Isaac has been using training chop sticks for a while, so I graduated him to actual chop sticks. I gave Joshua the training chop sticks. Isaac did a lot better than I was expecting.
In other news, one of the boys is hiding the devotionals in Joshua's closet. They both seemed surprised when I brought one out after finding them earlier today.
I finally figured out that I was allowed to recycle the box of shredded paper that has been patiently sitting in our basement if it was in brown bags. We've been getting a lot of bags from the grocery store, so one of Joshua's chores was to transfer it.
It was a big messier than I expected. Not to fear, life skills are here! Joshua's life skill today was to use the broom and dust pan to sweep it up. He didn't do a great job, but it's better than it was. He also seemed to be enjoying it and said, "We should make another mess so I can sweep it up!" I'll admit though, this is the fun kind of mess to sweep because it is so obvious that you've cleaned.
We decided to feed this paper to the worms. Instead of giving them each half the bag we collected, Joshua gave them both about 10 bits. He was very worried about the worms escaping too.
Isaac wasn't completely feeling school today, so while he still had to do a few things I also gave him a Lego challenge of building a cloud factory. (The cloud factory was given to us by one of our librarians. She's been wonderful. Not only has she made us a bunch of reading lists, but when I mentioned I was having a hard time doing my own searches for on-line books she sent me a nicely detailed way of doing it. I haven't quite gotten the hang of figuring out appropriate books for the boys, and it's hard not being able to page through the book to see how many pictures there are.)
One more day down! They're not bad days, and they do go pretty fast. But they're all somewhat the same.
Joshua was supposed to make a gigantic piece remover and a vacuum today. He made a normal sized piece remover and a hand-held vacuum with a cockpit and a dragon skull inside it. He also managed to fall on some Legos (I think) and got a pretty nice gash on his knee.
We packed a box for community action house. I made the boys do a scavenger hunt through the groceries that we had quarantined from Monday to find everything. The only thing we were missing was 2 cans of soup, but Isaac suggested substituting two cans of spaghetti-os.
The students of the lab I'm teaching this summer didn't finish their work early, as I was hoping. (I hope every year. Sometimes one or two finish something early, but never enough for me to nicely space everything out.) So I'll have a lot of grading to do tomorrow when I could have been doing some today. Oh well.
The kitchen got cleaned and the laundry was already done. I worked on cleaning the guest room, which has gone from a disaster to a controlled mess. I could have started a few other cleaning projects, but 1)I'm never really sure how long I'll have until a child needs me and 2) grading tomorrow so I didn't want to get into something and 3) I didn't want to.
Isaac's class had a "eat a snack and listen to a story". I let Joshua join in while I went for a quick bike ride in the cold. I'm not sure Joshua enjoyed it because I didn't change the video format and Ben didn't realize it was in a grid format. Oh well.
Well, the phone isn't showing me today's pictures, so ...I don't remember what happened today.
Um, I told Joshua to decorate a box to put food in for Community Action House and he decorated the inside, which was unexpected.
I got groceries.
Joshua's lego challenge (from me) was a dinosaur or something that was only blue. He came up with a story about an octopus making a huge wave and the villagers going in their boat to fight it.
For Joshua's Lego challenge today, I told him to make Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders. He made a combo game. Isaac really wanted one too, so I told him Outfoxed or Blokus.
Joshua made a combo Candy Land/Chutes and Ladders game. It was playing along about like those games go, and I asked him how one is supposed to win. It turns out that instead of choosing one (or two or three or four) of the color pieces you could choose zero pieces which would trigger a special piece being put into your hand and that would bring you to the end.
Isaac made a pretty close rendition of Outfoxed, but added a volcano. The volcano might go off every round or it might not, depending on how Isaac was feeling. If lava hit you you zoomed around the board like a crazy rock and ended up in a new place. As add-ons go, it wasn't too bad and could be used strategically.
For "Mom's choice" today we finally got out the robot that had been languishing, partly put together. It turns out that Joshua had gotten stuck on a hard step. (It was hard. The instructions were not clear and it was a technic join, which he doesn't like.)
Anyway, we got about half way through it before school was done. He kept going on his own and finished. He was super excited about it and I'm glad we got it back out! I wish I had realized it was such a small stumbling block, because we could have restarted it a while ago.
