05/22/2012

1.  Back to school today!  It was actually OK.  We took Monday off (obviously, driving home from Lubbock), and for some reason starting the school week off on Tuesday seems to go down a lot easier for my boys.

2.  In the afternoon I took Joseph to flute lessons (make-up from yesterday's missed lessons).  On the way home we talked cars.  All the boys have been really into cars lately.  Mosey and Joseph are obsessed with Kia Souls.  It's not that they particularly like them, they just like to notice them and point them out.  Funny boys.  Anyway, Since I don't have a Y chromosome, I don't really get the whole car-obsession thing, but I try to play along.  We had fun trying to identify the make of every car we passed by on the way home.  It was hard!  A fun family game sometime would be to have a contest to see who could correctly draw the most car maker symbols.  I'd lose, but it would be fun!

Here are the boys with their boats.  They painted them and put them together all by themselves.  Yay!

3.  In the evening was the boys' Cub Scout Raingutter Regatta.  This was a fun event!  Way less stressful than the pinewood derby, and more fun I think.  The boys each got a little boat-kit to put together and paint.  Then 4 rain gutters were set up on saw-horses and filled with water, and the boys took turns racing their boats by blowing into the sails to push the boat from one end of the rain gutter to the other.  This is such a random thing, and has nothing whatever to do with how the boat is constructed or decorated.  And they did a million heats, so everyone got a chance to come in first in at least one race, I think, and certainly all the boys realized that this was truly not much of a competition at all.  Afterwards they swam in Brother Scott's pool, and Brother Scott spent an hour catching boys as they sped down the zip-line he has across his entire yard. If that was heaven for little boys (and it was), Brother Scott is a saint.  :-)

4.  We are reading "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" right now.  All throughout the year, the boys have one book that they are reading (fiction-- not counting their history books and science books), and one that we are reading together.  I remember reading this one when I was a kid.  It's such a good book, but a difficult one to read aloud.  I have a hard time with the "N" word.  But one of the things I love best about this curriculum is the read-aloud element.  Such a great opportunity for discussions about topics that wouldn't come up, otherwise.