Learning By The Way

Moriah had her 10th birthday on Valentine’s Day. To celebrate her first decade of life, we took a trip to St. Louis, just the two of us. First stop was a teahouse, The Enchanted Rose, in Lebanon, IL. We had their Mom and Me tea with some yummy Apple Butter Chai Rooibos, and little tea sandwiches. We dressed up and had a wonderful time. I know, because Moriah said about a dozen times “I just LOVE this place!”

From the tea room, we went to our hotel in Collinsville. We swam in the pool and stayed up way too late seeing if the wounded duck which was rescued on Animal Cops: Detroit lived. (She did). The next morning, we went to Cahokia Mounds Museum, where they have excavated several mounds. Then it was on to St. Louis, where we had lunch at Fitz’s and watched them bottle cream soda while we ate. (Of course, we did make a little detour at a bookstore on the way there- I bought a book about restoring old windows).

After lunch, we went to the St. Louis Art Museum. It was grand. Now, I have to tell you, when we were planning where to go on this trip, Moriah wanted to go to Chicago to see Degas’ Little Dancer. After researching though, we discovered that the Little Dancer was in the Louvre. I told her that wasn’t an option! So we settled on St. Louis. Well, unbeknownst to us, the Art Museum there has a cast of the Little Dancer taken from Degas’ original work in 1920. Moriah was ecstatic. We saw Monets, Van Goghs, and made lots of new discoveries. The ancient Egypt section with its mummys and really, truly canopic jars was a special hit with Moriah as we had just been studying that.

After the art museum, we walked down to the zoo for our last stop in St. Louis. While early in the day it had been beautiful and sunny, the skies turned grey, and a stiff breeze started to blow. Sure enough, partway through the zoo, it started to pour down rain. We took refuge in the monkey building. When the sky cleared, we took a jaunt through the African animal display, and then headed home. We had a glorious time, and were thankful for the safe trip and the time we could spend together.

The 4 older children adore their fencing class. Here are some photos of the class 2 weeks ago. The top one is Peter waiting for the class to be over, and doing research for his upcoming book “101 Interesting Uses for a Purple Bouncy Ball” (he also put it under his tummy rolled on it by walking with his hands, and used it for a chair) Below is Moriah on the left (I think- they all look alike in their fencing masks!) fencing with her friend Gwen. Last is Mr. Emara trying to instruct them in what fencing is actually supposed to be like.

I know that sometimes I post a lot of stuff, and then just when you get your hopes up and start checking the blog every day, I quit for weeks. Yes, this all just part of my evil plans to send the world into despair… oh, wait no, it’s just that I am busy and disorganized — in truth I have very little to do with world peace or otherwise.

Okay, so here’s a quick catchup:
Moriah, Samuel and Toby continue to do worksheets in math every day, hammering in the basics of addition, subtraction, multiplication. I throw in the occasional fraction to keep it interesting.

They have started a first aid class at the Red Cross on Friday mornings. They had their first class this past week. Toby was able to apply his newfound knowledge rather quickly as his little brother had a nosebleed- one of the first aid situations covered in class # 1. Toby had him stay calm, pinch his nose, lean forward, and fetched him a tissue.

We had a mini Ancient Egypt study, with a couple of library books and a National Geographic DVD on King Tut.

Raquel helped me put together a class on how to introduce people. She taught the rules of introductions according to age, gender, and rank. Then she talked about how the customs in other countries are often different, and what some of them are. Then came the fun and crazy part where the children picked slips of paper from a bowl with various tableux to role play. For instance, “You are walking down Main St. and run into Councilwoman Van Auken. While you stop to chat with each other in front of the Chinese grocery, Pastor Henninger walks out with a bag of fortune cookies. Choose someone to be the councilwoman and one person to be Pastor. Introduce them.” In my opinion, the craziest part by far was where Samuel begged to be the ghost of George Washington, and Moriah introduced him to Toby ( who was role playing our neighbor, Mr. Bare). “Former President Washington, this is our neighbor, Mr. Bare. Mr. Bare, this is George Washington, first president of our country, dead for hundreds of years now.”