Everyday Life: March

Lincoln dusting the wrought iron banister.

He volunteered to do it!

Jake helping Lincoln with his handwriting. 

New Lego minifigures!

 (We used to buy whenever a new set came out, but Lego has too many new sets!)

Jake in his karate gi collecting a few cat hairs.

Bentley and Lincoln in matching socks!

Schoolwork--it's not all play at our house!

One of B's favorite things: Books!

Throwing the parachute guy off the top of the staircase.

A game of CooCoo The Rocking Clown

(Carder was visiting for the day.)

Bentley playing chess.

Jake helping Evan with his handwriting.

Kara asked Jake to work with the younger boys on their handwriting, but he didn't have the needed patience to work with four and five year old boys. 

(Or were they lacking the patience it took to work with him?)

Needle Felting Can Be Dangerous

It should come as no surprise when you examine a needle felting tool that you might hurt yourself when felting. We just didn't realize how badly you could hurt yourself!

Viva has had her Klutz needle felting kit for a year or more and has made a couple of felted animals. Two weeks ago she brought the kit out and Jake decided he, too, wanted to make a felted animal. The concept is simple--you take a piece of wool roving (wool prepare for spinning) and you form a small ball or egg and then you punch it hundreds of times with your felting tool. It shrinks as it binds in on itself.

The trick to needle felting is to not poke yourself with the needles--which are very thin and easily puncture skin. Of course, if you are holding your ball of felt and you poke it hundreds of times it is inevitable that you will at some time poke yourself instead of the ball. 

Last week when Viva and Jake were enjoying a lazy afternoon outside needle felting, Viva poked her finger with one of the needles. It didn't hurt much or bleed much, so she ignored her injury. While they were felting, they lost a little ring that goes inside the felting tool and so the twins spent a half hour or more looking through the leaves under the porch for the missing piece. It was not found. The following afternoon Viva and I spent a few hours gardening. She put on gardening gloves, but the gloves were dirty which is typical for gardening gloves.

The end result was Viva's finger became infected. Seriously infected. We tried soaking it in hot water and Epsom salts, but Viva would only use tepid water. The infection became worse looking so on Saturday (four days after the injury), Kara took Viva to the doctor's office. The doctor cut the infected area and drained it and sent a sample to the lab. An antibiotic was prescribed.

The finger looked worse the next day with a visible red line, but since she was on antibiotic, we didn't have to panic. Viva agreed to soak her finger in hot (not just warm!) water and did so a few times a day. The lab results came back and she had both staphylococcus and streptococcus bacteria present. The antibiotics and soaking treatments worked and her finger is doing much better now and we anticipate a full recovery.

The moral of this story? Always treat puncture wounds with an antibiotic and a Band-Aid especially if you are going to play in the dirt. Take infections seriously because they can be very dangerous. We are very happy we acted promptly.

Snapshot: Friday Afternoon

I took this photo a little after 2PM this afternoon:

Kara and Bentley had just left the house to go to cello lessons. I was in charge of getting the other children to eat lunch. They had apples, pepperoni, goldfish (crackers), and eggnog. You can see from the photo some of the activities that we were engaged in at that time. Viva was knitting (more on that tomorrow), Jake was reading the comics, Great-grandma was doing the daily word puzzles in the paper.

Also on the table was our trio of amaryllis bulbs, a peg puzzle, a game of checkers, and a shark jigsaw puzzle. None of our amaryllis bloomed by Christmas, but they are all in full bloom right now. The peg puzzle features opposites and Evan retrieved it when I started quizzing him and Lincoln on opposites while I was setting the food on the table. Evan also brought the checkers game to the table. He was trying to get someone to play with him. Lincoln had brought the shark puzzle to the table a little earlier. It was a 100 piecer which is more than he usually works on, so I recruited everyone to do a few pieces of it.

School Photos

Here are a few photos taken of the children doing school work. Most of them were taken the first week of August. I want to reiterate that our school did not shut down for the summer, although Kara gave the children a lighter schedule so they had plenty of time to enjoy the summer.

I think the trio are watching a DVD history course in this photo. I have no idea why they decided to share one chair. As long as there is no elbowing, we are lax about stuff like that. A little sibling bonding is a good thing.

Again only one chair, but they aren't all sharing it. We have more than one chair so this seating arrangement is puzzling to me--as is the subject they are intently studying. Two large orange rectangles? It's not math, they do math using Saxon textbooks. Unless it's a short talk on a math related topic? Is it modern art? I don't recall that being on the schedule currently.

