Wet & Wild

GOOD MORNING, ELMO: For reasons I don't know, straight out of the gate (we're talking 6 a.m.) CJ was asking to play "Elmo's Preschool." (Perhaps CJ spent some time on Sesame Street during his slumber.) When a nightmare woke Annabelle at 6:20, sweet furry Elmo sounded pretty good to her, too. Without a doubt, the game is a bit "beneath" them academically, but at least it's not a bomb dropper and it's better for them than being parked in front of the Cartoon Network for an hour. The game offers practice with number, letter, sound, shape and color recognition, as well as some easy spelling and critical thinking skills.

DEWEY DECIMALED: Thursday is library day and that's no simple task, let me tell you. It's database management. At any given time, we probably have a dozen fiction titles checked out, maybe 20 or so non fiction, probably 20 or so DVDs (both entertainment and educational). These checkouts are spread out over three library cards (mine and the kids') and I have to totally keep on track of who checked out what when because Seattle Public Library has limits on the number of items you can have checked out and they have rather steep per day fines that start the second the clock strikes midnight at the end of the due date - and when you have 60 things checked out, fines can accrue quickly if you don't stay on top of it.

So this morning we spent a good 30 minutes stacking sorting and accounting for everything. I think today we'll just return some items and not get any more. We have at least a week's worth of resources - no need to be greedy!

CANDY QUESTIONS: Out of the blue this morning, CJ asked me, "Were M&Ms around before I was born?" I knew, of course, they were, but I told him I didn't know exactly how old M&Ms are. So, thanks to the Internet, we set out getting some answers. (I love being able to answer questions, no matter how obscure, on-the-spot. That's definitely one of the advantages of our little "charter school.")

Anyway, we learned that M&Ms were introduced in 1941 and were made for troops in WWII. In 1954, peanut M&Ms were introduced, along with the tagline "Melts in your mouth, not in your hands." In 1982, M&Ms were on the Space Shuttle for the first time and have been on every flight since.

TACOMA BOUND: This afternoon we took a field trip to Tacoma, to visit Grandma and Grandpa who were there on business. Before leaving, I researched Tacoma a little bit so I could tell the kids a little something about the city. As it turns out, Tacoma adopted its name after the nearby Mt. Rainier, originally called Mt. Tacoma or Mt. Tahoma. It is known as the "City of Destiny" because the area was chosen to be the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad in the late 1800s.

I brought the Magnadoodles along with the idea of doing some brainwork in the car. I decided it would be fun to play a modified version of BrainSurge - a new game show on Nickelodeon that CJ is wild about. On the actual show the challenges are mostly testing contestants' observation and listening skills. So I did the best I could for our car version, asking questions like, "Steve walks into an ice cream store and orders a three-scoop cone. He chose chocolate chip, marshmallow, and bananarama. Which flavor did Steve NOT choose: marshmallow, chocolate chip or strawberry-licious?" Questions involving numbers went along the lines of, "Jim, George and Jeff were jumping on a trampoline. Jim jumped 8 feet high, George jumped 12 feet high and Jeff jumped 3 feet high. Who jumped the highest?"

I also told a couple of stories, and quizzed them about certain who-what-where-when-why elements of it. The BrainSurge game kept us busy the entire way to Tacoma. The kids did pretty well (using their Magnadoodles to record their answers, kinda like a Jeopardy! screen), and we all had lots of fun doing it, so it's definitely something we'll do in the future.

CRUIS'N TO A CHAMPIONSHIP: On our way up to the grandparents' room, we spied an arcade, much to the delight of CJ. So we went back down to the lobby. There were just three games - two shoot em up and one driving one, Cruis'n World. So we settled on the driving game and hilarity ensued. Annabelle was racing 'round the world in what looked like a Corvette and CJ tearing it up behind the wheel of a Hummer like vehicle. They raced through Italy, Japan, Hawaii, Africa, Australia, China, Egypt and Russia. It was actually a lot of entertainment for just $3.50 - CJ kept winning free plays for winning the levels. And, of course, the educational value was huge ; ) - they ran over animals and into monuments and landmarks all around the globe!

AFTERNOON INTO EVENING: Mostly the kids just enjoyed hanging out with the gparents, but some 'school' work got squeezed in. They read the Tubby the Tuba book with grandpa and watched the vintage Tubby movie we'd discovered earlier this week.

We all got to experience some wild weather - the wind was blowing so hard, you could actually hear it howling through vents and the doorway in the hotel room. We walked in blustery weather over to a restaurant next door and we hadn't been sitting down for 5 minutes when the power went out. Annabelle thought they should bring out some candles and we could just carry on, but there was the issue of the kitchen not being able to cook anything. So we loaded up into a car and found a restaurant a bit further south that wasn't affected by the outage. The folks were in the dark in their hotel until 12:30 a.m. Upon arriving home to Magnolia, blinking clocks told us that we'd lost power here, too.

Fortunately, our power stayed on the rest of the night but at about 11 o'clock a MAJOR storm hit - howling wind, pounding hail and simultaneous lightning and thunder overhead. It was pretty freaky and kept me awake for hours.

Therefore, Friday is going to be a pretty low key day at MPA. ...