Parentheticals

This has been a busy week! Monday we had CC. We lost another tutor, so now we have all 15 kids in one classroom. The tutor who's still here is a former public school teacher and is AMAZING, so it works, and the kids have made some new friends in the group. But it's also harder to keep everyone focused. We're working on other ideas to help the kids sit still and quiet. Tuesday and Wednesday Alison felt like she was coming down with a cold, so she rested a lot. Everyone else did fun things, probably. Thursday was Rea's Carnival party. We came home from Grandma and Grandpa's house early to meet the Dalyais. Rea picked Vietnam as her theme, and she and Aunt Amy made Vietnamese ginger cookies (yum!), and she helped everyone make paper lanterns and taught them a Vietnamese game. Then they had so much fun playing for four hours that we forgot to have dinner and got to bed pretty late. On Friday the 3rd we had a game day with the Wilsons at our house. We finished up playing...

This week we... Certainly we did something. Wednesday for Science Time we talked about the particulate nature of matter.  That was an interesting one.  Rea seemed to get it, though. She did, at one point tell me that particles are called atoms, so apparently we had talked about it before. Thursday was Rea's birthday.  She requested homemade macaroni and cheese and asparagus for dinner, and chocolate cupcakes for dessert.  We at it as a picnic in the backyard.  She made little fairy decorations for the cupcakes, and she got some lovely presents: a kit to make flower fairies, a set of laminated paper dolls of horses and fairies, a coloring book, a toy Dalmation puppy, a doll with a dress modeled after Elsa, and Quints dolls.  It was a very fun day and she was very happy. Saturday we went and picked apples from a neighbor of Amy's.  Amy told us the apples were falling off her tree, so we asked if we could pick some and clean up the ground for her. ...

Last Tuesday was Sara's daddy-daughter-date. She chose to get ice cream at macey's and to go to the playground and go on the slides. This last week I also worked on my tower defense game that I am making for a programming competition. It is coming along decently. You can play the game, but it isn't complete yet. I also finally convinced Scott to make a board game. It is moving quickly. It is a game where you play as villains, sending monsters to fight heroes. A unique idea. On Wednesday we had 'science time with daddy' again. This time we talked about energy, and what it was. It went well. On Thursday we had another Board game design group meeting. I presented my changes to Space Game, and there wasn't much feedback (perhaps I need to make some bigger changes or get it played with another group before I get more feedback). Friday Alison went out and bought treats for General Conference as well as stuff for Rea's birthday while I took care of the ...

This was Rea's first week of homeschool kindergarten: She missed the kindergarten cut-off by a month, so all her friends from Church and the neighborhood started kindergarten this week and she didn't. So Alison told her that they would do a homeschool kindergarten. Alison says there's definitely been a learning curve, but things are going pretty well. Rea says her favorite thing to do is math, which Alison would have guessed was her least favorite from her responses, so that's interesting. She also practices handwriting, reading (Rea is reading aloud "Little House in the Big Woods"), and memory work, and Alison reads some classics (fairy tales, Aesop's fables, etc) to her. It all takes 30-45 minutes a day and has been going well. Alison is looking for some sort of group to join once a week to get out of the house more, but she hasn't found one she loves. She might have to create one. On Wednesday we had Science time with Daddy for the first time. We ...