Field Trip to the ASO

The three school-aged kids enjoyed a dinner out and a Mozart piano concerto. Thanks to some family friends we had great seats in Symphony Hall—boy did that pianist’s fingers fly over the keys!

More project day–Columbus displays

Kate was very proud of her Christopher Columbus display. She created a sandy beach, complete with a stick-and-fern palm tree and beautified by real miniature shells, coral, and beach glass and “tropical” flowers.

 

Meg also made a nice display including Columbus petitioning Ferdinand and Isabella, a not-to-scale ocean with Spain on the left and Hispaniola on the right, plus some of the New World discoveries Columbus brought back from his voyage.

Project Day

This was a year of firsts: Meg, Nate, and Kate recited their usual poems, but for the first time Kate gave a speech (albeit forgetting a key detail at the end!) and Meg and Nate played piano pieces. Also, Caleb recited his first poem in public. Thirty minutes before we left the house he wailed that everyone was doing something except him. So I grabbed a book off the shelf and found the shortest poem in it, which thankfully happened to be cute and sort of fall-related, read it to him three times, and he was good to go:

A wee little worm in a hickory nut
Sang as happy as can be,
“Oh I live in the heart of the whole round world
And it all belongs to me.”

Halloween

Tiger Lilly, Queen of England, Darth Vader, Giraffe

 

this one deserves its own close up; annual fun with the neighbors

Homeschool Poster Children

Oh my! Is this a stereotypical homeschool picture or what?! Still in pajamas with unkempt hair, performing a half-baked science experiment in the kitchen. I am fighting the urge to list all the ways this picture is the exception, not the rule; that they really are normal and well-socialized, etc. But I suppose the jury will be out on that for 10 or 15 more years.

Fall beauty

God created the first zippers (Velcro, too)

This is amazing. In a recent study of bird feathers we examined a pheasant feather with our microscope. The dark area on the left is the shaft of the feather (the central, plastic-y “spine.”)  The dark vertical columns jutting off the shaft are called barbs. The tiny eyelash looking fibers jutting off the barbs are called barbules. All the barbules on one side of each barb are plain or straight; all the barbules on the other side are hooked. Do you know how when you pinch your thumb and index finger together at the top of the feather and run them down toward the bare quill at the bottom the neat little hairs get all ruffled and messy looking? You are separating all those “hook-and-loop” connections. When you run you fingers back the other way everything becomes smooth and straight again as the barbules “zip” back together. One reason a bird preens is to zip its feathers back up to ready them for flight. That is just one tiny view of one feather on one type of bird…think of the millions of wonders that exist among all the creatures of earth and all the galaxies of space.

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. Ps 104:24