The Way They Should Go

That’s it.  Apparently it’s decided.  LOL

I have to admit I was a little taken aback by this - because this is the girl who announces to everyone she meets, “I’m a girl who really likes bugs.”  Seriously, this is how she introduces herself to people.  So I said, “I thought you were going to be an entomologist and study bugs.”

“Well, I can do that, too.”

She has a point there.  Silly me.

Recently I’ve really noticed KTRose’s ability to remember stories I am reading to her.  She’s always done fairly well at this with her usual kiddie books, but with chapter books it has been harder.

When I pulled out The Well Trained Mind recently I was reminded of the work it recommends for retention.  Starting out with prompting questions to get your child to tell you something from the story s/he just heard.  Then working toward being able to just say “tell me about the story we read” and get an accurate plot line back. 

When I started doing this I was both amused and frustrated by the responses I got back.  Inevitably someone (from the story or not, it didn’t matter) turned into a bug, or grew wings, flew, had an adventure… all basically having nothing to do with the actual story we read.  When I tried to prompt with major plot elements I got “I don’t know”.  I realized that she liked the sound of my voice, but often tuned out from me and tuned into the running narrative that seems to be in her head.

However, after practicing this - and it really seems to need practice - she is doing much better.  I had to explain what we were doing and that I expected her to remember something from the story.  At first I was going for anything from the story.  Then we worked on having her close her eyes and listen to what Mommy said and make a sleep-story in her head of what I’m reading to help her remember.  THIS seemed to be the jackpot. 

Just this week I started getting paragraphs of accurate narrative back from her.  Whoo-hoo! 

I take whatever she has told me from the story and print it carefully on a sheet of her manuscript paper.  We read it, then she copies it to practice her handwriting.  Quite simple actually - but it puts a lot of skills to work.

This week when I wrote down what she said, I would only write one main sentence.  She got upset with me telling me, “No, no Mommy, you forgot to write…” and repeating her narrative back again.  :-)  I told her that was all a bit much for her to have to recopy - wasn’t it?  So we compromised on two sentences and she re-copied them both.

I need to remember next time to take down her narrative on the back of the paper, then we can choose part of it to use for handwriting practice.  I want to encourage getting as much back from her as possible!

It’s nice to see progress.

I do something that totally befuddles my husband.  I know I do it, I know he doesn’t understand, but I can’t help myself.

I can see it at the end of the evening as we put dishes in the kitchen, start turning off lights in the family room.  He’s ready to go to bed now.  We’ve put the girls to bed, had dinner, put those dishes… well… in the kitchen at least, maybe watched a DVD of a favorite Scifi show… it is now time to go to bed.  It says so right here beside his freakishly impeccable internal chronometer. 

However, I know that I have some of the neighborhood women & kids coming over tomorrow, so I should really clean up those dishes in the kitchen.  Maybe find the coffee table… I could swear it was in here somewhere earlier today.

So I start doing those things and hubby will keep himself busy for a few minutes with something.  Then he’ll usually stalk me for a few minutes, judging how long I’ll be.  At some point he’ll go upstairs and get ready for bed.  Then, often about 10 minutes later, he’ll appear at the bottom of the steps to see if I’m coming yet.  And he does this even on nights he’s not looking for… well, we’re all grown-ups here.  You know what I mean. 

But of course, I’m still puttering around.

He just doesn’t understand why I do this to myself.  After all, I HATE morning.  Mornings are evil and should be avoided at all costs.  I can barely breathe and brush my teeth at the same time when I first get up in the morning.  Interestingly God gave me daughters that wake up mid-sentence with smiles and hopping and narrating complete run-on epics of dreams that must be recounted in minute detail with much exuberance and little breathing.  I’ve told God this was an error and He really should check His records.  I’m sure the replacement part is in the mail.

And yet, baffling as it is, I sit here at 11:10pm writing to all of you.  The necessary spaces half cleaned up from my meandering straightening.  I LOVE this time.  In college, this is when I did my best work.  I once wrote an entire final paper analyzing a Supreme Court Employment Law case starting at 11pm the night before.  I had done all the research, but wrote the whole paper starting at 11pm and finishing around 4:30am.  I got an A.

