Mid-Week

CUTE(?) COUPLE: We drove through Kingston yesterday in order to get to a ferry to take us back to the mainland. In Kingston, we encountered a stand of carved characters, including this duo. I'm not sure if the kids were tickled or creeped out by them - maybe some of both. They sure took a big steamy gawk. And the long faced statues stared back, of course.

"I think she had real flowers," Annabelle said softly, as he headed for the ferry.

I learned today Kingston used to be called Appletree Cove. That was a sweet sounding name. I was wondering why it changed. According to Wikipedia, a man named Michael King bought a cabin in Appletree Cove in the late 1800s and moved in with some loggers. They cleared trees in the area and built many small buildings and shacks, which became ramshackle. The derelict development was referred to as "King's Town," which morphed into "Kingston."

If I lived 'round there, I think I'd petition for a return to Appletree Cove.

IN REVIEW: As a writing exercise today, I had the kids jot down a couple of paragraphs about Port Townsend. I rejected CJ's first draft. It was too long on superlatives (It was great!) but lacked detail.

Eventually, he came up with this:

"Port Townsend is a great place. In Port Townsend there was a nice hotel called The Tides Inn. The Tides Inn was nice because it had nice air freshening, a cool Jucuzi, a comfortable bed, and mutch, mutch more.

"Eventually, we went to a restaurant called The Public House. In The Public House if you look closely, you can see Puget Sound. Before we left, we went to a restaurant called The Pizza Factory."

Clearly CJ's main memories revolve around his stomach. :)

Annabelle wrote the following:

Port Townsend is a very nice and sunny place. There is a lot of restaurants and stuff to do. In the room (at The Tides Inn) that we stayed in there was a Jacuzzi, a bathroom, 2 bedrooms and an outdoor deck (where the Jacuzzi was).

Some of the restaurants I went to were The Public House, The Roadside Diner and The Pizza Factory. We also went to the actual Fort Worden! Our apartment was good, the food was good, overall I think our trip to Port Townsend was great!

ANOTHER REVIEW: The kids knocked out a chapter review exercise today in math. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, often with some combination thereof. Can't wait to see what the next chapter holds for us!

DROP AND GIVE ME 10: While the kids were doing their math and writing today, I tired of them dropping their gosh-darned pencils every 5 freaking minutes or so. It's such a waste of time when that happens, as it almost always (of course) rolls under the couch or the kitchen island. And so, to help them remember to hold on to their gosh-darned pencils, I told them our new rule would be 10 push ups every time you dropped your pencil.

At that point, I learned that neither one of them could do anything remotely resembling a push up and so now we have something else to work on - hooray!

NUMBERS AND STARS: We read a couple of great library books today. First up was "Math Fables" by Greg Tang. I wish we'd discovered this book 3 years ago or so, as it was a bit young for CeeJ and Bee now. According to Greg Tang's author's note, a youngster's success in math "is often determined by how fluent children are with numbers, the language of math." The book uses animals to illustrate short stories or fables involving numbers. It was well written, making "the language of math" inviting and accessible. Six thumbs up from the three of us.

Next up was the lovely "Once Upon a Starry Night," by Jacqueline Mitton and Christina Balit, and published by National Geographic. A beautiful book about the constellations. Lavishly colored illustrations of some of the more famous heavenly bodies were adorned with shiny stars in strategic places. The illustrations told the legends of how constellations like Pegasus, Lyra, Hercules, Centaurus and so on came to be. CJ wanted to know why the legends all seemed to be about dying. I told him that my speculation would be that a) for thousands of years, people have been forwarding the notion that people go to heaven or the heavens when they die and b) for thousands of years, people have been trying to explain why there were stars in our sky.

CJ, especially, loved the book. As soon as we were done, he asked to read it again, and he revisited it several times throughout the day.

WHEN PANCAKES ATTACK: I did something out of the ordinary this a.m.; I made chocolate chip pancakes (because we were out of every other breakfast food on the kids' hit parade).

HEY! THAT'S EXACTLY CJ'S AGE!: Tonight we watched the unbelievably horrible news that third grade boy shot his classmate at a school in Bremerton today. When she heard the shooter's age, 8, Annabelle said, incredulously, 'Hey, that's exactly CJ's age!"

As we watched the news, we had Big Talks about what you'd do if you found a gun, if you saw a gun, if a friend had a gun, on and on.