Seven Quick Takes

1.  My children have spontaneously started building yurts!  With my long standing fascination with all things Mongolian, I can't tell you how excited I am by this.  It's a real yurt: removable, solid, round walls, solid door (you can't see the door in this picture) and fabric roof.   It makes me want to go out and buy a bunch of horses and recurve bows... or herd camels.

 2.  On St. Joseph's Day we had cream puffs.  It's a solemnity.  In fact, it's a holy day of obligation in the universal church!  So it was fine to have dessert. Not that anyone (cough, cough, the Emperor, cough, cough) would ever tease me about the number of desserts we have in Lent.

It's just St. Joseph, and St. Patrick, and Sundays, and Leena's birthday (a major feast in the domestic church, so, naturally, we also celebrate the vigil), and ice cream sundaes every time we go to confession.  Oh, I guess we had pie for Pi Day, too.


3.  That reminds me, I forgot to post the last two weeks Gospel desserts!

Week  4's gospel was the prodigal son.  Except, at our Mass they  did the gospel of the healing of the man born blind! It was also Laetare Sunday, and Leena's birthday party, and, since she had a pink cake, I called it a day.

Week 5's gospel was the woman caught in adultery, and I did meringue "stones."


4. Back to St. Joseph's day. I figured it would be all right to do Oob's favorite math activity: marshmallow math!

It has been super cold, so we made an inside number line, and practiced adding, subtracting and dividing.

Making this numberline with the kids was fun.  We used different colors for different numbers and looked for patterns.

5. In other math news, Choclo, Oob, and I have been playing store a lot.  After teaching basic math 6 times, I think playing store is the best way to cultivate number sense, and get automatic adding, subtracting and multiplying going.  Also it gets loose change sorted!  We had $17.83 in loose change with no quarters to be found anywhere (all swiped for parking on field trips!)

In other, other math news: Klenda has finished Geometry, Zorg is nearly done with Algebra 1, Leena is into decimals, and Mxyl is doing Precalculus!  Wahoo! 

6. It has gotten so cold here that the cherry blossom bloom time has gotten pushed back by more than a week!  Which means our magnolia visit got pushed back a week.  We were scheduled to visit this week, and we actually took a trip there without our usual group of friends.  But it was breezy and cold and hardly any buds had opened.  Next week should be glorious, though!






7. One good thing about the evil time change.

It's given us the best crop of bed head ever.

Have a great week end!  More quick takes fun with Jen.