FINALLY my brain is quiet.  My house is quiet.  No one has any expectations of me for the next 8 hours - and I’m supposed to miss the whole thing??  Are you kidding!

I have framed 6 pictures that have been sitting around in various corners of my house.  I cleaned off most of the dining room table.  I did find half the coffee table and I have strong suspicions as to where the other half went.  And that stack of stuff that’s been accumulating beside my desk?  I know what’s in it now.  Did you really think I was going to say I went through it and put it away - the poor thing is only in it’s infancy!  It has a good 18 inches growth yet before it reaches it’s full potential - and we’re strong supporters of exploring and reaching for maximum potential in this house.  We’re homeschoolers.

I still have within my sight a random large piece of cardboard, Grandma’s Attic book, KTRose’s writing paper, a brush, husband’s sneakers, 4 picture frames, empty paper bag, screwdriver, plastic dinosaur, rubber light-up squishy dinosaur, “magic” marker, teddy bear shaped blank paper book and mini-karioke machine to put away.  And that’s not even counting the steps - which I can also unfortunately see.  BUT I get to pick all that up with no mention of pee-pee, anyone kicking anyone else, no joyful “watch the birdie’s wings move!” (it was real and it was dead - AcK!) or really any noise except the faint highway noises coming in from the open windows.

I may stay up all night. 

One of the things I said I would write about a while ago was what I am planning to do for next year.  So here goes.

Planning starts early since all the homeschool fairs get underway as early as mid-May.  So for me, that means I want to have a good idea of what I am doing next year before going to a fair.  What I did this year was decide what I was going to do for History, Science, Fine Art, Read Aloud, Grammar (simple as we are keeping that), and Bible.  I am debating between two Math programs and I think I’m going to be pretty unstructrured about KTRose learning to read.  I just had a vague idea of what I was going to do for spelling, no idea on handwriting.

I know we don’t need to cover all these bases in 1st grade - but we’re going to give it a shot.  Anything overwhelming will be put aside.

For History I am doing Biblioplan for families (Check it out at www.biblioplan.net).  I like them because they follow the classical model and teach Ancient Times in First grade.  They focus on a few key children’s encyclopedia/atlas type texts along with Susan Wise-Bauer’s The Story of The World.  Then they have Family Read Aloud from the Bible & from excellent children’s fiction that is very historically accurate and designed to get the children into the culture while reading.  They also have readers, which at first grade level are read to the child, and then a list of other age-appropriate reading related to the time for the child who really likes to read.

They also incorporate the building of a time-line and working maps thoughout the course.  On top of all of that, they incorporate Biblical History in with world history.  So you learn about the Cradle of Civilization, then the Flood, Tower of Babel, Mesopotamia and Sumer.  Then Abraham, early Sumerians & early Babylonians.  Then Joseph and Early Egypt.  You get the idea.  I am really excited about getting *context* around these biblical people!

This History programs makes it really easy to have our Bible reading & devotionals track right along with it, so that’s what I’ll do, often combining some aspects.

Some parts of Language arts will also track along with History.  Most, but of course not all, of our read aloud work will be with the history program.  Which means that much of our practice writing - which will often come from our read aloud.  I’ll have KTRose tell me what happened in the story today, I’ll write it out and have her transcribe part of it as practice writing.

Art will also track.  I found a reference book that I hope to find discounted or used at one of the fairs called The History of Art for Young People by Janson & Janson.  Also a good one would be Usborne’s Book of Art.  They break down art by historical period making it easy for me to pull out the art that is current with what we are studying.  We’ll do two different things with art.  First, we’ll look at pics of relevant art, have KTRose look at it, then talk to me about what she sees.  At first I will prompt her a lot, but work on getting to where I don’t have to.  This is to build observational skills.  The second thing we will do is art projects related to some art we’ve seen or something we’ve studied in history.  I have ideas like making our own Papyrus one day - I know I ran across a how-to on that at some point.

So that’s History, Bible, some Language Arts & Art. 

Our other key subject that will relate to some others is, of course, Science.  We following The Well-Trained Mind’s recommendation to do Life Science in First Grade.  This is somewhat repeated material from last year, but she loves it and I hope to be a little more catering to her interests that Sonlight’s K program.  It was good, but not as much science as she wanted to do, so we finished the program way early and it seemed a little light.

