She did get two shots, one in each thigh.  I was making her laugh, as I held her upper body down, but afterwards she was limping around.  They hurt for a couple of days, but only when she remembered.

Henry did well at CC this week.  He gave his presentation on Chile.

The boys had to pick a Central or South American country to present on and they picked theirs solely based on how easy the flag was to draw (part of the requirement of the presentation).  So, Henry chose Chile which was very similar to the Texas flag.  Josiah chose Panama.  We learned Chile produces a lot of grapes and copper.

We learned about the salinity of the ocean and made salt water pictures.

It's getting to that time of year where we're finishing up all of our books and activities.  Josiah finished his Awana book this week.  Then, earlier in the week, we had our WAM concert rehearsal.  We are having the 3's, pre-K, and Kindergarten classes all performing together.  The rehearsal was a wonderful disaster with the 3's, so I'm happy we preordered the video.  It should bring us some laughter.  They were to stand on the choir risers (bleacher/stairs kind of thing) during the whole performance.  But our three-year-olds weren't that great at standing in one particular spot for the 45 minute rehearsal.  Plus, all of a sudden they all wanted a speaking line and to talk into the microphone.  One of our boys was supposed to say, "an ox" into the microphone (God is bigger than "an ox."), but when it was his turn, he loudly said, "I love you."   We're going to go out with a bang.

We finished our week with a bit of fun.  The boys really wanted to get Todd with an April Fool's Day joke by giving him a glass full of Jello instead of cranberry juice.  They were looking forward to it all week.  Before I came downstairs that morning, Todd warned me that the boys had made me a piece of toast with mayonaisse instead of butter on it.  He wanted me to react big.  So, I played along, even though I couldn't actually taste the mayonnaise (which I really don't like).  Henry thought it was hilarious to get me.

What they didn't know was that we had some tricks of our own.  I told them that we had to do school that day to make up for what we didn't finish on Thursday.  I gave them each a math drill sheet which is how we usually start every day.  They were NOT happy.


Then I gave them a puzzle that I had made.  It looked like:

T H I S I

O L S D S

O K E A A

F O J Y N

L I R P A

So they had to follow it in a spiral which told them it was an April Fool's Day joke.  They were quite relieved and happy to read that.  

We got them back at dinner though.  Since we had had a huge lunch, we could justify the random dinner meal.  It was "yogurt" (sour cream) with a berry on top, "cranberry juice" (Jello), and some real cheese and crackers.  The sour cream threw them.  They thought it was flavorless yogurt, so that sort of didn't work out.

The Jello was funny (although none of the kids like to eat Jello - somehow I've failed them with this).

So, Todd offered to get them some milk.  That's when it got funny for us.  They took nice big drinks of his buttermilk.  Henry, always willing to try new foods, gave us far less dramatic responses, but he enjoyed the tricks.  He actually tried the buttermilk a few times before deciding he didn't like it.


Josiah dramatically spit his out on his plate.  

After their dinner, what little they ate, we had dessert.  We had a pan of brownies.  This one threw them.  We had to spell it out, like Orange H's, Purple C's, etc.  Brown E's.  Josiah failed to see the humor in it as he was only disappointed they weren't real brownies.  Come on, after all the flavorless yogurt and sour milk?

We also stopped by the Children's Hospital to pick up our race packets for the Fun Run next week.  The kids went back and forth jumping over the giant balls out front countless times.  We were happy no one fell on their face.  We did have a few close calls.  

Caroline barely made it up each ball, but the struggle was worth the slide down.

And now on to one busy week.   

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...

A Week With No Activities

It was a week without any activities.  No karate, no Awana, no WAM, no CC.  It was such a welcome change to have our afternoons and evenings free.  The kids played outside a lot this week.  I have never been so grateful for a fenced-in backyard so they can play freely and I don't necessarily have to sit and watch them like I do in the front yard.  I think it's good for them to play by themselves at times without me always hovering around.

With the extra time in the afternoons, Josiah read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory again and came down at the end of the week dressed as Mr. Willy Wonka.  He stressed the "Mr." part of the name.  He walked with a Lego cane for most of the morning.

Somehow dressing up as Willy Wonka inspired Henry and Caroline to dress as ninjas.  And they all wanted an early morning picture outside.

We made salt blocks many weeks ago.  We were studying the salt and gold trade in West Africa and made salt blocks that were supposed to sit in a sunny area for a few days.  We left ours for 4-5 weeks just to make sure they were good and hard.  They just kept sitting on our windowsill in the sun.  I'd look at them and think, someday...  This week seemed as good as any to try to build with them.  The boys built a few things and then quickly Hulk Smashed their salt blocks to smithereens.

