« weight, discouragement, and anticipation | Main | bleak and gray... Fresno will do that to you... »

Monday, September 15, 2003

good school day

We had a really good school day today. I was looking for gaps in LT's math knowledge so far by going over chapter tests in a second-grade book, and found that he knew how to do everything in Chapter 3 except for rounding. So we started on rounding today, and had a really good, fun, informative discussion. He learned a lot without getting that "this is school, I dislike school, therefore I will dislike this no matter what" kind of attitude. Then instead of a reading comprehension worksheet, I started teaching him how to use the Internet for research. I asked him what he wanted to look up; first it was dinosaurs. He wanted to find a place to see dinosaur skeletons etc. in California. So we learned a great deal about the Brea tar pits; he even saw practical application for addition as he calculated how much we would have to spend to get our family into the museum. We added this to our list of places we want to visit. There are a lot of problems with California but really, it is a wonderful state to live in the middle of from an educational perspective. There are so many varied things we can see in a day or cheap weekend trip. Every major landform except a jungle, within half a day's drive. Both the highest and the lowest places in the continental United States; huge metropolitan areas as well as dozens and dozens of out-of-the-way small towns, and open spaces that go on for hours. And wow, it looks like our daily high temperature will get down below 90 just in time for the first day of fall! ;-) (OK, so it's definitely not perfect).


Anyway. After we looked up dinosaur stuff (I'd completely forgotten I was talking about school; had you?), he wanted to see if we could find bird calls for local birds. And boy, could we -- there are a lot of really neat sites. Here's one of our favorites: Bird Watchers' Digest's audio pages. Really useful and interesting. What on earth did we do before the Internet?


I'm back to my disciplined self regarding diet. Somehow, in spite of the fact that this is Bloat Week, and that I ate like I was meant to be having a growth spurt over the weekend, I weigh the same this morning as I did last Friday, and I'm wearing The Too Small Jeans again today. I will take that, with thanks, as special grace from God, and endeavor to keep things from going downhill (or up-scale as the case may be) from here on out. Tonight I'll have a good start -- I have chorus rehearsal and that means a walk there and back.



If T wins the ebay auction he's bidding on right now (which is likely, since the guy wants to sell these car parts to someone who will pick them up, rather than having them shipped), he'll be driving down to San Diego this weekend. We were trying to figure out how we'd manage it exactly; he has two trucks, but one has too short a bed (and too expensive a 4wd setup and tires) to be useful on this trip, and one is out of commission until he finishes rebuilding it. So he will be borrowing a friend's truck; the four of us won't fit in it; he and I can't go on our own because our overnight sitters (my parents) are, to put it nicely, a bit grandkidded-out after this last weekend and I don't want to foist my two on them for an overnight two weekends in a row; the friend who owns the truck can't go because he teaches a class at church on Sunday. Finally he figured out that if he wins, he'll take our son, which is perfect. They'll have a fantastic father-son trip, and C and I will have a girls' night in. I'm actually looking forward to it.



We went yard-sailing ;) over the weekend and bought a SORRY! game. LT is now fully obsessed with it. When nobody will play it with him (which is not often; I like it a lot better than Candyland and Monopoly, and I'm not yet as tired of it as I am of UNO; however, I do have stuff to do, like, for example, read diaryland diaries and update mine ;), he sits and plays for two players by himself. There are a lot of worse things he could spend his time doing -- not that he knows about any of those yet...

--------