Adventures in Parenting

DH went back to work this week so I've been on my own. Yesterday wasn't anything too traumatic, just gymnastics and I'm used to that being a zoo. Today, however, I ventured out to both the grocery store and the library. Yeehaw, that was interesting. The grocery store wasn't too bad - the kids actually behaved - but I forgot to bring my baby sling so I had to put Greyson in the cart seat, Linus in his infant car seat carrier in the main part of the basket, and then had to ask Cameron and Cassia to push one of those little kid carts so we had somewhere to put the groceries! LOL. I know I'm going to end up being that mom who has to push three carts through the store each week to feed all her teenage boys. They were actually pretty well behaved in the library too, but it felt really zooish. I think I messed my back up carrying the infant carrier in one hand and Greyson on my other hip across the street. And then trying to keep track of them all while I was checking out the books? Yikes. Someday I'll get the hang of it, I'm sure. (I hope, lol.)

But we did have another productive school day, even though we didn't get started until almost 12:30. Cameron read a chapter from Frog and Toad All Year. Cassia chose not to do any phonics or reading today. For grammar we learned about adjectives. It was kind of funny, one part of the lesson gave a list of adjectives and asked them to name nouns that those adjectives could describe. Hot, cold, long, short, cute, fuzzy, etc. Cameron did really well (although he kept saying "Linus" for almost all of them, lol) but Cassia seemed to struggle a bit thinking of things. Another part of the lesson asked them to come up with all the adjectives they could for a certain noun. I picked the noun "Linus" thinking that would be easy since we had already used him for a number of adjectives. Cassia came up with several right off the bat but Cameron found it almost impossible to come up with a single adjective. He could only manage to think of descriptive clauses like "has a small nose" or "has lots of hair" or "cries a lot." I had to help him turn them around into words like "hairy" and "tearful." I just thought it was interesting that one struggled with the nouns and one struggled with the adjectives.

For math, Cameron learned about adding fractions to make a whole. (e.g. 3/5 + ___ = 1) He got a little confused at first, saying things like "3/5 + 1/2 = 1 whole" but got the hang of it pretty quickly. Cassia did some more subtraction and made a cute little bunny calculator where a hungry bunny on an envelope gobbles up carrots on an index card.

We finished up with history and read about the Mauryan Empire of India and Emperor Asoka who renounced the act of war after seeing how it made his people suffer. We also read a Buddhist story from the Jataka Tales about a hare, an otter, a jackal, and a monkey. (In looking that up in Wikipedia, I noticed that it seems to be spelled incorrectly in SOTW. They have it written "Jakata" Tales.) Cassia was so impressed by the ending in which the hare tried to sacrifice himself in a fire to feed a hungry traveler only to find that the traveler was really a disguised god and the fire did not harm him, that she decided to draw a picture of it. It's quite a good picture, but unfortunately, our scanner does not seem to be working at the moment. She wanted to give it to the librarian but I convinced her that we should keep it in her History Notebook* instead. I had great last minute luck at the library and came home with an armload of other Jataka Tales and a colorful and simple book on Buddhists.

I had wanted to do science today too, but we really did need to get to the store and the library before soccer. Oh yes, I had to take all four kids to soccer too. I met an elderly man there who had been laughing at Greyson and was admiring the baby. He said in his heavily accented English, "Two boys?" and I said, "No. Three boys, one girl." He looked startled for a minute and seemed to count on his fingers a bit before finally looking up and saying, "Now that's a family!" Now, I thought the previous generations were used to larger families! He looked at me like I had said twelve kids, lol. So that was my final adventure for the day. The good news is that Greyson cooperated and actually walked back to the car when it was time to leave instead of making me carry him and that Cameron and Cassia both pitched in and carried the camp chairs so that I didn't have to make two trips. I really do think we all may get the hang of this eventually. :)

*OMG, I have been so horrible at getting anything for the History Notebooks! Ideally, we should have drawings and maps and narrations for every chapter we've read but I haven't put anything in there for months. If anything, all I have is a random pile of maps and coloring pages stuffed in a drawer somewhere waiting to be scanned, sorted, and hole punched. I hated feeling tied to having to do written stuff so we'd have proof that we studied X, but I also hate having huge gaps in the stuff I do have because I love the idea of ending up with a self-made history book. A clear case of being damned if you do and damned if you don't.