The Butterfly House Was a Bust

Last week we went back to the VIC, because they had opened the Butterfly House this month. The Butterfly House is normally full of (drumroll, please) BUTTERFLIES! Can you believe it? But we noticed a distinct lack of them when we visited. A friendly volunteer came up to us and apologized, because a chipmunk had gotten in the previous night and ate all the butterflies! There were only 2 left. Thankfully, they had lots of caterpillars of various kinds, so soon they should have plenty of monarchs, painted ladies, swallowtails, lunas and polyphemus moths. We'll have to go back in a few weeks.

We did hit the trails while we were there, and we did the 1.4 mile Boreal Life Trail, which winds through the forest and into a bog, with a boardwalk over the bog part. It was beautiful. We saw lots and lots of pitcher plants, and many were in flower. The flower looks sort of like a tulip, and has a waxen or almost plastic look to it. Very interesting. The Pitcher plant is carnivorous, and we were able to see insects inside several of them.

(Boy, Isaiah really looks grouchy in all those pictures! He's a bit camera shy.)

I sent in our final quarterly report on the 23rd, and I am really looking forward to a break from schoolwork. Lydia and Levi started swimming lessons this week, Monday through Friday at Postwood Park, for 6 weeks. A daily 60 mile round trip does not thrill me, but it is a wonderful program, and only costs a $20 donation per kid. It's our 4th year doing the lessons, and we all love them. And we're making great memories of days at the beach!

Don't Eat the Pictures

We found this little gem on VHS at our library. Don't Eat The Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it. My kids, 4 and 8, have never even seen Sesame Street before. They thought it was hilarious. Now we all go around the house singing "Don't eat the mummies, no. no, no". It was a really fun introduction to art and museums for little kids.

Here's our favorite song:

Cecropia Moth

Lydia went outside early this morning and promptly returned, urging me to come see what she had discovered. Only about a foot from our door, resting on the railing, was this beautiful Cecropia.

Moms should never, ever get mono.

It is just way unfair to be this wiped out and try to take care of 3 kids. We've been listening to audio books, and Lydia has really taken off with her desire to read. Maybe it has something to do with mom being way too tired and coughing too much to read aloud. At any rate, my mom had bought her the whole set of A-Z Mysteries a few months ago, and she never touched them, except for the first one. In the past week she's picked them up and is now on book 'R', The Runaway Racehorse. Some days she goes through 4 of them. I'm just really happy that she's finally doing it on her own, because I know it will help her fluency and confidence tremendously. They're no great literature, but they are fun, and I like that the main characters are boys and a girl who are just friends and they are kind to their siblings, polite to adults, and cooperative with each other. I have read all the books up through 'Q' and have found nothing objectionable. Just good clean fun. Lydia loves them. Now I need to think on what to introduce her to when she's through them. The author, Ron Roy, has a set of books called the Capital Mysteries, set in Washington, D.C. He wrote them after the A-Z Mysteries, so I'm hoping they might be a little harder reading level. I need to check them out.

The audio books we've listened to are Five Children And It, and Nine Unlikely Tales for Children, both by the wonderful E. Nesbit, and The Witch Family, by Eleanor Estes. The first two are free on Librivox.

A little hike at the VIC

On April 23rd we met up with some friends at the VIC for a little hike and picnic lunch. That was the day I first noticed a pain in my left side, and I've been pretty much out of commission since then with Mono. Evidently the left side pain is due to the inflammation of the spleen. I thought I had better at least do a short blog entry about the hiking, before I forgot about it!

A beaver dam we saw:

The perspective in this photo cracks me up:

Isaiah didn't make it into any of the pics, since he was on my back most of the time.

That Friday was also the day our Teaching Textbooks Math 4 came, and I am so, so glad I ordered it! What a night and day difference in Lydia's attitude toward doing math. I actually think a lot of her resistance comes from doing the writing part of the math work. With TT she is completing the lessons so quickly. And she's been able to do it even though I've been sick. I'm really glad I didn't wait until Fall to order, as it seems like such a perfect fit for her.

Confession:

Not a lot of formal schoolish things have been going on here. The kids have had an overnight at Grandmas, the public schools are on vacation so yesterday we visited Grammy, and today we hope to get together with some little homeschooling friends whose mom is a PS teacher and also has this week off. What has been going on, is lots and lots of playing outside. Which is just fantastic, because I have really seen L & L's relationship grow closer when they can play off by themselves a bit with Isaiah out of the picture. The novelty of having a new baby brother is wearing off a bit for Lydia. She no longer feels the need to be near or with him every waking moment. So, I'm letting a little relationship repairing happen. Levi was having a pretty hard time adjusting, and was VERY out of sorts for the first month. I'm more than happy to let the two of them go off and play by themselves, and it seems to me that they are playing together even better than they did before we added a third child. Part of that is Levi getting older and a little less destructive (just a little). Just this week the book Making Brothers and Sisters Best Friends arrived, and I'm eager to crack it open. My hope is to give them the foundation they need to build a lifelong friendship.

 Above are flowers that come up each spring in one of the flower beds. I've always thought they were a cultivated flower, but a post over at Sage Parnassus has me wondering if they're some sort of wild Squill. Our house was built in the mid to late 1800's by the Patten family. We're the first non-Pattens to live in it. When we moved in the flowers were mostly overgrown, and most of what was here was native wildflowers, ferns, lilacs. But I've never seen this plant growing wild, so I'd always assumed it was purchased.

The daffodils below are actually double daffodils, and were here when we moved in, but there was a row of cedar trees directly behind this bed that we ripped out, and it was terribly overgrown. The daffs never bloomed until we started yanking things out. Now they've spread and multiplied like crazy and I need to dig some up and move them back out of the lawn.

Below is a photo of our house in 1889. I love this picture!

And finally, I visited my favorite used bookstore this week and scored a pile of gems, all for $35.