Homeschool Week Three

This week I got to draw on the wall.  (See the lovely Lilla Rose flexiclip in my hair?)  We did an exercise where I guided the children through a drawing with a story about a fisherman.  

And that picture turned into a lousy rendition of a MAP of a portion of the waterways of the middle east.  (Wow, how many times can you use the word OF in one sentence?)

This week we learned about Noah's descendants, the Tower of Babel, and early civilizations, such as the Sumarians.  

We also got a new Blender.  Our old one died a couple years ago, and we never replaced it.  Lately, I've heard more and more grumblings from the kids about wanting to make smoothies, so I used some Amazon credit and gift cards from a university adoption study we are participating in, and got us a free blender.  My favorite kind of shopping.  

The kids' math books arrived late last week, and we've been diving into those.  

Let's just say, they were way more excited about the blender than the math books.  

This was the week Katie went from this tentative taking of a few steps into someone's outstretched hands...

...to this walking all over the house (and now the park) on her own.  One little quirk I've noticed is that she doesn't yet stand up from the floor.  She crawls to a wall or piece of furniture and uses that to pull up on.  It's so fun to see the developmental stages in hyper-drive.  I'm sure she'll be standing from the floor soon enough.  

Playing at the park is thirsty work.

Poor Luke.  He does NOT want to hold his own cup.  And when he does hold the cup, he can't quite figure out that he needs to tip it to get the juice (a hugely rare treat for my little butterball, I assure you! I think this is his third time having it with us.) to come out of the spout.  

Okay, so a couple weeks ago, I saw this blog post.  And I thought to myself, that looks tasty!  Which is weird, because aside from the once every blue moon bag of battered fish fillets I get from the freezer section, we don't eat fish.  So I kept moving.  

Two things happened that sent me back to that post.  1) she posted about raspberry truffle mousse, and 2) I found out we had to eat fish for this week's homeschool lesson.  

Okay.  It's an omen.  I placed my first ever Wildtree order from her site, rationalizing that if I'm going to buy foo foo foods, at least it's helping to support another family's special needs adoption, obviously a cause near and dear to my heart.  

Last night was our Rosh Hashanah feast day.  Yeah, I know, the book suggests cooking a whole salmon with the head on.  Repeat after me:  Not. Gonna. Happen.  I made fish.  It's close enough.  

Our "feast" included glazed carrots (which weren't half bad!), the fish, round bread (we made challah last time, but this time we bought our round bread), grape juice and apple slices dipped in honey.  I was totally going to do the tomato/cucumber salad, because I love it with cilantro, but forgot.  Bah.  Not pictured would be our "new fruit" (we used nectarines).  

The feast went well.  We didn't do as many of the readings this time as we did when Daddy was home to participate with us last time, but it was still a pleasant, interesting, and educational meal.  We are using the book Celebrating Biblical Feasts as suggested by our curriculum.  It gives a lot of information and options, and we're able to pick a way to celebrate that suits our family.   

The book suggested using a globe with a crown on it as a centerpiece to symbolize God's kingship over the earth.  I remembered seeing a gold crown rattling around the back of the van (I think Hannah brought it home from school or Sunday school), and I'd been wanting an excuse to get this very cool Crocodile Creek World Playground Ball anyway, since the kids popped our last globe.  

So how was the fish?  It was good!  I liked it, Eli wants me to make it again, and all the other kids except Jack and Brianna seemed to like it.  Jack lives on peanut butter and quesadillas, so his opinion is taken with a grain of salt, and Brianna said, "It's still fish," so her objection may be more mental than taste related, since it didn't taste "fishy" with the lemon oil and seasonings.  Katie, Luke, and Hannah chowed it down without comment or complaint.  The teen boys both had more after their initial taste-sized servings.  I'm thinking I'll make it again on a night that Paul is home and see what he thinks.  

I'm really excited about starting to learn about EGYPT next week!  

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