We learned about the different Greek columns (Doric, Ionic, & Corinthian) and tried to make them out of playdoh.  As we were out one day, I noticed Henry staring at a Greek looking building for a while before happily exclaiming he saw Ionic columns.


One of my favorite activities was when we studied about Martin Luther and how he was a monk and how some orders of monks take vows of silence.  So, we took a vow of silence.  They were allowed to gesture and write things down, but no talking.  We went quiet at 9:40 a.m.  Josiah lasted about 35 minutes.  Henry went even longer.  But it required a lot of paying attention to them gesturing wildly with their hands and trying to write words they couldn't spell.  So it wasn't exactly a peaceful vow of silence.  Probably not what the monks had in mind originally.

The boys started up my school again.  Josiah always has a craft for his school.  One day we made Pete the Cat out of index cards and the next day he had a Finding Dory theme so we made Nemo out of index cards.  They made quite a few worksheets for me.  I aced their test, too.

Todd has been wanting the get more strategy games for the kids, more thinking games.  We finally got Catan Junior and have been playing it through the week.  The very first game, Henry surprised Todd and I and won without us even realizing he was close (so much for us playing strategically).  He was so excited.  He went to bed with a huge smile on his face and it was the first thing he spoke about when he woke the next morning.  So after that, we stepped up our game.  Between that and the kids focusing on Coco cards, we've been beating them every time.  Josiah's getting better, though, he nearly beat me yesterday.

The kids are just learning to think more strategically, but they are already quite good at speaking antagonistically.  I had noticed that Josiah and Caroline would get in these one-up type arguments and in the midst of it they'd call each other "Carol" and "Joe."  Josiah did it to Caroline once, saw her reaction, "That's not my name!!!!" and it went from there.  She quickly picked up on calling him "Joe" just to mess with him.  Now, she calls Henry, "Henny," to get his goat.  It's amazing what they come up with to mess with each other.
  
Henry finished his week on a happy note.  He used some birthday money and a Toys R Us birthday coupon and got a Luke Skywalker Lego.  He could barely contain himself in the store when he saw he came with a real Lego lightsaber.

And while we had hoped we'd all get healthier this week, somehow all the kids caught a cold.  So, there's lots of sneezing, coughing, and runny noses.  A few more years, I think, and all the kids will figure out this whole "how to blow your nose" deal.  It has proven amazingly hard to teach.  "Close your mouth, blow out through your nose.  No, no, close your mouth.  Don't wipe your nose, blow your nose.  Blow harder.  No, close your mouth."  We'll get there one day.  You don't see too many teenagers with their parents blowing their noses.

Caroline Turns 4! (...and Pink Eye, Take 2)

Caroline turned 4 this week.  She was so excited to finally be the one celebrating her birthday.  The boys made her some very sweet cards.

They were trying to read their cards to her very nicely, but she took a glance at them, said, "Ok, ok." and moved onto her gifts.  I think she hurt the boys feelings a bit.  Josiah had drawn her portrait and she wasn't giving him his props like Henry did.

She had some exciting presents:
Magic tracks & dolls.


A new stroller and a "ballerina dress so she can twirl, twirl, twirl."


We measured her on our height chart and she is clearly a tall child which came as no surprise.  (I've had several people ask if she'll be in kindergarten next year, so she's that tall. ;) )  She is 1.5" taller than Henry at 4 years old and 3.5" taller than Josiah at 4 years old.

She had her favorite breakfast: peanut butter and jelly bars.  That would be her favorite sandwich, too.

We had CC on her birthday and they always sing happy birthday each week.  She was so excited to go up on "stage" (that would be a one step stage).  When our director asked her when her birthday was, she said, "Now!"  It was pretty cute.

It was also pajama day at CC, hence the pajamas in all the pictures. She had her favorite spaghetti and broccoli for dinner.

Then it was time for the cupcakes.  As I had said, she requested "the same cupcakes as Hannah," so I did my best.  We do not have cake tips for decorating around here, so we did the ol' frosting in a ziploc bag trick.  Todd took a look and asked if it was the Duff Goldman "dog doo pattern."  (The blanks were for Henry who wasn't a fan of the frosting.)

Caroline loved them.  And for that we're glad.  The rest of us are glad we don't have gluten and dairy sensitivities.

Caroline had a good rest of the week.  She practiced her running because at karate she had stopped participating during certain parts - games or relays.  Last week I had asked her why she wasn't doing certain things and she said she couldn't run as fast as the other kids.  So, we practiced running.  I made sure she knew she ran super fast and at karate she did better.  We still need to work on her Dodge Ball technique.  The other kids are running around playing dodge ball and she stands smack in the center of their game and refuses to move a muscle.  Every time.  She cracks us moms up watching her, but she just won't do it.

