This Is Exacto-ly What Happened

It is a good thing my friend Bonnie is staying here tonight. She came from Vegas for a flute competition and even brought her son Nikolas, so that he could play with his friends, including Raef and Zach. They have always been good buddies.

Anyways, we are hanging out, talking, catching up. You know, the whole bit. They are playing. We have settled down to watch a Hayley Mills movie (Moonspinners), when I hear a horrible, blood-curdling, well-amplified scream from Zach.  The sad thing is, I didn't even bother to get up out of my chair.  He does have a flair for the dramatics.  But then when Raef came running for me in a panic, I knew something was wrong.  

Blood everywhere!  

I got the boys a book called Mini-Weapons of Mass Destruction.  It is an awesome book, but it may have projects that include the use of an Exact-o knife.  So now my awesome book, that uses very inexpensive household items, all of a sudden, in one swift movement, became a very expensive book.  Zach tried to make a zombie target by himself.  It did not go so well.  He now knows that when he has to use an Exact-o knife, it would probably be better to do it with a parent.

So, Exacto-ly 3 hours, 5 stitches, and $150 later, I am home.

School Update

We had a good day with school work. I kind of had a slacker week last week. The kids managed to weasel out of all math assignments, because I was just too tired to fight them on it. Therefore, I devised a new strategy. I put 10 math pages in their notebooks and informed them that all the pages had to be done by the end of the week. They did two today fairly quickly. I am hoping that they will just take it upon themselves to get it done on their own time. I am sure there will be resistance this week, but over time they will learn that math is not an option.

In addition to math, we reviewed all 19 poems in their memorization book. Level One is almost done. It is great. I love the fact that one word will trigger a poetry recitation while we are driving in the car or at the playground or the zoo. It is wonderful. Today, Zach was excited to find "Who Has Seen the Wind" by Christina Rossetti in another poetry book we own.

They made additional progress with their spelling words. Of course, Raef missed all of the words he missed last week. I hope he passes them off tomorrow. It is time to move on!

We are halfway through book #4 of the Odyssey series by Mary Pope Osbourne. The goddess Athena visited Odysseus' son Telemachus to help him get Odysseus to come home. She came disguised as a man named Mentor. I can see why the Odyssey continues to live on, century after century. It is a fun story.

Then we headed out to co-op. The kids are going to do a play at the end of March. Zach is going to be an inch worm and Raef is a narrator frog. Zach gets to turn into a butterfly! How fun is that.

They both had their art class and then joined me for astronomy. We covered Uranus and Neptune. I am soon going to have the kids start working on a model of the solar system. That should be a lot of fun. At the end of class, I decided to play a review game with all of the kids. It was tic-tac-toe and they could put an 'x' or an 'o' when they got the answer right. Zach's team was winning and his teammate decided to put the 'o' on a spot that would not win, even though the to right corner spot would give them the win. Zach almost had a nervous breakdown because Nicholas put it in the wrong spot and didn't win. He started bawling. He couldn't turn it off. They did win anyways, but he was really mad. Oh my word! He is so much like me, it is scary: competitive, control freak.

It carried over into PE and he was still upset so I took him to the store with me instead of subjecting everyone to his drama. We went to Trader Joe's and after he got some food in his stomach, he was much more pleasant. Aha! Maybe he was just hungry.

When we got home, I told them it was reading time. For the next hour, Zach read books to Raef. It was very adorable. Zach loves to read, and Raef loves to be read to. It worked out really well and I was able to load old high school photos onto facebook. What fun!