Cows and carpet tiles

We ended up not doing official school over spring break after all. But we did do a lot of gardening, went on a tour of the dairy farm near us, and started some ambitious home improvement projects. We went to Cagle's Dairy with my friend Maureen and her kids, Margaret and Henry. Cagle's is less than 10 minutes from our house and is where we buy all our milk. I'd taken Ari and Milo on the tour before, but not since they were 3 and 1. They're at a much better age for it now.


Milo feeds a baby cow. After the baby cows, we saw how they milk the cows and the kids got to stick their fingers into the machine to see what it felt like. And then on to the processing place where they pasteurize the milk and put it in cartons. Then we went on a hayride around the farm, and Margaret got very close to a hungry not baby cow.


Next we fed goats and finally, of course, drank some chocolate milk.


My end of the year antsiness is kicking in, so I decided we needed to end the week by completely reorganizing our entire downstairs. The old set up was that our dining room was our schoolroom and what's supposed to be the master bedroom (we sleep upstairs) was the playroom. But I had a vision of one big schoolroom/playroom (or, as we now call it, schlayroom) and then putting the computer and futon (parts of the old playroom) in the dining room. Clear? Anyway, before I could do any of this, I needed to get rid of the nasty carpet in the playroom. We were thinking of cheap laminate, but then a friend told me about these super cheap carpet tiles at a place near us. They came out to 33 cents a square foot and were very easy to install--you just sort of slap 'em down and cut them to fit around the edges. The 33 cents-edness means you can't be picky about colors, but I think it looks pretty good.


Of course, now that that's done, there is much moving of furniture and books still left. We just bought three new shelves at Ikea today and managed to get one of them put together. My house is sort of a disaster. But it's on its way to being fabulously reorganized! So that's my excuse for how non-exciting we've been with school this week--that and the end of the year blah feeling. Oh, we did get test tubes in the mail from Oriental Trading Company, and it seems that that's the most exciting thing that's happened to Ari and Milo in a very long time. We have many scary looking potions in the cabinet now.



Which brings us to last week. Let's see. We did the chapter on the Reformation in SOTW. There's an activity page doing Henry VIII's family tree, which inspired Ari do his own family tree, complete with calls to grandmothers for help remembering some names. We read about Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in science...and looked up the latest information on the whole "is Pluto a planet?" raging controversy. Near as I can tell, where it stands right now is that Pluto is a "dwarf planet" along with newcomers Ceres and Eris. I am slacking on the space pocket books lately; I need to look and see what we need to make something for them this week. Ari's getting close to finishing up Singapore 2b...working on volume last week. More adding for Milo in Earlybird. Ari just finished reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing on his own a few days ago. We're reading Ramona's World at bedtime...it was published in 1999, so I didn't read it when I was a kid like most of the Ramona books. It's a lot more focused on "girl" stuff than the others, which I guess is to be expected since Ramona's getting older. Ari doesn't seem to mind so far.

And it's very late, so I'll leave it at that!