Week 2

I'm finding this week that if I sleep 8 hours at night, I collapse in exhaustion midday, but if I sleep 9 to 10 hours, I make it through the day feeling good.  

So:  sorry, world, but Mindy and her invaluable contributions will be unavailable for longer than the socially-accepted nightly norm.  

I feel much better since I stopped fighting for what I "should" be able to do and accepted reality.

Though we had to raid Grandma's flower garden to find any worms, since our flower bed apparently doesn't sustain life, we did come home with two good ones in the end.  We used them for [gentle] experiments all week, despite Jeddy's worm advocacy.  You're going to hurt them!  The poor worms!  They need to rest!

Below, we're waiting to see if the worm prefers the cool side of the pan (which is resting on an ice pack) or the warm side (resting on a heating pad).  (You're freezing him!  What if he burns?!)

Jeddy's fears did, unfortunately, come true when I found our best worm deceased over the weekend.  Perhaps Experiment #4 did him in.  Perhaps it was the baking soda we mixed in to some of his soil.  Perhaps it was the sand we gave him.  Perhaps our dirt wasn't sufficiently nutritious.


Or maybe he was just plumb wore out, as Jeddy had warned.  Score one for PETA.

We took a field trip to the zoo.

Large venomous snake.

The kids enjoyed feeding the animals in the petting zoo.  I thought it was all right--the goats weren't terribly slobbery.  But I got bitten by that emu thing in the background (a "rhea").

Lizzy was ok with the miniature goats, but she didn't like the big animals.  Below, she's nervously backing away from the middle-size black and white goat, and is just about to notice the huge llama leaning over her shoulder.  I did not manage to capture on camera the screaming and flying bucket and raining food pellets that happened a split second after this shot.

Caleb fed the goats one pellet at a time.

Back in the classroom, Lizzy can't get enough of pre-K.  Here she works out a math problem with counting bears (also a couple of cubes to pad the numbers).

My favorite thing on library day:

Also I had a birthday.  And I have a dear, thoughtful friend who surprised me with a card and an adorable cake.


...featuring an engorged tick on top.  Who is happy because he just filled up on my blood and gave me Lyme disease.

Be it known that ticks actually have 8 legs, not 6.  They are arachnids.  The greatness of this cake lies in its timely humor and deliciousness, not its biological correctness.

As she said, "Now you can bite him!"  And I did, and it was so good.