Gettin' Loose

This just in to the MPA newsroom at 7:44 tonight: Annabelle has her first loose tooth! Warning alarms have been heard sounding at Tooth Fairy Central.

Stay tuned for further developments!

MIME TIME: Still wearing her PJs this a.m., I caught Annabelle quietly going through some interesting poses. When I asked what she was doing, she explained she was being a mime.

(Hey, anyone out there besides me remember Shields & Yarnell? I couldn't help myself - I had to Google 'em and found out they're still at it. How 'bout that.)

ONLINE ADVENTURES: Looking for something new and different to do, I pointed my browser to Scholastic's Online Activities and Interactive Learning. I selected the Maggie's Learning Adventure option and found a couple of math exercises that looked good. I also spied a rather unfortunate typo:

Hmm. Maybe the misspelling is on purpose - just part of editing Dan's copy?

The kids each played "Dude's Dilemma" and "Around the World in 80 Seconds," testing their addition, subtraction and multiplication skills. It was fun and really great flash-card like practice.

FLOATING ON AIR: One of Annabelle's favorite things is balloons. She's constantly blowing them up and batting them around the house. This morning one of her balloons got away from her, landing on a plateau she couldn't easily reach. So she found some kind of rod laying around the house and used it to fetch her balloon. "Hey look! I made a simple machine!" She declared.

Later, we played "monkey in the middle" (a/k/a keep away) with the balloon.

SUM MOHR SPELLING: Today we debuted a new list of 26 frequently used words. I had the kids write them twice and then we did a pre-test spelling bee. They did great, with only a couple missteps. CJ, especially, was on fire. ;) I suggested if he got stuck, he try to write the word in the air with his finger. It really seemed to help him out.

PILING ON: Because we already have so many plant starts I don't know what to do with them, we decided the prudent thing to do would be to plant more stuff today. : /

But seriously, CJ had scored a pack of free seeds at Sky Nursery last week (thanks to a Jr. Gardener coupon), and we have to get those going. He chose a hybrid mix of sunflowers, so we'll see what transpires. Sunflowers are so showy - and I think kids, especially, love 'em because there's something sort of magical about a flower that's taller than you. : )

ONLY IN SEATTLE?: I get a daily email offering one hugely discounted Seattle activity a day (for instance, the helicopter ride I bought but we've yet to redeem). Today's special - trapeze lessons. That's right, you too, can be a circus freak, er, I mean circus artist!

Believe it or not, Seattle has not one, not two but at least three circus schools that I know about. Christian and I were talking about the circus school proliferation just this weekend, so I forwarded him the email. He replied that as a result of the email, the lines "He floats through the air with the greatest of ease, the daring young man on the flying trapeze," were going through his head all morning, and noted those are the only lines of the song he knows. I had to imagine those are the only two lines of the song most of us know. So, of course, I had to do some research. I found the Burl Ives version lyrics and it turns out the song's about the trapeze artist stealing a girl away from the songwriter: "He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, The daring young man on the flying trapeze, His movements are graceful, all the girls he does please, And my love he has taken away."

Turns out the 1868 song is about Jules Léotard, the famous French trapeze artist who made his music hall debut in 1861 in London's West End. These days, he's probably most famous for the attire he invented and which bears his name - the leotard.

(In case you're wondering, Léotard died at age 28 - but not from a trapeze fall. An infection did him in.)

GETTING HIS 'GOOGLE' ON: We recently bought three cacti, and CJ is mildly obsessed with them and cacti in general at the moment. This afternoon, he kept demanding to know how many types of cacti there are. "Is it dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?" Yes, probably, maybe ... I was elbow deep in something in the kitchen so I suggested he type in 'cacti how many types' as search terms and see what he could find out searching the Internet. The inquiry turned up dozens of articles, but as we scanned the first three or four, none of them came out and definitively said how many types there are. And the one that did stick in a number ranged from 200 to 2,000. Hmpf. Not very helpful. We'll have to dig deeper, clearly.

The real point of the story is, I do believe this marks the first time CJ has Googled something himself. He's performed similar operations (searching for a YouTube video about video games), but this is the first time he's flown solo on a WWW search. I suspect there will be lots more of this to come, as I'm trying to instill in them the fact that "don't know" isn't a very good answer. Much preferred is, "Don't know, but we can find out. ..."

$TORY $TARTER: I was going to use a Scholastic story starter today, but instead decided to use a line that had been rolling around in my head all morning, that being the Barenaked Ladies' "If I Had a Million Dollars." So when I had some 'alone' time with each of them during swimming lessons today, I asked them to write a couple of sentences about what they'd do if they had a million dollars. Annabelle wrote, "If I had a million dolers, I would buy toys. I would buy action figures for CJ." Sweet. :) Later in the day, during Annabelle's lesson, CJ wrote that if he had a million dollars, he'd buy three more Legendary Pokemon action figures (the ones he needs to complete his collection). Not a bit altruistic, but honest. ;)