Tidbits from Week 5

Wrapping up week #5 here today.  I cannot believe we are almost half way through our first term!  We are slowly finding a flexible enough routine that works for us…I think.  Now I’m just beginning to wonder when I will ever have time to get term two planned and on paper?!

~ I ~
Monday, we took the kids to our favorite pumpkin patch for “school pictures.”  It’s an annual tradition.  I picked up a couple of pie pumpkins, but they are still sitting on my kitchen counter, staring at me, begging me to roast and purée them into a pie, maybe some curry soup, pumpkin oatmeal, pumpkin mac ‘n cheese.   
Mmmmm, I sense a pumpkin love post on the horizon!

~ II ~

Tuesday, AWANA started for Boo and Belle.  C-Bear also has GEMS  that evening.  Daddy had a meeting that night so Mommy played taxi, shuffling everyone to their respective churches throughout the city for the evening.  Phew!  I’m beginning to remember what a fall routine feels like now…and realizing there are really only about three evenings a week that we can squeeze in some bedtime read alouds.  I must reconsider our booklist once again!

~ III ~

We are trying to fit in some of our Friday Fun Day stuff today since tomorrow we will be on the road to Family Camp!  Yahoo!  So, today we made an entry in our nature journals about lizards.  We did a little experiment with balloons and electrostatic charge (you can imagine how the kids enjoyed that…including Little Mister, who was very amused with us all rubbing balloons on our hair).  We learned that geckos have millions of little hairs (called setae) on their toes that branch out into hundreds of branches at their ends.  Using these hairy toes and electrostatic charge they can climb smooth surfaces and even walk across ceilings.  A tokay gecko has 6.5 million of these setae, enough to create sufficient electrostatic attraction to support the weight of two human adults!  Amazing, eh?!  Surprisingly, the secret to the gecko’s “clingy-ness” was only discovered in 2002!  I found that interesting.   

I still need to find a time to make a trek to the pet store with the kids and see some lizards up close. 

~ IV ~

I mentioned Family Camp already, but it deserves another mention!  It is a definite highlight of fall for our family, a time that we get away overnight to spend time with our extended “family” from our association of churches here on the east coast.  It’s a lot of work for one night, packing the playpen, rolling up sleeping bags and lugging pillows for all of us.  But the refreshment and fellowship are so worth it!  Our kids talk about it all year long.  And tomorrow won’t be a total write off as far as school work goes.  We’ll have a few hours in the car to listen to a great audiobook! (Maybe we’ll make up for some of that missed bedtime reading!)

~ V ~

I’m always praising up the metric system with C-Bear in her math exercises.  I’m having to supplement this year since her main math book is American and doesn’t include metric.  Anyway, she was doing some of those supplemental problems yesterday where she had to choose the more accurate weight for different objects….whether something was more likely to weigh 5 grams or 5 kilograms, for example.  When she asked for me to verify her choices, I had to chuckle as I mentally converted her answer to pounds as I checked them!  I really am of that in-between generation where certain things make sense to me in metric; but I will always measure weight in pounds (and a person’s height in feet and inches).  I guess I’m an old dog, reluctant to learn those new tricks!

~ VI ~

Our family has been enjoying one of our favorite fall past times the last few weeks.  It’s cruise ship season!  We love to take a drive downtown and see the big ships in port.  One day there were actually three here at the same time.  It’s also fun to pick out the “cruisers” in the crowd.  You can’t miss them with their comfortable walking shoes and expensive travel clothes, a good sized camera and backpack of some sort usually rounding out the outfit.  It might actually be a tortuous past time (given how much we love to cruise ourselves!) if we weren’t in fact boarding one of those ships in three weeks’ time.  Yes, we have been saving for about two years to take our family on a cruise to Bermuda!  The ship we’re taking made its last stop in our town just this week before it begins its runs to Bermuda.  So we had to be sure to say farewell…until we meet again in THREE WEEKS!  EEK!

Linking up today…