Under the Sea!
This Saturday we decided to visit the aquarium and purchase our membership (I think it'll definitely be worth it!). It turned out to be more of a reconnaissance mission than an in-depth look--the aquarium was absolutely packed on a Saturday morning! Several sections looked like they'd be fun, but were pretty much inaccessible thanks to the crowds. I didn't even try to get photos; there were just too many people. We did get to see some cool stuff though--sharks, sea stars, lots of varieties of anemones and jellyfish, flatfish, crabs, sand dollars, penguins, etc. We took a picnic lunch to eat on the shoreline (and inadvertently shared with the pigeons and sea gulls). The girls and I will definitely being making return visits!

Library Day
We got to the library early enough for the girls to have the kids' section to themselves for a little while. After storytime there are tons of kids, and it's not nearly as much fun to hang out. This week's storytime theme was toys and games--lots of cute books. We came home with these books:
The Baby Who Roared
Dreamtime Fairies
Once upon a Cloud
Little Bear
The Duckling Gets a Cookie
One Bear at Bedtime
Bill and Pete
Museum ABC
Pancakes! Pancakes!
Best Friends for Frances

Cook in Training
I may have mentioned this before, but Bug has set a goal for herself of being able to cook a meal by the time she's 10. This seems reasonable to me, and lately she's really been working on her kitchen skills. The biggest step was discovering that the ulu knife Daddy and I bought in the Pacific Northwest is the perfect tool for little hands: She can push straight down onto the blade, and the concave cutting board helps keep everything corralled. She's also cooked ground beef for me (I'm colorblind and therefore unable to safely cook it myself anyway), and successfully measured and mixed ingredients (I gave her instructions for making granola bars, and she was good up until we needed to add the liquids). She's also learned how to work the microwave (for popcorn and thawing bread) and the toaster.

Jujitsu
Monkey and Bug had their first real class this week, and they did a great job. Here they have class for an hour once a week instead of a half hour twice a week. They got through an hour long class with no trouble, and they've been practicing with Daddy at home. Monkey in particular has been working on her somersaults (going over her shoulder instead of straight over her head).

Wednesday Night Church
We did our first Wednesday church night here. We actually found two churches that we really love, but only one of them has mid-week programming for kids too, so we decided to check that out. My little introverts didn't participate much their first week, but that's to be expected. It's actually a bigger group than Sunday mornings at that church, which was unexpected too. I think they'll come around!

Playground
We walked down to the playground twice this week. We had fun, but were disappointed not to make any more new friends there yet. I know I've succeeded in winning my girls over to the this making new friends thing, because once we heard kids voices as we approached the playground, and the girls got all excited about the possibility of making new friends! Sadly, we then discovered the kids voices belonged to an afterschool group of 5-10 year olds that had overwhelmingly taken over the playground. We quickly changed plans and headed for a nearby grove of trees to see if there were any good climbing trees among them.

Goose loves to swing!

The Three Rs
Several moments this week have been real "this is why I love homeschooling" moments related to our formal lessons. First, while not an established routine, it's happened pretty regularly that after snuggling up with each girl individually for reading lessons, the girls have requested I make a pot of herbal tea, and we gather around the kitchen table to sip tea and work through their math and writing lessons. It's just such a cozy way to get the necessary things done. Second, we took our lessons on the road: I had to get something done at the bank that I knew would probably take awhile, so I grabbed the books the girls are reading, and we did reading lessons while waiting for a bank manager to be available. (Of course, this outing also included discussions about what happens in a bank, and why we were there.)

Monkey made one big step forward and one big (but very necessary) step back in her lessons this week. After listening to Bug read from real books for her reading lessons, Monkey really, really wanted to do that too. She's about 30 lessons behind Bug in the textbook, but she hasn't encountered an actual new sound in her lessons for a long time (sounds have been introduced, she's just picked up on them already). So, I told her we'd try it on a trial basis. I would carefully select books for her, but if it became too much of a struggle, we'd go back to the textbook with all the phonetic clues. This week she's been reading her way through Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop and loving it! For math, though, we've temporarily set aside the addition book and gone back to drilling number recognition. In the course of doing lessons early in the week, Daddy and I realized that Monkey couldn't name numerals over 5 with any amount of consistency unless they were listed out in order. She can count beautifully up to whatever number you want and since we do mostly manipulative math, she's been able to hide that lacking skill for a long time. So, this week we pulled out the Sesame Street flash cards and played some games with those to really solidify her knowledge. Taking that backwards step was definitely the right thing to do! She's actually been excited about math lessons again! She made up the rules for one of the flash card games we played (place half a dozen cards object side up on the table, count out how many objects one card, flip the card over to reveal the numeral, write the numeral on her white board), and she's started playing with the magnetic numbers on the fridge again (she puts together 2 or 3 digit numbers, and if necessary enlists Bug's help to figure out what they're called). Writing lessons are going very well. I give them tons of freedom to write what they want to, and Monkey usually writes a sentence or two on a piece of paper then illustrates it.