For Life Science I am going to spend the first week on Creation and Stewardship - which is my answer to the LOADS of life science material out there that spends most of their curriculum on endangered species and the importance of saving the planet.  I’m not against saving the planet, I just think it isn’t the entire thrust of studying life science.  Anyway, after that first week we will spend 19 weeks on Animals, 10 weeks on the human body and 6 weeks on plants.  Which all adds up to 36 weeks - a full school year.  The 19 weeks on Animals will be broken up between invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals.  Learning the defining characteristics of each and choosing a few from each catagory to learn about in more depth - focusing on KTRose’s favorite animals. 

The Human body will be an overview of systems - since we did much of those before on our own - and the senses.  I have no idea how we will do plants, I still have to find a good reference book to use to map that out for us.

*** After I wrote the above about Science a friend reccommended Apologia to me for KTRose.  They have an elementary course called “Exploring Creation through Zoology” that focuses on the study of Birds, Bats & Insects.  Just that sounds so perfect for her that I’m going to look at the materials at HEAV.  Maybe we’ll switch! ***

I had all of the above fairly well mapped out when I went to the CHAP homeschool fair this past Friday - and I’m so glad.  Because even knowing all that - and having my preferred resources researched for on-line prices - I still felt overwhelmed at the fair and didn’t see a number of things I wanted to!  Those things are just huge!

But I did make some progress.  I am debating between two Math programs right now.  I am working through Horizons K right now with KTRose and will continue through the summer.  She seems to like it and is doing well, so it may very well be our choice for First grade.  If so, we will still be finishing up the K program at the beginning of the 1st grade year, but that’s fine with me.  Horizons is actually a bit advanced, so thats somewhat common with them.  The other program I am looking at is Math-U-See.  It has good reviews all over the place, so I picked up their Demo DVD and some literature for Scott and I to look at.  KTR would be ready to start their 1st grade program now, so we can make that call sometime this summer.

I also found Draw Write Now at the fair.  I had heard others talk about it, but never looked at it.  It is a program to practice writing (printing) that also teaches the child to draw.  KTRose is really into learning to draw things, mostly animals, right now so I thought it would be a good strategy.  The books teach you to draw something - all the books I picked up are related to animals so this will tie into Life Science - and have you draw the animals and color a picture around it.  Then they have a few short sentences about the animal that you read to your child/have them read depending, and they copy the sentences below the picture they have created.  It’s kind of a way to practice handwriting without calling it that outright to the child.  I don’t have enough animals to do one each day of Invertebrates for example, but I can work with it.  Have her draw another picture of something she already learned to draw and give her a new couple of sentences based on what we are learning?  Something like that.

For grammar we are going to use Jessie Wise’s First Language Lessons for the Well Trained Mind.  It’s super simple to start out with so I think it will be good.  Just the basics.

Spelling.  I picked up Modern Curriculum Press’s Spelling Workout.  I picked it up because it’s recommended by TWTM and I had no other guidance on the issue.  I looked at several other programs at the fair and didn’t see a huge amount of difference, so I thought this was a good place to start.  Not sure if we will start spelling right away in 1st grade or hold off until she is reading better.  We’ll see!

Last thing is music.  There’s not much of a way to tie Music into anything that I can tell at this point, so I think I’m going to take Ken’s plan that he already gave me and stretch it over a year. Do something similar to what I am doing with art in trying to build KTR’s observational skills - have her listen and then tell me something about it.  But also just have music playing in the background when she is working on something independantly.

I think that’s everything.  Whew!  I’m still being obsessive and perfecting my spreadsheet of matierials with on-line prices so I can go the the HEAV convention in June fully armed and ready to shop!  I keep revising as I get to look at the books, and as always am fighting my urge to build the best library of Ancient Times Materials known to the first grade.  There IS a budget to work with here!

A common fear of homeschoolers, and I’m no exception, is the fear of skipping something.  One friend shared with me how her daughter had qualified for a special essay writing program.  She took her daughter the first day and watched as her daughter struggled to keep up.  It wasn’t because she couldn’t do the work - it was because it had never occurred to her mom to teach her Manuscript writing!  She couldn’t write fast enough to keep up!

