Some Of This Week...

We survived our first week of homeschooling, and a week without Daddy. Whew! 

Also, for the record, I'm not requiring the girls to wear dresses; they're choosing to wear them on their own. 

Evelyn put together her new "red" puzzle. She was frustrated at first, and pretty convinced she couldn't do it, but once I started pointing out the different pictures and helping her find the pieces, she got really excited.

Bella taking notes about clouds and then drawing what she learned. Here, she was drawing a picture of what happens when the sun passes through the water in a cloud and makes bright colors.

Making smoothies! One of our "Specials" this year is cooking, and I know it's going to be a hard one to follow-through on. Kids are messy, and sometimes that can be really overwhelming, but I'm so glad we did this on Wednesday, because it was a lot of fun and the girls loved it! 

This was a great parent moment, where I had about 20 seconds in Walmart to make a decision. I've been telling the girls all Summer that I'd dye their hair, but I keep forgetting. (Other parents do that, too, right?) The only box that was a funky color had this genteel, young lady on the cover, which advertised an upcoming movie called Suicide Squad. So. Many. Thoughts. I grabbed the box while the girls were looking at Dora shampoo, flipped it over, and paid for it carefully. Once we got home, I took the stuff out of the box and threw the box away before they could see anything. That's good times right there.

We visited the Eastside playground, and Henry pretended he was a lion.

I've got to admit, Thursday was a rough day for me (although, probably our best day of homeschooling). It was the day that Eastside went back to school, and I missed being a part of the fun and hooplah. The uniforms and the new bookbags, and seeing all of the parents and teachers again. It didn't make me want to change my mind about homeschooling, but it did make me text Whitney and be sad to her. 

FaceTimeing with Papa to hear him play the piano. Papa's the best. The end.

Putting the finishing touches on our first Science experiment, a wind vane! This was a little bit of trial-and-error, because we had to substitute our own materials for some of the cheaper versions that came with the kit, but still, it worked! Bella also used a compass for the first time. 

Evelyn is definitely in the stage of thinking she can't do something new, and then getting tickled pink when she figures it out. Granted, she may be doing it with a lot of help from Mommy, but it still makes her feel accomplished. 

Can I have a "Side Note" about Evelyn for a second? This girl is insanely verbal. I mean, she's incredibly well-spoken, she gets social nuances that Bella has no clue about, and she has a freakish memory. She can count to at least 30 and uses words like "literally" and "actually". 

But she doesn't recognize letters or numbers very well at all. I mean, at all. I don't know if it's a learning-style thing, but it throws me off a little bit, because I expect her to know more, and I know they went over letters a little it in preschool last year, but she can't identify about 3/4  of the alphabet. Anyway, that's just my "huh" parenting moment of the day.

On the one hand, my girls don't see a whole lot of diversity in their daily lives. On the other, I've noticed that it doesn't really seem to register with them anyway. In a good way. They are very matter-of-fact about describing their friends with either "brown skin" or "peach skin", but it's not an issue otherwise. I've never gotten into the issue of racism with Bella, so I was glad to have her read this book and then get to discuss it with her. She's only about halfway through, but she's figuring out that not everyone has been treated equal in this world. She also wanted to know why people with brown skin were called "black", which I had absolutely no answer for.

Her graphic organizer that I made for her to complete on Jackie Robinson. I've loved being there when she's learned new things!