Bug has been working her way through Go, Dog, Go! this week for her reading lessons. She's ready to drop it and go on to the Little Bear book we got from the library this week, but I decided she needed to practice perseverance and stick with the dogs to the end (She's almost there!). For math, Bug is still working through the addition workbook (she's almost done), and I finally found some brightly illustrated multiplication worksheets online for her to do. There's only a few though (I guess by the time most kids are doing multiplication they're past the brightly-colored-worksheets stage), so I may have to break down and make some of my own. Bug has discovered she really likes doing copy work for her writing lesson. She picks out some piece of text (sometimes from a book; yesterday it was a snippet of Peter Rabbit printed on her mug) and copies it into her composition book. She doesn't just copy the text; she actually notes details of the different fonts (angled lines, serifs, etc.).

For Goose we continued our focus on the letter A. I cut out the letter A in different fonts along with some clip arts of things that start with A, and she created a collage with them (this inspired her sisters to jump in, and create their own collages with materials from the scrap box). She also did several worksheets tracing the letter A, finding and coloring objects that began with that sound, etc. She practices math on her own by randomly counting objects, and she really enjoyed a worksheet that had her circle the correct numeral for the number of items in a box.

Potty Training Note
Goose has got this potty training thing down! She has maybe one accident a day now, and is very excited about finally being a big girl. We've even been out and about quite a bit with no accidents. I didn't mention this last time, but I decided I wanted to share the details of the reward system we used, because it has worked so beautifully for Goose. For the initial few days, we kept a container of M&Ms in the bathroom: she got one M&M for getting pee in the potty and one M&M for having dry underwear at the time (this really helped reinforce the "run to the potty before the pee starts" concept). Also if one of her big sisters helped her through the process without my involvement, her sister got an M&M too (the way to go if you have a "big kid" old enough to help but still young enough to be motivated by getting a single M&M). Once the M&Ms ran out, we switched rewards. Each time Goose gets all her pee in the potty, she gets one piece of a puzzle. Eventually she has the whole thing, and she was so excited about trying to figure out what it was as she accumulated pieces. Also, this meant I got quite a few rewards out of one dollar store puzzle--definitely a parenting win.

New Doctor Visit/Sick Days
So it's been a rather germy week around here. We've had two kids (so far) downed by a stomach bug, one kid with a mysterious rash (fortunately, not contagious) and conjunctivitis, and to top it off I have a cold. Prayers that the stomach bug will at least stay away from Daddy and I would be much appreciated.

Thanks to the rash and conjuctivitis, we had two visits to the doctor. Fortunately, I happened to get a recommendation for a doctor from a mom at church the week before, so I had a practice in mind when the medical issues arose. Our new doctor is in a private office instead of a hospital, so we had a discussion about the difference on the way there. There was some anxiety expressed about seeing a new doctor, so we talked about what to expect before we went in. She was so brave! She had no hesitation at all in talking to the nurses and doctors and following their instructions. She's even been good about getting medicine put in her eye--no fun at all.

Of course, with the stomach bug making the rounds we ditched most of our formal lessons and did most of our learning through TV shows and movies the girls chose to watch: SuperWhy (language arts), Leapfrog (math), Color Crew (colors, recognizing what doesn't belong), Pingu (because who doesn't love Swedish claymation?), Madagascar (geography and the food chain discussed at length) and Kung Fu Panda (fun snuggle time with Daddy--a crucial subject).

