January 24-28, 2011: Week 22

My, it's been an odd week. Sunday Gus had a mysterious episode of not being able to catch his breath, and then it happened again on Monday and again on Tuesday, so we spent a lot of time at the doctor's office Monday and Tuesday trying to figure that whole thing out. Now we have an inhaler, but of course, it hasn't happened again. Anyway, though, that kind of messed up school for the early part of the week (we're usually at the doctor so rarely that it's not really a big deal that she's 30 minutes away, but it starts to add up when we go there twice in one week). And then the last half of the week was already going to be crazy, so....to sum up, not our most productive week. Wednesday was our usual classes at LEO, and Thursday we had an afternoon playdate plus Math Olympiad in the evening. And then this morning I suddenly remembered at 9:44 that we were supposed to be at LEO at 10 for make-up Spanish classes. We were all in pajamas at 9:44, but managed to leave the house by 9:51 (which still meant Milo and Gus missed the first 20 minutes of class). So there was lots of Spanish this week, anyway. Gus asks if he can have some "leche" all the time now. "I love leche," he muses.

Ari:
*did two writing assignments, both on this week's SOTW topic, which was Alexander the Great, one straight up summary; one assignment from Paragraph Town. He still needs to rewrite the second one a bit. That's one of the things I was planning for today back before I remembered about make-up Spanish classes.

*finally finished the first lesson in Growing Up Heroic. We're going to need to pick up the pace with that, if we're ever going to finish it. I think he's going to enjoy it and get a lot out of it as long as I pre-read and toss out the more touchy-feely journal assignments. I'm pretty much like Ari is about stuff like that, so I understand. Like when there's a wedding shower or whatever, and you're supposed to write down your special, thoughtful, gooey advice for a happy marriage? Yeah, I pretend to forget to do that.

*Worked on Life of Fred and Singapore; doesn't like decimals

*continued to read A Wrinkle in Time

*dissected a sheep's eyeball in his biology class. Yum.

Milo:
*sometimes spends, literally, 5 minutes working out a subtraction problem like 11-7. Other times can do the same problem in 5 seconds. I'm thinking the issue here is focus.

*still reading Chamber of Secrets for school. At bedtime he's working on the first Series of Unfortunate Events book, after tearing through all three Fog Mound books in about 4 days.

Gus:
*is reading a lot of "Frog and Toad" these days

*likes math as much as Milo dislikes it

Other stuff:
*we started reading Alexander the Great Rocks the World this week. Last year we went on a field trip to the Carlos Museum, and the woman who did the tour for our group wrote this book. I picked up her book on Cleopatra also, for later this year.

*Lord of the Rings continues to be a hit with the bigs, and Gus still likes ("no, I LOVE it" he says) The Hobbit. Who knew? I tried to read The Hobbit to Ari about 3 different times, starting when he was a good year older than Gus, before he'd finally listen to it.

*I'm fretting a lot about science for next year. Stay tuned for special fretting about science blog post in the near future!