Parentheticals

 It's been more-or-less February for about two months now (February being, of course, the "beastly month" when everything seems awful for a while). That is finally over! We've had over a week of lovely sunny springlike weather, and everyone is feeling great! We spent lots of time outside, we had to break out the sunscreen, Timmy got his ants, Rea is growing things in her garden. It's so nice. Both last Friday and this Friday we went to nature group and then Wildflower Park and ended up being out for nine hours or so. We went to Cabana Park with the Plastows on Saturday and to Brookside Park when we visited Grandma Julie and Grandpa Craig on Thursday. We also went to Crestwood Park today. At Crestwood, Rocket discovered that he loved swimming in the creek. He really doesn't do well in the heat - even though it's just in the seventies, it's too hot for him to do much without wanting to lie down and pant in the shade - so it looks like come summer we'...

We had really good school this week. My main goal in our homeschool is for the kids to learn how to access their flow state and really immerse themselves in learning and creating. We had a lot of that this week! Timmy has been struggling with reading for a long time, but we've just started a new program, and this week he absolutely exploded into writing. He spent all week making a book of different kinds of dragons and maps of their worlds (the kids are all really into the Wings of Fire series right now). He wrote all the names and facts about the dragons by sounding out the words and writing the letters that represented the sounds. It was so exciting to see him focusing on this for hours and hours! He's never written like this before, so it was extra special. Sara decided to mimic one of Rea's projects from last year and read a book and decorate a cake to teach us about it. She just finished reading "Stellaria's Big Find," the first book in the Herb Fairies s...

Oops, we forgot to hit post on this last week. 😬 We didn't post last week because of Saltcon. This time we attended it for all four days, and we had a fun time. Mike's parents watched the dog for us, so he wasn't sad while we went away from him for multiple days. That being said, he was happy to see us when we came back home. One event of note was that when we packed the car we forgot to pack our board games that we were planning on trading at the convention, so after arriving there we had to drive all the way back home to get them. We were fortunate to be listening to a fun audiobook on the drive, so the kids were happy to triple the length of the drive so that they could hear more. The audiobook was named Mister Monday, and is about a boy who gets a magic clock minute-hand, gets transported into a huge magical house and has to figure out how to get back home and stop a plague from killing everyone in his hometown. The math trade went well for Mike this year - he got 8ish...