One of the best things for me to remember as I go through this process is a quote from Debra Bell in her book The Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling…

“Let’s address this universal fear right now.  You ARE going to skip something.  Further, it will probably be something REALLY IMPORTANT.”  This made me laugh out loud when reading the book.  But she goes on to say…  “We’re in the midst of an information explosion.  Much of what we learn today will be irrelevant tomorrow.  How will you figure out what will be applicable?  You won’t.  Here’s the solution:

“Instead of wasting one sleepless moment worrying about “Skipping something,” all you have to do is teach your child HOW TO LEARN.  If you’ll just focus on the latter, then when your kid inevitably finds himself in a situation where he doesn’t know how to do something, he is not rendered immobile… stunted for life… no longer employable… ultimately a panhandler on the corner… a sign around his neck begging “Please feed me.  My mother homeschooled me.”   Your worst fear realized.

… “I often told my kids, “It’s your job to learn, not my job to teach.”  I am a facilitator, a mentor, a fellow lifelong learner, a guidance counselor, a coach - and only occasionally the teacher.”

:-)  That works for me!  So besides all that stuff above, I really hope to foster a love of learning in both kids this year.

Oh!  And if you’re worried about Lydia - don’t be.  She sits right there with us.  Listening to all the stories, pretending to sound thing out with her sister.  Doing the phonics drills.  This may actually be a good strategy for the girl whose favorite words are “I do it!”

I suppose that’s enough for now!  I’m working on a separate page that is going to contain an outline of our 1st grade program including resources, so one day soon it will appear.

Later!

Well, there’s never a dull moment is there?? 

On Sunday morning I had gotten fed up with our Lydia’s (age 3.5) lack of potty training.  I had taken to telling her, as I changed her diaper, “You know, Mommy thought I would be done changing these stinky diapers by now.”  She unfailingly said, “No Potty!  I want Diapers!”  or something to that effect.  A few times when I had tried to put her in panties to encourage potty activities, she would wail in a heartbroken tone, “Pleeeeease gimme diaper, pleeeeeeease gimme diaper.  I don’t like the potty!”

So we would go back to diapers.  Is that weak of me?  Tough.  I Just couldn’t see we would get anything productive done with that kind of stress.

There was one time about 3 months ago that I sat her down and explained, “This is really important to Mommy.  I really, really, really want you to go on the potty.  Mommy goes on the potty, Daddy goes on the potty, KTRose goes on the potty - and it would make me sooooo happy if you would go on the potty too.”  So she trooped downstairs.  Sat on the little potty, went, stood up announcing, “I did it!”  And she hasn’t done it again since.

Unfair, I know - but one of my issues with all of this is that KTRose potty trained a few months before her 3rd birthday - and we did that potty-training-in-a-day.  It worked wonderfully after just one false start day.  She only had one accident the first week - and they were incredibly rare (like maybe only 2 times) in the first 6 months.  So, I admit, I was thinking Lydia should be able to do the same thing.

Anyway.  After arriving at church and having to run to the bathroom to change another stinky diaper before even dropping her off at her Sunday school class, I started talking to some women in my church about it.  Mostly I was just venting.  There were many suggestions, but most of them not anything we hadn’t tried before.

Then Sunday afternoon Lydia developed terrible diarrhea - sorry if you are eating.  After talking to a neighbor I remembered that Lydia had had several glasses of straight apple juice at a friends on Saturday - something I have never let her do before.  She got awful diaper rash with blisters and much screaming and crying at diaper change time.  I felt so bad, but also told her that if she went in the potty instead of in the diaper it wouldn’t hurt her little bum so much.  Nothing doing. 

She got up on Monday morning and ran into my bathroom (where I was showering of course) declaring, “I have to do pee-pee on the potty!”  I almost fainted.  Then KTROse came racing in behind her with the little potty, helped Lydia get her pants down and diaper off and sat her on the potty - and she went!  YAYYYY!!!!  (And YAY!! for big sisters!) The rest of the day she went on the potty!  We had a couple misses with the pull-ups on, so I went to panties and she was quite careful about keeping them dry.

