Faith drew this dinosaur mother and her brand new hatchling. She says they’re apatosaurs.

We read about Egyptian farming today, very interesting in light of the recent flooding in NOLA. The ancient Egyptians based their whole agriculture on the yearly innundation of the flooding of the Nile, instead of trying to work against it. Of course, their floods were very well planned, really, so to compare it to Katrina is perhaps inappropriate (which Faith noted.)

There was also an aside about bread and beermaking, to which Faith said “If Daddy were here he’d say ‘Did somebody say ‘beer’?'” Ah, she knows him well.

Faith is on the cusp of easy, fluent reading (and probably better than grade level, whichis reassuring). She has to pick out longer words and oddball ones like ‘cough’, ‘through’, and ‘thought’ can send her for a loop but by and large she “gets” it.

So I’m thinking about what books I liked at that age and ability. I was a big Arnold Lobel fan, and I recall enjoying the Frances books (especially Bread and Jam for Frances) but I’d love suggestions from anyone else, if you have any. Amazon is being finicky or I’d link to a few books here.

I’m going to get I Can Read (Level 2) books and see how she does. We have a bunch but they’ve been read so often that they all have them about memorized.

My mom found these books at a garage sale

and picked them up because they looked good. Faith and Abby are enjoying them, and they are a nice barometer of their knowledge vs. their institutionally schooled counterparts.

Besides, I would be remiss as a parent if they were not given the opportunity to wonder what exactly the odd clip-art on page 14 (or 42, or whatever) that contained the short /o/ sound (which they were supposed to color) was. A pancreas? A plum pudding? A flattened beach ball? Something more sinister? The world may never know…

We got our World History book and the girls are very taken with Egypt. The idea of polytheism and the notion of the body itself having immediate utility after death are new concepts for them, being Catholic, and have brought much discussion.

They are especially taken with the chimerical Ammut, seen below. Crocodile head, lion forelegs, hippopotamus hindquarters.

Wacky!

Faith and Abaigeal attended their very first ballet class tonight. In fact, it was their very first class of any sort outside of home.

Faith drew this picture of her class. The tall figure is the teacher, and the shorter ones are two students.

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.