Productivity!!

Yee-haw!! I've had the most productive last couple of days. I am SO relieved. I don't know if it's just my nesting instinct finally kicking in or if it's my birth numerology moving from 10, Wheel of Fortune (lots of change and ups and downs) to 11, Karma or Justice (where you reap what you sow), as my friend Karin predicts. I was complaining a couple weeks ago about feeling so out of control and so incredibly in need of a change and she reassured me that as soon as my birthday passed I would feel a change and most likely move into a period of strength. Seems to be true and regardless the reason, I'll take it!

So to recap... Friday was Favorite Park Day. We didn't do any blackberry picking like we had planned (partly because Cassia had lost her sandals and then refused to put on any other pair of shoes *eye roll*) but spent most of the afternoon learning a Spanish card game. Cameron loved that game and wanted to keep playing round after round after round, lol.

We left the park a bit early because we had plans to go to an Unschooler's Game Night and Potluck that evening. I had been wanting to go for months but since DH is usually only home for dinner 3 nights a week, we had never made it. This week, however, DH wasn't going to be home until close to 10pm so we decided to go. C&C were so excited. They LOVE board games and card games and the thought of having a room full of games to play and kids to play them with was truly exciting. We brought Hungry, Hungry Hippos, Tangoes, and SkipBo and a big bowl of homemade refried beans. Unfortunately though, none of the other kids seemed to want to play any games. Dinner wasn't served until about 8pm and then the adults settled down to a game of Trivial Pursuit and the kids disappeared into one of the bedrooms around a computer. Computer and electronic games were supposed to be strictly off limits at this gathering, but (forgive my stereotypes) the Unschooling Nature of the group seemed to prevent any of the parents from telling their kids not to. I knew my kids actually wanted to play games so I pulled them away from the computer and played a round of SkipBo with them. And then we left. Don't get me wrong, it's not that we had a bad time. We had a good time - it just didn't quite live up to our expectations of a Game Night.

The weekend was spent finishing up Cassia's new room. It looks fabulous. We have her brand new big girl bed in there complete with purple walls, pink and purple butterfly sheets, a floor lamp in 5 different shades of pink, white shelving along one wall, and what was supposed to be their school desk that is now the perfect accessory to the girliest of girly-girl rooms. She loves it. I love it. I wonder if she'll let me move in too. ;)

Monday was my birthday. I am that much closer to 40 now - yikes. LOL. Funny, I remember 28 being a lot harder than 29 or 30 and it seems that 38 is the same way. I think it's that once you hit that x8 you can no longer say you're mid-twenties or mid-thirties. Oh yeah, I'm late thirties now. And barefoot and pregnant too, lol. We didn't do anything special really. Just hung out around the house and then went out to dinner. It was a nice day.

Tuesday, get ready, we actually did schoolwork. Cassia finished up a review page in phonics on CVC words with the five short vowel sounds. She did FABULOUSLY. I had been worried that she was just memorizing the words after I read them the first time and then couldn't recall them later, but this time she really seemed to "get" the sounding it out thing. Cameron finally FINISHED the very last phonics lesson. WooHooo!!! We got through it. The whole book. Yay!! Next I decided to skip Grammar because the lesson was about introducing dictation and I just don't think Cameron is quite ready for that. I think I'll wait a week or so for him to get comfortable reading small sentences again before I make him start writing them. For math, Cassia did some more adding and Cameron started an introduction to fractions. We finished off with Science and read all about lungs and gills. There was a cool activity for measuring lung capacity but unfortunately I didn't have all the parts for it. I need a rubber tube. Where do you get a rubber tube?? I looked online for something else fun to do, but there were surprisingly few suitable unit study ideas for the respiratory system.

We finished off the day with haircuts and gymnastics. It was about 500 degrees in the gym so that pretty much finished off my productivity too. I met yet another mother of four also. It's funny how they're all coming out of the woodwork now! It seems that having four kids is almost commonplace around here now. Well, not really, but it does seem that three is the oddball number - people either have one or two or just jump straight to four!

Today was another good day. I started off with an OB appointment. Everything is good. I'm much less uncomfortable now, for some reason, and am content to just wait until Junior decides to make his appearance - though I do appreciate the repeated offers to induce from my OB. She just keeps saying that everything looks great and so she'll go along with whatever I want to do. Oh and I'm still anemic, but not as badly so that probably has something to do with my energy level too. DH was working from home today so since he was home with the kids, I decided to stop off at the library on my way home. I paid my $9.40 fine (ouch!) and picked up a book for everyone. I got Cameron Frog and Toad Are Friends, Cassia An Ant: Learning the Short A Sound, and Calling All Engines for Greyson. Cameron said, "Oh, I bet I'll like this book!" and then tossed it aside, lol. Greyson jumped right in squealing, "Tommy! Tommy!" and spent about 15 minutes flipping through the pictures in his Thomas book. Cassia, after looking slightly strangely at me for getting her a book on ants, sat down and read the entire thing cover to cover. She did SO good. I was so proud. She had some problems remembering the word "an" but I think it was because she didn't really realize that it was a word, you know? I don't think she ever listened to herself closely enough to realize that she say "an umbrella" rather than "a umbrella" so I can see how it would be hard to read. She could read the words "ant" and "can" just fine so it was just some silly mental block, but oh well. She worked hard sounding things out and really, really did a fabulous job. I am so happy that I got that book for her. For me, I got Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife to get me "in the mood" so to speak. I wanted to get one of Ina May Gaskin's books but they were all checked out.

After lunch we... get ready... did school again! Yes, you read that right - two days in a row! And the best part is that everyone was super, super cooperative and wonderful about it. Cassia voluntarily did a phonics lesson even after spending all that time reading her ant book. I totally said she could skip it if she wanted but she wanted to surge ahead. The lesson was on double consonants and she piped up with "Hey, I read a word in my ant book that had that. Well, it wasn't like that but it was two with the same sound!" and she was right. She had read the word "black" in her book. She's a smart little cookie. Cameron put up a bit of a fuss when I asked him to go get his library book to read for school. So then I told him it didn't matter what he read as long as he grabbed something to read. He finally came back with a WALL-E Little Golden Book and read it well. It turns out that I was right about him. He seemed to really need the closure of finishing all the phonics lessons before he could have the confidence to believe that he could read. It's been coming on for a few weeks now - ever since we started that final section of the book - but now it seems complete. He read "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and now he can read anything. ;) For math, Cassia started on subtraction by counting backwards on a number line. Cameron named fractions from pictures, as in, "1/5 is 1 part of 5 equal parts" and he even did all the reading in his math book too. For History we read about the caste system in Ancient India and about the young prince, Siddhartha, who became Buddha. I'd really like to go a little deeper into Buddhism with the kids. If I *had* to choose a religion, I think I would choose that one. I went over a couple of the principles with Cameron, like reincarnation, and he informed me that he is starting to believe in ghosts and gods - especially ghosts. I think he might be ready to really start understanding what religion means to people.

The ironic thing about today is that school was done in Cassia's room. Yes, when that room was The School Room we never did school in there. It was just too cluttered and crowded and stiff. Now that it's all purple and comfy (and all DH's computers are out of there), it seems to be the ideal place to get a little quiet and hunker down with a good book, lol. A lesson in irony at its best.

The only thing left on our schedule today is a soccer game this evening. It is so nice to have everything done and out of the way early. I really hope this trend continues. Maybe I can even get the house clean and the baby's stuff ready before he arrives. *grin*