According to Amazon, my history book is on the way. In fact, it passed from Kansas City to Dallas sometime between September 8th and September 10th. Bah.

At any rate, I hope it’s here soon. The other book, Abby’s encyclopedia, hasn’t even shipped. I’m so not going for the free shipping option at Amazon any more.

Faith and Abby played with Renée’s kids, S and Z today. I’m not sure what was the most fun, but it’d be hard to beat the elaborate pipework constructed from soda straws in our bathroom going from sink to tub (sometimes less so than other times. it was very wet!) Although they also had fun using cookie cutters as stencils (and I discovered that Faith really really knows how to add and subtract, which she picked up from the air, like reading. Go figure. Oooh, bad pun!) and Bede and Z had a great time with some foam bath letters too.

While they were here I made good on my promise to teach Renée to knit! I sent her home with a ball of Peaches and Creme cotton and some bulky superwash merino, and some lovely slippy slidey aluminum needles for that first-time knitter tight tension, and a copy of SnB Nation. Yay R! Now a bad-ass fiber artist, w00t!

That’s all for me tonight, gotta get some sleep!

I sold a couple things on the MDC Trading Post so I could order two books. Here they are:
and

I was originally going to go with the much-more-complex Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia Of World History, but decided that it was really too much information at this point, and we’d be better off with a more age-appropriate text. It sure looks nifty though! And The Natural World (The Usborne Illustrated Encyclopedia) also looked worth getting later.

So hopefully my history angst is silenced.

The First Encyclopedia is for Abby who is my little naturalist. She knows all the names for the young of animals, and she’s working on their collective nouns, to wit: “Mama a baby mouse is called a ‘pinky’ and the mouse family is called a ‘nest’ of mice,” etc. A new Maturin in the making! I’ll leave you to imagine her speech; she has a deep voice and tends to prononce all R sounds as Ys. Trust me, it’s pretty darn cute.

Today we read about nomads and early civilization in The Story of the World. Discussion included whether or not there were marshmallows and hot dogs, what lizard stew would taste like, and who built the first grocery store.

We’re reading Story of the World and we like it. Today we talked about timelines, and how old pictures and letters can help you figure out what happened before you were born. Abby says she has a History and it has a birthday and it is four years old. Faith was intrigued with the idea that archeologists find trash and broken things to ‘tell a history’, then corrected herself to say, they tell about history, then said hi-STORY is a STORY!

So all in all I’d say some connections were made. Tomorrow, nomads!