Added excitement on the day was that KTRose developed a stye in her right eyelid.  This meant a trip to the doctor.  Doc gave us meds and said it wasn’t contagious, so we then went to the girls art class (at KTRose’s request).  Picked them up afterward and went to the drug store for cream for KTRose’s eye.  Lydia did all this and kept a DRY pull-up!

I told our pediatrician (who we love, by the way) and he laughed.  He said, “I tell parents all the time, just wait until the child WANTS to potty train.  If they don’t WANT to, you are wasting your time.  If they want to, you can hardly stop them.  If you start trying at age two, and this child isn’t going to potty train until age 4, you are just setting yourself up for 2 years of frustration.”

Of course he had told me this before with Lydia, but I’m a Mom and I wanted things different.  *sigh*  Will I ever learn??

KTRose’s eye is ok.  We have to do the antibiotic cream 3xday and give her tylenol if her fever kicks in, but it doesn’t have her feeling bad today.  Hopefully it will resolve itself in 2 weeks or so - surgery doesn’t sound like a fun option!

With all that we didn’t get all our homeschooling done yesterday.  When I said that to my husband he just shook his head at me.  He reminded me we did plenty yesterday that was more important than math!  I’m glad I married him.

Hope you all are having a joyous homeschool day!

Meg.

A few weeks ago some women and I in my neighborhood Bible study were joking about how much more relaxed we get with each additional kid.  The first you worried about every passing germ, meticulously scheduled every meal, worked on the ABCs before she turned One, and used diaper changing time to practice counting to 10, 20 or 30.  One woman with 4 children joked, “Now we’re just glad Joe (#4) is talking and gets some food every once in a while.” 

We can all relate in some way I suppose.  But one of the nicest things I found recently is that I don’t NEED to be as… shall we say focused? - on teaching Lydia things as I was with KTRose much of the time.  She seems to pick up these things by osmosis.

With KTRose we worked and worked on counting items.  I could tell you (then, not anymore of course as each additional kids does, I think, take up space in memory) the date and time she counted 4 items, or 8 items.  Each one was a milestone to be chronicled and emailed to grandparents.  It changes with Lydia, being the second child - sorry sweetie!

The other day I was visiting with a friend and she asked Lydia how many little play horses she had.  Lydia starts, “One, two, three, four…” touching each one as she goes and finishing up with, “twelve, thirteen, fourteen!”  And she was right.  I’m thinking, “Nice.  Wonder when she picked that up?”

Of course, the answer is sitting on my lap or beside me doing a puzzle when KTRose and I are working on math.  I was reviewing phonics with KTRose sitting on my left, and Lydia was on my right piping in, echoing KTRose’s answers.  And yes, she can get a few right on her own.  She sits in the same place as we work on the Bob Books.  I’m just waiting to sit down one day and have Lydia start sounding out words.

This little phenomenon has also forced me to look at how I teach KTRose things and realize that sometimes I make it too much work.  I make it a process with rules and goals.  If Lydia can pick up counting just by being around it - I wonder how many other things BOTH girls could learn the same way.

Some of that is reflected in the decisions I’m making next year for our Homeschool plan.  Phonics and reading will have no set “curriculum.”  I can’t stomach spending $200 for something we could do just as well on our own.  I am just going to keep working with controlled phonics books, reading with KTRose.  I have “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” that I’m sure will be used as reference for introducing new concepts like blends and weird letters like ‘Y’, but besides that, lets just relax a little here!

Science also will be no set “curriculum” and that is her favorite subject!  It being her favorite is one of the best reasons in my mind not to use a curriculum at this age.  She loves it, she’ll do more than any program asks of her easily (finished Sonlight’s program by beginning of March this year) so I’ll just set up my own Life Science Outline guide.  We’ll read as much as we want in each area, we’ll study whatever animals of each type and do whatever projects and field trips the girls are excited about.  I already know for KTRose this will be all bugs, turtles, and eagles, for Lydia I predict horses, whales and lizards… varied interests these little ones.  They’ll probably learn more than any set program and like it a whole lot more.

We are using Curricula for other subjects, but even those I want to be relax about a little.  It’s amazing to me what these girls will learn if I will just read it to them, talk about it and let them act it out.  If it can somehow be learned by putting your sister in a headlock, all the better. 

