Today we celebrated Tornado and Horizon's 2nd birthday.
The boys got out all the special food and made Lego gifts and decorations.
They got wet cat food. Horizon licked it quite a bit, Tornado ignored it. Possibly the candles scared him.
Joshua opened his presents. He had made them a heart out of their colors and a cat.
Isaac made a cake...
That could be cut into two pieces with a dull knife.
In other news, we started working on addition because number flash cards are boring. Does anyone have a trick for telling the difference between a six and a nine?
This is what Joshua made me yesterday.
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Today Joshua made a water park as a Lego challenge. It was quite detailed, with a slide, water shooter to knock over a person, a pirate ship, and ...something else. The something else came with a die and needed to be rolled in order to move it.
He also made a rather impressive tower out of Rhino Hero.
Isaac and Dad have been doing mail chess for a few months. It's been a bit hard because we weren't sending a postcard back very quick and Isaac kept forgetting to move his pieces. So we finally moved it on-line, because screen time limits are out the window right now anyway. Isaac found several lessons and spent quite a while doing them. He also pulled out our chess board and was doing something with it.
One day at karate there were a lot of women. We're usually rather outnumbered, so we took a picture.
There aren't many adult females. There's one near my level, but I haven't seen her lately. I know there are some at the next higher level, but I just don't seem them because they're in a different class. There are some high-school black belts, and they almost count. (Hmm, maybe they've graduated by now.) There were several that have dropped out semi-recently for assorted reasons.
Good rambling, I know.
In other karate news we still get to test this cycle. And we get to take it for free this time! We've been doing virtual training twice a week. It's going better than I expected; I'm sure we're not doing as well as we would in person, but I think we're doing ok.
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.