Don't they look happy?

Read, Read, Read

Our young readers are keeping us busy making more trips to the library. Two weeks ago I reported that I'd collected from the library the last eight books in the Dragon Slayers' Academy series and the first few books in the Secrets of Droon series. Bentley and Jake have finished the DSA books and Viva has read through book 13. The boys prefer to read one series at a time, but Viva is reading at least three different series. She likes variety. She's read at least the first four Droon books.

After finishing the DSA series Bentley started the Droon series. Like the DSA books, the Droon books are 100-130 pages of large font print. They are a nice length for young readers. B quickly powered through the first ten and opa had to stop at the library for another nine in the series. He gobbled those right down and we sent opa back for another fourteen. We currently have books 2 through 29 and Super Editions 1 through 4 in the Droon series on loan from the library.

Jake has just started the Droon series. I think he rated the first book 4 stars whereas the DSA books were 5 stars. It's hard to top a book with dragons in it. Bentley and Viva tend to give all their reads 5 stars. They don't like to discriminate. (B, J, & V keep a list of the books they've read at GoodReads.com.)

Being ill has given the trio some extra reading time. When you have sick, cranky children, it's nice to be able to send them to bed with a book.

Library Books!

Wednesday afternoon I made a dash to the library to collect a book on hold and to get some books for Viva and Jake. Viva came home Wednesday morning from an overnighter at Grandma Karen's and asked me to get her the second book in the Secrets of Droon series because she had finished book one the night before. We owned the first book in the series, but it turns out there are 44 books in the series. We do not have enough bookshelf space, so to the library I went! While there I looked for more books in the Dragon Slayers' Academy series. We own the first ten, but I didn't want to buy more. The library did not have book 11 (it is not even in their catalog), but it did have the other eight books in the series so I got them. 

That evening Viva grabbed Droon 2 and climbed in my bed to read. Soon she was joined by Bentley who had DSA 12. Jake showed up with DSA 10. Don't you just love little readers?! They are so cute...and smart!

Weighty Tomes Dad Selects

Inspired by a posting from last week, I thought I should give some perspective on the books the kids read with their dad (me). For the most part, I like word books. I also like educational materials, inspirational materials, fun, adventure, science, math, economics, books where I can do voices ... and so I expect the kids to enjoy it with me.

As some of you may recall, Bentley's first book with me was Stephen Hawking's A Briefer History of Time. We followed that up with selections from the Book of Maps, a collection of historically significant maps which I received for Christmas. Bentley seemed to enjoy reading time, so I stuck with what worked. It helped that he was less than two months old and a very captive audience. To date, he and I have read a very large selection of books from his shelves, some from mine, and a few more we picked up along the way. Most recently, we've been adventuring through canyons as we read about the tales of Hank the Cowdog.

On the repeat list (for a third time through) is Ralph S. Mouse and the Motorcycle (by Beverly Cleary). Unlikely to make it on the repeat list: the Baudelaire orphans in the Series of Unfortunate Events books... we made it through #3, but it just didn't hold anyone's attention. The Spiderwick Chronicles helped us get through the early days with the twins, though Bentley had to continually shake me awake and say "Read Daddy!" It wasn't uncommon for him to give up on me, grab his blanket, and go to his mom. I think we may have to revisit that series with the twins soon.

We enjoyed Stephen Hawking's children book George's Secret Key to the Universe, and we recently started reading my illustrated Atlas of the Universe book together after we finished a book of satellite photography for the world called The Complete Earth. Bentley's mostly interested in pictures of "robots" (satellites, landers, and rockets), but I think he enjoys it all - he sure has a lot of questions about everything we look at.

We read parts of Tales of Beedle the Bard just after Christmas, but there were parts a little too scary in there for him, so we skipped sections of it. We've been working our way through Eragon for a LONG time. The dragon just doesn't stick around long enough to keep up the interest level. Come to think of it, it's probably been an in-progress book since October of last year. It's almost like a memory test to see how far back a toddler can remember going that long.

The library has supplied us with several fun books, most recently being some Shel Silverstein stories about Runny Babbitt. There was also a book about some city in a sky which was well received by all three, as was a book about the Alaska Railroad. (Noting a trend here - all three of these books were illustrated and intended for children).

Now that it's summer time, we probably won't make it through too many [long] books. Of course, since no one's going to bed like they're supposed to, maybe I'll just start reading some fun biographies and math texts I bought last week to help calm them down... I wonder if they'd like to learn about Archimedes next week?