Henry reminded us we need to work on his sportsmanship technique.  During Awana, his team lost the relay race.  I was helping a different team and saw him from a distance throw himself on the ground and then three adults quickly came and stood over him.  I think they thought he had hurt himself as he was crying and falling apart on the ground.  I moseyed my way over to him knowing full well he was in tantrum mode and pulled him out of there.  He just does not like to lose.  We're starting to come up short with ideas on how to get him to not be a sore loser (or a showy winner).

Henry is a good shopping companion, though. He and I went to the grocery store and he found a map of the store in the cart.  He followed that map for every step and every aisle we took.  He loves maps.

We had a few fun science experiments/projects this week.  We were learning about changes in air pressure by sucking the air out of a water bottle.  This was enjoyed by all.


We also learned about wind and how it forms.  So we made trash bag-hanger wind socks and tried to find the direction of the wind.  They had a lot of fun with this one.


We also discovered that we won an origami book that came with 100 sheets of origami paper.  We have a magazine subscription which has a hidden toothpick in every issue.  After reading what the editor said in the previous issue that "your chances of winning are very good" we went for it.  The boys really like origami, so this was a really great win.

And then our happy week took a left turn when Josiah woke up with pink eye Thursday morning.  I really thought we were out of the woods since it had been three weeks since Henry has been contagious, but alas here we are.  The good thing is that next week is spring break so all of our activities are cancelled for the week.  We are hoping to get every one healthy.  (It's spring break for everyone else, but we're doing school.  I'm still sticking to our six weeks on, one week off bit.)

We made it through the birthday gauntlet again.  Until next year...

Decorating Help

Caroline has had a rough week.  She woke up at 1:30 a.m. Tuesday morning and got sick "from both ends"...at the same time.  We felt really bad for her.  She managed to go back to sleep only to be awoken again at 3:30 a.m. and this time it was worse.  We were tired Tuesday morning.  Todd ended up staying home with her so I could take the boys to CC and another appointment.  Mid-morning, I asked how she was doing and he said she was eating cheerios, drinking water, chatting him up and sent this picture:

We thought she was better, but then the same thing happened Saturday morning.  It was the exact same thing.  We think it may be a food issue, not a virus issue.  My guess is salami. She loves her salami, but I don't think her insides like it.  We're introducing foods little by little now to see if we can catch anything else.  She's not too happy about the restrictions.  Lately, she's been getting upset when she can't have the same foods as the boys.

Since she could not go to her classroom at church (the whole no throwing up and no diarrhea for 24 hours rule), she hung out with Todd and I at the Resource Center where he volunteers.  She did not exactly sit still for the sermon, but she downed a lot of cheerios and water.


To keep her entertained and not running around, the boys put on a lot of puppet shows.  There were quite a few arguments over director rights, story line, puppet handlers, and dialogue,  They got a bit of it sorted out when the law was going to shut down the theater, so Caroline got a few minutes of entertainment, unless she included the 15-20 minutes of squabbling before the actual show.

We learned about clouds early in the week and we tried to make pictures of them using cotton balls.  Using white paper wasn't the brightest, but two out of three kids enjoyed it.


The boys have been identifying clouds every time we're outside, so at least they learned something.  We've had quite a few stratonimbus clouds this weekend.  Before the rain came, we raked up some leaves in the front yard.  That's what we do in March, rake the leaves that didn't exactly fall in the Fall.  The kids had fun jumping in the pile.  The fun ended when one child jumped on another child's back instead of the leaves, causing one to go inside angry and the other to go in due to pain.

The boys have decorated even more walls of the house and have even expanded to Todd's office.  It started off with the boys making framed pictures.  Basically they folded over the sides of the paper to make it look like a frame, or as Henry liked to think, a window.

Henry made a lot for Todd to take to work.

Later that same day, we played an Angry Bird dice game for our review work.  Basically after every question, they rolled their die and would do the bird's body, then eyes, then beak, then tail feathers (4 turns).  After drawing lots of birds during the review, the boys kept adding to their pictures and were making entire Angry Bird scenes.  The only wall that could accommodate that much artwork was Todd's wall in our bedroom.  So there they are.  He's always said he didn't know what to put there.

the whole shebang

Caroline turns the big 4 next week.  She has requested cupcakes just like from the birthday party she went to last week.  Cupcakes, strawberry frosting swirled on top with a slice of a strawberry on top of that.  We'll see what we can accomplish.  I've never piped or swirled any sort of frosting, so it'll be interesting.  We'll go for flavor.