It was a great day!

Yesterday was a GREAT day!

...until dinner. OMG, what is it about dinnertime that drives them absolutely BONKERS and then sends me over the edge. By the time DH got home I was seriously spewing smoke out of my ears and shooting lightning bolts from my eyes. Gah. Tell me other kids do this? Tell me that it's normal for children to lose their sense of hearing and respond to nothing but their sibling's maniacal giggle. Tell me that they will outgrow this and I will survive!! OK, enough venting. I feel better now.

So since last time... Thursday was ballet where we signed up for the Annual Student Showcase. Did I tell you about that? They're doing a full ballet called The Enchanted Garden and each class gets to be a different flower. The exciting part is that it's a real production with a dress rehearsal and publicly sold tickets and everything. Should be really fun. Friday was Favorite Park Day. Man, did we miss that! Between sickness and the weather it had been over a month since we'd been able to play.

Saturday brought the first Little League practice of the season. I think it's going to be a great season. The coach really impressed me for some reason. I haven't even talked to him face to face yet, lol, but his level of organization and contact is a thousand times better than our coach last year. The scary thing is that we also signed Cassia up for tee ball this year. I know Cameron's games will all be at one of the three fields at this one park and I'm hoping that Cassia's games will all be at the elementary school across the street so that if we do have game overlap during the week (when I can't count on DH to be home to drive one of them) it won't be too tragic of a situation. Of course it's also possible that I'm going to end up dropping poor Cameron off by himself and then driving Cassia all over town for her games, but I'm hoping for the best. And he won't care either way. And there is a parent on the team that we know from last year with a little girl that Cassia is good friends with, so I'm sure she wouldn't mind keeping an eye on him if need be.

The rest of the weekend was pretty chill. At one point, Cassia got out her phonics book and started working on it. Cameron said, "Cassia, what are you doing?? It's the weekend! You don't have to do school today!" I wonder if that difference in attitude is simply because I had put more pressure on him to do school every week day or just a difference in personalities?

Monday we went to gymnastics and as I was digging through the school bag to find something for Cameron to work on while we were there, I realized that I never got out his new math book! All that build up to finish the old book and then we forgot to get the new one out, lol. Yes, unschoolers at heart, all of us. So we did science instead. He started a workbook page where he was supposed to rearrange phrases to make a logical sentence and then find the word that it was describing. The first sentence was "Only plants / can use this energy / from the sun / to make food." That was actually a great lesson because we got to discuss sentence mechanics too - two subjects in one! The workbook didn't have enough space for him to actually write the sentence out (since it is a 4th grade book and his writing is still 1st grade size) so he wrote it on the only paper I had in the bag - story paper! Of course this prompted him to draw a picture to accompany the sentence and then, since it was science, he labeled all the pictures. So that made it art and spelling too. And he never did make it past the first sentence but I think he got quite a lot out of it!

Tuesday we went to another Odyssey of the Mind practice and the kids rehearsed again. They're doing a fabulous job and I can't wait to see what the final creation is going to look like. The kids seem to really like it too. I wonder if this will spark a love of acting/theater? Our 4-H project for the day was canceled due to the sickness of the leaders. That's the problem with being the first ones sick. Once we're better and want to do stuff, everyone else is sick! I can't remember what we did instead. Did we watch a movie? Play a game? I really can't remember. Hmm.

Wednesday was our day off from activities. We watched the Tinkerbell movie. We built with K'Nex. We finally started Cameron's new math book. The first lesson was numbers to ten thousand and he did great until we got to the "write the number in words" section. Does any kid like those? LOL. Those last four problems took a crazy amount of time. Cassia did three or four lessons in her math book in that time. After they finished their math, we read two of the last four chapters in Story of the World, Volume 1. Even though we haven't really done a lot of extra stuff in the last half of the book, we're still pretty much on schedule with our 5-year plan for the four volumes. So I'm happy with that. The next two chapters are on the fall of Rome and then after that I think we'll spend a week or two going through some of the myriads of Roman stuff that DH's aunt (a retired 4th/5th GATE teacher) gave me before moving on to Volume 2.

Today we spent the morning spring cleaning and then did an in depth phonics and grammar study - we watched The Electric Company on DVD. ;) Did you know that Bill Cosby and Morgan Freeman (OMG, he was so funky cool, rofl) were on that?? After lunch we went to ballet. During that Cameron did two exercises in his math book - obviously there was no writing of words involved, lol. Greyson had me read a couple books to him and then he followed one of the ballerinas around the studio watching her vacuum. He's such a nut. Cameron wanted to do history too but just then we heard the pitter-patter of little ballerina feet coming down the stairs. I planned to do it once we got home but they got distracted with K'Nex and I got distracted blogging and now I don't think we have enough time before baseball practice. Oh well. Tomorrow is another day. :)