Side Note:  best idea to come out of this past year was that my little drama queen needs no tests - stick a camcorder in front of her and as her what she learned and she’ll dramatically recreate circulatory system!  She *may* need a little guidance to stay on topic, but she’ll do anything to be on tape.

That’s all for now.  Just something I’ve been mulling over.  Later!

I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this with their child - but KTRose has a downright oddly good way with animals at times.  This is primarily noticeable with insects - for goodness sakes!  I HATE bugs!!  God has such a sense of humor.

This child has been able to catch flies in her bare hands for about 2 years now.  I have pictures.  The first time she did it I figured it had to be a dead one and made her go put it in the trash over her objections.  Imagine my surprise when the little bugger flew off as she tried to throw him in. 

She can catch butterflies and moths also - not so uncommonly just reaching out as one goes by and grabbing it out of the air.  That happened most recently this past Mother’s Day.  Her cousin was especially stunned on that one.  Usually there is no damage to the little critter.

She has been stung by bees a total of 3 times (I think that’s right - maybe 4 times) because she is convinced she can make friends with them.  I was stung twice on one of these episodes trying to save her from one of the bees. 

We have had many, MANY discussions about not catching bees/wasps/hornets etc.  And yet about two weeks ago she came joyfully in the house, “I caught the wasp Mommy!”  She had caught him in her butterfly net and transferred him to her butterfly habitat (currently unocupied) and zipped him in without getting stung.

Just today we were at the park and I saw her coming toward me with hand out in front of her, measured steps and not speaking.  That can only mean a bug since her preferred mode of transportation is a sprint and she wakes up in the moring mid-sentence, I swear!  She had a moth that had (according to her) landed on her hand.  You would think I would learn, but I expected it to be injured.  Nope, as I approached too close it flitted away, landing in the grass.  She gave chase, knelt down and put her hand in the grass, easily scooping him up and carried him home.  He’s the new resident of the Butterfly habitat.

I have no explanation. 

Our lives were greatly impacted Saturday with the cry from the back deck, “Mommy, there’s a turtle!  There’s a turtle in the grass!”

I ran out to see, and what do you know there was a turtle in the grass.  Between the back fence of our yard and the woods there is a neighborhood walking path and a grassy area.  Trucking from seemingly our back fence to the woods was a rather larger than I expected Box Turtle!  I told KTRose to run out (through the house, out the front door, around to the back) while I grabbed a large metal pot that was in the house when we moved in, scooped up Lydia, pulled her and my socks off and headed out behind KTRose.

We got there and she was still trucking her way to the woods.  KTRose, with of course no hesitation, picked her up by her shell and put her in the pot.  We named her Franklin, which coincidentally we have named all varied insects, stuffed animals and critters since first pointed to a picture of Benjamin Franklin and asking ’who’s that?’  I don’t know why.  Following is a pic…

We kept Ms. Franklin for the day and there was much rejoicing most of the time.  KTRose and Ms. Franklin were inseparable.  I was actually suprised at how social this critter was.  Up until one critical moment (we’ll get into that later) she never pulled her head or legs in to hide.  KTRose would pic her up, she would just look around and mover her legs.  We put her on the table on the deck and she crawled to edge after edge looking for a way down.  It was kinda cool.

However, at one point a sobbing and nearly hysterical KTRose came in from the deck and finally got out between hiccupping gasps that she had dropped Ms. Franklin off the deck!  We have a walk out basement, so our deck is a full story off the ground.

We ran down and Ms. Franklin had landed upside down on her shell with everything pulled inside.  I turned her over while sobbing KTRose asked if she was alive.  I didn’t have any idea and told her so, and she started begging to keep her if she was ok, promising to be more gentle. 

We had to have a little talk about Ms. Franklin.  For one thing, I had looked it up on the internet and there is a bit more care to a box turtle of this size than Daddy and I were quite ready to jump into.  Like building an outdoor “little” habitat.  So I told her we shouldn’t keep Ms. Franklin, that she would probably live longer and safer out in the woods by herself than with us.  After her recent leap off the deck, KTRose couldn’t argue much.

After about 10-15 minutes of no one touching her, but KTRose keeping vigil, she peeked out and eventually trucked across the backyard.  When she found a gap in the fence and went through we all let her.

Now we have a teary-eyed girl asking for a cat?  doggie?  bird?  spider?The list is endless.

