Loyal Friends

You know how I'm always raving about the Preschool Park Day gals? Well this week there is an apple festival that will be closing down our regular park on that day so we decided to just combine it with the regular Wednesday park day in my town. You remember, that's the one I'm always complaining about because no one shows up! And guess what, you guessed it! The only people who showed up were the ones from our Preschool Group. Not all of them mind you, but we had four families and a great time. Cameron and Cassia had an especially good time playing with C.O. and C.J.

Now, flash back to our incredibly slow start of a morning. There was this nasty overcast sky that refused to burn off and it was cold and all I wanted to do was lay in bed and sleep - or if not that then read. Three little monkeys had another idea, lol. Greyson started throwing his writhing form on my face at about 6 am. It's this weird new habit of his. He rolls and thrashes and does everything in his power to lay body across my face while jabbing an elbow in my neck. Always a joy to wake up that way. Next, at around 7, Cameron comes in and starts wrestling with Greyson (whom I was still trying to coax back to sleep, lol). I finally give up and get up. They follow me. Cassia soon gets up too. They suddenly decide to teach Greyson how to play the drums. Yes, the drums. Before 8 am. Before coffee. Then Cassia gets out the harmonica and we've got a whole band going. I grab my cup of coffee and go back to bed with Harry Potter. ;)

Finally, sometime around 10 or 10:30, I finally emerge showered, dressed, and reasonably civil. Well, it didn't quite happen like that. Somewhere in there I managed to make breakfast and get everyone else dressed first, but it's all a blur. I am so NOT a morning person. So then Cameron suffered through his phonics - still choosing that over a reader - and then a math exercise (things like 64 + 29). Next was history and we read/looked at a couple different encyclopedic entries on the evolution of man. I wanted to read Stones and Bones! How Archaeologists Trace Human Origins but Cameron said, in no uncertain terms, that he did not want to listen to that one - too long. So we just looked at the pictures and I read the captions of the more interesting ones. We actually got a pretty good feel of the book by doing that. We had a nice long discussion on Charles Darwin. Cameron was really interested in how he came up with his theories. I may have to find a simple biography on him. OK, done. I love online library catalogs.

Maybe an hour or so later, I was checking my email and came across this article. So then I had to go and revise my little hominid evolution speech because it turns out that Homo hablis didn't slowly evolve into Homo erectus over millions of years as was previously thought. Turns out that they were living side by side, much like chimpanzees and gorillas do today. Very interesting stuff and a wonderful example of the way that science and history can change with each new piece of evidence. One of the things that I really wanted to impress on the kids with our Classical Education from Real Books, not textbooks, was that you should never get all your information from one source. Different points of view can form different conclusions and paint completely different pictures from the same "facts." You can never really *know* but by examining as many different views and sources as you can, you can get a clearer picture. Knowledge is power, as they say. I wasn't exactly expecting to convey the malleable nature of science and history this early on in the game, but I'm thrilled to death that it came up naturally and so well timed to boot!

As a bedtime story tonight, I plan on starting One Small Blue Bead by Byrd Baylor, the shortest of the several historical fictions I have on prehistoric man. Hopefully they will like it, but if they don't maybe the treat of staying up a little late to hear it will be enough to keep them listening. ;)