Mummies and tombs

In Calvin's own words.

Tuesday

Over breakfast Jon called my cell phone so that we could find it, and that started a conversation about the difference between cell phones and land lines, which required a thumbing through David Macaulay's The New Way Things Work.

After breakfast there was piano, and reading. After revisiting Charlotte's Web the kid is now re-reading The Wizard of Oz. We found a 1980s copy of the original at a library used book sale this past weekend, complete with Denslow's original illustrations and color plates, and he just dove right in.

A little later we were in Egypt learning about mummies, transportation, and gods and godesses.

Over lunch, a game of Totally Tut. Calvin has graduated into Math-U-See's Gamma book and is starting to master multiplication, so we're adding those functions into the game as he goes.

Then a discussion of matter, molecules, and atoms, solids, liquids, and gases, and a few experiments just to demonstrate some principles. I think it's time to break out the microscope again.

Then a trip to the vet with the dogs, just for simple boosters, and then a traipse around the yard to check on our trees. After the weird weather we've had, early warmth, late deep freezes, some of our trees were looking a little worrisome, but with the steadily rising temperatures now they seem to be improving.

And lastly grilled cheese for dinner, because Jon had a late piano lesson and I had a meeting after dinner, so the overlap was brief. In my absence the guys walked the dogs and played more games before bed. They finished Raggedy Andy and started a new book, but found it less than interesting, so I think it's time to break out Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales.

And that makes a full and successful day in my book.

Wednesday and Thursday

Time is just flying.

Or really it's just that spring came kind of early, so it feels later in the year than it really is. In fact, I've already mowed our lawn twice, and isn't that something we usually reserve for April?

There have been ups and downs this month, and the bright weather has helped to clear the bad air. High winds and a couple of heavy rains have done a lot to clear the tornado debris from the trees, and the warm weather has made it easy to get out with Iris and Ollie and ease the pain of losing Moose. Colorful, happy flowers always help, too.

It's been chillier lately, though, and while I don't really have the right to be disappointed because this is more like true March weather, I suddenly find fifty degrees to be a bit on the cool side. Either way, spring is here.

We're in Egypt these days. Calvin loves Egypt. We spent a couple of weeks exploring it last winter, and I'm surprised by how much he seems to remember now. I think Magic Tree House has a lot to do with it (Mummies in the Morning, plus the accompanying research guide, by Mary Pope Osborne). We are visiting ancient Egypt now as part of a tour through the ancient civilizations, which we're loving. Calvin discovered a craft book in the sale room this week, all the suggestions in which he is determined to try (Egyptian Crafts from the Past, by Gillian Chapman), and we've watched Engineering an Empire (History Channel, 2006), three times thus far—it's a great overview of the architecture from each of the three kingdoms. I suspect there will be many crafts to photograph in the coming days, but we have to go shopping for a few oddball supplies first.

Meanwhile, we're smelling the flowers, puzzling through the continents (Geo Puzzles Europe and the Middle East), filling in our ancient civilizations timeline (I've failed to photograph it thus far, but I'll get on it tomorrow), graphing, mathing, and exploring the earth that is coming alive all around us. Every day is full of discovery, more so now I think than any other time of the year.

Mesopotamian feast

Spring visited today. Temperatures reached almost seventy degrees and the sun was out for much of the day. Even after a winter as weak as the one we just had, a day like today still makes me long for the freshness of spring. Along with the warmer weather, another cold is visiting our house, complete with snuffles and the glassy-eyed stares of the slightly infirm. We've been fortunate on the illness front, though, so we won't begrudge the season a few snuffles and we're trudging right along.

A couple of days ago I read My Father's Dragon to Calvin. It's a short book, and only took about three days of bedtime reading to get through it, but he was so impatient for the next two books that he read them on his own yesterday, and read them again this morning. Today he declared a strong desire for a Boris the Dragon, and he's sure this is something I can produce with fabric and a sewing machine. Unfortunately my ability is limited to items of two dimensions only. A stuffed dragon may be beyond my skill.

We have swimming lessons on Wednesdays and I figured that the warm, moist pool would be good for snuffles, and since he wasn't coughing or sneezing, and the chlorine to boot, we kept to our obligation. Lunch with Gram and Grampa after, and a romp in the sunlit park. As my father pushed him in the what Calvin calls the "big comfortable swing", Calvin closed his eyes and actually rested. He swore, again and again, that he was busy dreaming of his dragon, but I think he was actually tired. Colds will do that.

A day like today just calls for outside play. Calvin turned our driveway into a map of Boris the Dragon's world, and our neighbors came over to meet Iris. The only thing less than perfect about today, then, was our dinner, and that was something I'd expected. As we explore the world around us we like to try ethnic recipes, and being in ancient Mesopotamia right now, it was there that we ate. Tough beef with about a million different kinds of onion (shallots, scallions, chives, garlic, leeks, and white cooking onions) in the slow cooker (since I don't have an ancient stone fire pit), turnips stewed in beef broth (it called for blood, but I couldn't find that) with more onions, and some couscous I threw in on the side.

We had a good time researching the menu, making a shopping list, collecting the ingredients, and cooking the meal, and it was fun, edible even, but not at all thrilling. Jon and I tried two ancient brew beers with dinner, but even those didn't help much. We had dates and apples for dessert, and we're glad we tried it out, but thankfully there aren't many leftovers.

If you need us we'll be in Mesopotamia

Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon, human migration to the continents. The stone age, the Fertile Crescent, the first farmers, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile and Egypt. Calvin can't seem to get enough of any of it. Nearly every book he picks up, every picture he draws, and every chance he gets "can we have tea and read some more about history?"

It's a beautiful thing.

So what are we doing? We're loosely following Intellego's World History volume I unit study, and The Story of the World, and have found Archaeology for Kids to be a good go-with. We've watched and re-watched all of the Legacy videos. A favorite new story book around here is Mik's Mammoth, with its rhyming language and beautiful watercolor illustrations (love), and the Middle East and Asia Geo Puzzles have come in rather handy. I knew I'd love those things.