After a few months of KTRose asking “will you draw me a [fill in the insect/arachnid here]” we have decided to try an art class.  I just googled “Fairfax Virginia Kids art classes” and a class held in a local “Art Center” (who knew we had one?) popped up.

There are two times KTRose now stops talking, to stalk and catch bugs (what 5 year old can catch flies and butterflies in her bare hands regularly?) and now when she is drawing them.  However we quickly progressed to “No Mommy (or Daddy) you’re not doing it right!”  She is very particular and knows how it is supposed to look and she is not getting it to look that way and neither are we.

LOL - KTR is working on addition while I type this.  I hear, “one, two, three, four, five… ugh!  C’mon mind!”

Anyway, KTRose and Lydia had their first art class last Monday, and the next one is this afternoon.  Each week they learn about a different artist, their art, then do something similar on their own.  Last week was Gyotaku Doodle - the Japanese art of Fish Printing.  They used a fish, starfish, natural sponge & seaweed to paint and then ”stamp” out their pictures.  Here’s a pic…

They really seemed to like it, though KTRose seems to go back and forth on wanting to go back.  I think the teacher had her own plan that didn’t include drawing all known insects, so we’ll see if KTRose still likes it on someone elses plan. 

Lydia is also the youngest in the class, but it’s only 4 kids, so they agreed to let her in.  I’m hoping that all goes well.  One of my favorite things is that I get a whole hour by myself!!  AND there’s a starbucks only a block away!  :-)  I *really* hope art classes work.

Besides the aforementioned activities, I think the highlight for the girls was the airplane ride.  We didn’t tell them we were going on an airplane until we pulled up in front of the airport.  Otherwise we would have heard about it 60 times an hour until we left.  They were SOOO excited.

When we got to the waiting area for departure KTR, as usual, introduced herself to everyone in the immediate vicinity and informed them we were going on an airplane to Disney until we made her leave the nice people alone.  Then she and Lydia made friends with another little girl also going to Disney and they sat at the window waiting for the airplane to arrive, jumping and rejoicing when it did.

They were both really good on the plane.  KTR was an old champ having been on one when she was almost 3 which she vaguely remembers.  Lydia doesn’t remember being not-quite-one and going on that trip, so it was more of a wide-eyed experience for her.  She also did great.  Her one moment of worry was when the plane did a fairly steep banking turn right after we took off.  She had been happily watching the cars and trees and buildings, and suddenly could only see blue sky.  She cried out, “Oh no, we’re going to go upside down!” in a loud, just hinting at panic voice.  Scott was sitting with her and held her, assuring her we wouldn’t go upside down, and she calmed down and enjoyed the rest of the flight. 

On our return flight Lyd and I sat with a very nice mom-of-5 and grandma of 4.  I was a little concerned Lyd was annoying, talking away with her.  But in the end the woman wanted to take Lyd home with her.  She even invited Lydia to sit on her lap to look out the window and they talked and talked.  It was cute.  

Maybe my personal favorite thing that happened at Disney, was our freakishly “coincidental” meeting at the bathrooms in Fantasyland.  We turned the corner to take one of the girls in, and there were our friends Brad and Rachel and their 3 kids!  They are friends of ours from church & homeschooling, and neither of us had any idea the other was going to Disney - or on vacation for that matter - for vacation that week.

Brad & Rachel are military and are moving to California.  We knew the move was coming up, but the finally activity for the move happened fast and we hadn’t had a chance to get together.  Our vacation was somewhat short notice, so many of our friends didn’t know we were going.  So they left for CA and we thought that was it - but they were doing a stop in Disney before driving across country.  :-)  We decided it was God’s way of saying, “Oh no, we’re not letting this friendship go that easily!”

Well, those are the highlights I’m remembering at the moment.  It was a really nice vacation.  The girls are getting to an age that makes it much easier to travel with them, and this trip was pretty much designed around their comfort, so it worked well.  Scott and I decided that if we were going to do anything differently, it would be to go even more off season to avoid sun and crowds even more, and to research indoor activity options also.  We were wanting to avoid the sun as much as possible by Friday and hadn’t really planned for that!

Hope everyone is doing well.  See ya out there again soon.

Meg.