This Week

I finally got my wish--Bible study is going to be at our house tonight, which has motivated us to clean. Once we made it through the paper morass in the kitchen, things really started looking up! The boys have been working on the playroom and basement today. Anna is improving her crawling speed by leaps and bounds each day, so I told the boys that now that everything is clean, this really is how it needs to stay, since Anna can go wherever she wants now (and, unsurprisingly, she wants to go where the boys are!) and pick up whatever she wants, as well. I also told them I would not be picking Bionicle pieces out of her poop, and that any she swallows will just be given up for lost. They became much more motivated to keep all the Bionicles upstairs in their room after that conversation, LOL.

We start the Ancient Greece unit in our homeschool co-op on Tuesday. I was looking forward to 2 more weeks to prepare, since I teach the second 2 weeks of the unit, but then the other teacher called me Thursday afternoon to say they had a death in the family and were driving down to Alabama for the funeral. Could I please teach Tuesday? Ack! Of course, I said yes, realizing, frankly, that I often procrastinate on these things anyways, so I might as well have the crunch time be this weekend. I have been up to my eyeballs in Greek military stuff though. This first Tuesday I will overview the main city states and then discuss Athens and Sparta in more depth. Then we'll talk about the war with Persia, and then the Pelopennesian wars, and finally deal with Alexander the Great. For our craft, we'll make models of a Greek trireme (that's their fighting ship, which has 3 rows of oars, for all of you not current on your ancient Greek naval terminology). That should be very interesting to the boys in the class (I'm teaching the third and fourth graders), but probably not so much for the girls. Oh well. I know the other lady is going to talk about art, architecture, and drama, which probably will not be of as much interest for the boys! For my second week, I'm doing the language, as well as some of the famous scientists. We're going to recreate some of the famous experiments, like Archimede's principle and maybe even build an Archimedes screw. I found what looks to be an easy one in a book.

We're also looking forward to Caleb's birthday, which is now less than a month away. Every day he asks how many more days, so it is having quite the lead-up. He also spends a lot of time thinking about what kind of cake he wants me to make. At first he said Larry-Boy, which I thought would be pretty easy. But recently he has changed his mind and wants "bug party--but not with ugly bugs, only friendly ones." Soooo. A lot of "friendly" bugs are sort of "girly" bugs, right? I'm thinking ladybugs, butterflies . . . I'm a bit stymied as to what to make for a cake. I guess I need to feel out the concept a little more with him. But hey, now that I'm not teaching the week right before his birthday, I will have a lot more time to do the cake!