We've Got the Power

IT'S HERE!!!: This is what CJ looked like for a lot of today.

Since I'm from the "any reading is good reading" school, a couple months ago I ordered him a subscription to Nintendo Power. We finally got our first issue today. "Boy, there are a lot of pages in this book!" he said appreciatively.

He's enjoying it, of course. It reminds me of when Rick and Kennedy were kids in the pre-Internet age. That magazine was their conduit to secrets about Nintendo games they could get nowhere else.

What's funny is CJ has already found a code in it that he didn't know about from his infinite Internet sources, and is all hot to use it. So it really is like the old days.

APPLIED LEARNING: We are still plugging away on our Singapore Math. I'm really glad we bought these books - they are taking the kids through logical steps of learning math. For the past couple of days we've been talking about parts making a whole.

Today, when Annabelle was faced with 14-8, rather than count fingers, she drew up a part-part-whole diagram like we'd seen a few pages prior. Good for her!

MR. BILL: We read more of "Bill Gates Computer Legend" today. Today's chapters were about some of the first computers - things like their size and what kind of functions they performed. We also read about Bill Gates' first forays into programming while at Lakeside, a private high school, where he and Paul Allen were both students. They formed a club called Lakeside Programmers and their first programs were computer games.

And we read about time Gates spent at Harvard. There was a sentence reading, "Even when he was asleep, he dreamed about computers." At that I stopped and turned to CJ and said, "Hmm. Who does that remind you of?" He smiled broadly and said, "Me."

Eventually, Gates dropped out of college. According to a quote from a New York Time story, "I loved my years at college and, in many respects, I regretted leaving. I only did it because I had an idea that couldn't wait."

I'd say Gates made the right decision.

There was one caption in the book that really surprised me. It was under a relatively recent photo of Gates looking over students' shoulders as they used PCs. The caption said, "This is how children at school today learn to use computers. Gates is eager to give money to schools to buy computers, perhaps because when the children grow up, they will buy all his products!"

Yikes - so much for altruism.

BEWITCHING: For our art project today, we went back to Bruce Blitz for some cartooning. Today's exercise was drawing a witch, whose nose and chin were formed by a letter W.

CJ wasn't feelin' it today. You can tell by his coloring job. I decided to draw along with the kids today, but I don't think I'm going to do that again. I think that adds some pressure. They don't expect theirs to look exactly like the "professional" one on the TV or computer, but when I'm drawing and mine does pretty much look like that, I think they feel theirs is lacking, and that's not the case.

LIVE, FROM MARS: Ok, not really Mars - at least not yet. But thanks to a new Web cam, we can now take a live look inside the clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to watch the next Mars rover, "Curiosity," being built.

Technicians are working from approximately 8 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. PDT Monday through Friday. Curiosity is about the size of a car - 10 feet long (excluding the arm) 9 feet wide and 7 feet tall. It is expected to launch sometime between Nov. 25–Dec. 18 of 2011 and arrive at Mars in August of 2012.

On the site you can even chat with others in the room watching (there were 505 people when I popped in), and someone from NASA is monitoring the chat and answering questions.


FRIENDLY: This afternoon, we met CJ's BFF from kindergarten at the city park adjacent to her school. CJ and his pal always pick right up where they left off.


They played for about 90 minutes and had all sorts of fun. Annabelle played with them some, but she also worked the greater playground, finding new friends. Lo and behold, one of the people she met was a just turned 6-year-old girl with long dark blonde/light brown hair and brown eyes named Annabelle.


In the 'small world' category, we'd already met this Annabelle once before, in a Fred Meyer in Greenwood. We were shopping and heard a mom call for her daughter Annabelle and we ended up talking to them there, and then crossed paths again today, in Magnolia.


At the park, both CeeJ and Bee did a whole bunch of spinning today. CJ's not a huge fan of it - today he was doing it because his friend wanted him to. By the time we left, CJ was a bit green around the gills and complained that his friend 'made' him spin. I told him he can't blame his decisions and actions on other people's suggestions and that he needs to stick up for himself and stick to his guns. These are life skills we will, no doubt, be working a lot more on in the days-weeks-months-years to come.