Weekly Wrap-up: When Daddy Comes Home!

The biggest news this week is that Daddy came home from a three-week business trip! We are supper excited to have him back! He got in about 2am Thursday. Monkey got his first kite this week, so one of the first things we did Thursday morning was go try out the kite. Kites are trickier than the look, and everyone had some battle scars by the time we were done, but we got it into the air!



We passed the time Wednesday, waiting for Daddy to come back, at the children's museum. In the past we've spent hours at the firetruck. This time, Monkey passed it without a second glance and we tried out a whole bunch of new areas. My favorite was when he was doctoring the baby. Raven enjoyed checking out the pilot's hats while Monkey spent a good long time driving the plane. At one point, Monkey said we were flying to Taiwan (We got a postcard from there recently). The little boy next to him announced that after that we were going to Tai-two, which made me chuckle.

We've been learning about dung beetles. Glamorous, I know. Notice the shovel-shaped head. Lovely, isn't it? It all started out with Cardinals. Cute, cuddly, and right here in our own back yard. But cardinals have babies, and although the parents eat mostly seeds, apparently the nestlings need something with a little more wiggle to it. So that was exciting. And the dung beetles are pretty interesting. And now Monkey has a page of bug pictures that he wanted to hang on his bedroom door, rather than throw them away when we were finished coloring our bugs. Eww.. (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.)

It was a big week in phonics: Monkey finished the first set of Bob Books! I told him last week that I'd get him a Super Friends book if he'd read them all to me. He finished off those Bob Books on Friday evening. Those last couple were hard work, but he wanted that Super Friends book! I'll probably have him practice on these from this first set for a little while longer before I get him set #2.



Math is going OK. I'm still deciding if we've got a good pace as we move through the math book. I still am stressing a bit about our pace, but it seems to be somewhat better this week. Sometimes, he's so busy pretending that it can be hard to get a good grip on how he's doing. Is it too easy? Frustrating? This time I grabbed dimes and pennies for him to graph with, but unbeknownst to me, they turned into turtle eggs which had to be sat on and hatched... It was a novel way to do math, for sure! He still does the common reversals: p, b, and d, and also 6 and 9, but I'm told that sort of thing will work itself out most of the time, so I'm not terribly worried. And the work we did this week was a good chance to practice the difference between 6 and 9.



We headed back to the same park as last week, looking for changes. One big one was that the pond had melted. Last week he lay on his belly breaking ice for quite a while; this week he was splashing and squelching in the mud. Another change was all the birds. We were particularly interested in the cardinals, as they were a topic of study, and we had listened to their call, so I was hoping he would hear it while we were out. I'm not sure if that worked or not, so we'll likely listen to the recordings again. We saw robins (a sign of spring), red-wing blackbirds, black-capped chickadees, cardinals, a mallard pair, and some canadian geese. Poor guy; Monkey kept running after the birds, wanting to "make friends with them," and he was so dejected when they flew away.