Potty Training: Take 3
At some point in all of that we also successfully transitioned Goose to underwear! Goose turned 3 recently, and I realized it was going to start getting socially awkward if she wasn't potty trained. After two failed attempts in the last six months, I faced the first day in underwear with trepidation. Apparently, the third time's the charm! We are now a diaper-free household! Hooray! Once again we took this as an opportunity to ditch lessons, and we had lots of fun--we completed puzzles together, played some fun imaginative games (for example, "If you were a [animal], what would you do?"), and danced to a Pandora station based on "I Like to Move It" (because everybody likes to shake it like a lemur, right?)

First New Karate Class
Monkey and Bug were very excited about having their first karate class at their new dojo this week! They've been practicing at home on their own, so we knew they were getting antsy to get back into it. They usually pull Goose into these practice sessions and are good about correcting her techniques. While we're stationed here, they'll be studying seibukan jujutsu. This week they had an introductory class with just the two of them and their new instructor, so they could get acquainted and learn basics like how to bow in and some simple strikes. It's a much smaller school than their last one, and the teachers can pay more attention to improving individual students, so we think it'll be a good fit.

Nice Kitty!
This blurb's more about our cat's learning experience than the girls', but it certainly involves them. Kitty has been terrified of the girls from the day they arrived home from the hospital. Then during our cross-country drive, he was forced to stay in close quarters with them for all those nights in hotels. I noticed he quickly became more at ease around them, and the comfort level stayed once we settled into our new house! In fact, some of his favorite hang outs are on Goose's bed (they've taken several naps together) and on top of the play table (from which he has a great view of the backyard). He always vacates it when they want to use it for their play, but it's more of a "Oh, fine. I'll get out of your way" than a panicked escape.

Showers
The other new thing for the entourage in this house is that it has no bathtub, only a shower. These three girls have had three very different responses to having to take showers now! Bug has decided this a milestone of maturity; she takes this showering thing seriously and wants her privacy while she bathes. Goose absolutely loves it! The first time she took a shower she dashed under the showerhead, shrieking and giggling: "It's like a bath in the rain!" Monkey on the other hand despises the experience. She cried through the whole thing the first couple of times, but she seems to be getting used to the idea.

The New Normal
The house itself is mostly settled, and we can finally begin establishing something that resembles a weekly routine. Daddy started his usual schedule this Monday (we're pretty excited that it involves 3-day weekends), so we restarted our formal lessons on Monday too, and got to explore some of our new normal places.

The Playground
One of the major selling points of our new house: a fun public playground is a mere one block walk away! We've been there a couple of times now, and even met another military family who just moved to the area too (They have a 4 year old and a 16 month old, so I'm sure you'll be reading about more get-togethers with them in the future. Miss R and I made sure we exchanged phone numbers before returning home.)

The Beach
The girls and I are thrilled to live only a few minutes drive from a beach! Daddy discovered a  mostly empty beach with free parking on one of his bike rides, so I took the entourage to check it out on Wednesday. It's too chilly to get in the water, of course, but we had a great time. We walked through a little canyon in the dunes to get there, and the girls reaction when we rounded the last curve was just priceless. In the hour or so we were there, we took a walk along the beach before the girls settled in to dig holes, and we found all kinds of cool things: different kinds of sea shells, lots of seaweed, driftwood, crab shells and claws, a sand dollar (or a "water penny" as Bug described it later to Daddy), some washed up jelly fish, and a piece of sea glass. We watched the birds diving in the surf and even spotted a couple of boats in the distance.

The Library
Of course, we had to check out story time at the local library. I think it's going to be another great little library! The librarians were very friendly, and they seemed to actually know most of the kids coming in. The girls are pretty excited about the children's section: cushions and a few stuffed animals, a playtable with puzzles, some boxes of blocks, and a file with coloring sheets and crayons. The story time theme this week was wild animals, and the girls enjoyed the books, but this librarian does alot more "stand up and participate" than the entourage is comfortable with (unlike the rest of the kids who need wiggle time, my girls really do just want to sit and listen to stories). We came home with these books:
Shoe Bop
Zin, Zin, Zin! A Violin!
Around the Neighborhood
Hide and Sleep
Tucking Mommy In
Charlie's Checklist
Our Marching Band
Swan Sky
Where Are You Going, Little Mouse?
Penny

Social Circles
One of the perks of being a military family is that we can move across the country and still have friends waiting for us! Two of Daddy's former co-workers and their families moved out here months before we did, and they each invited us over for dinner this week. We all had a great time reconnecting with old friends. The girls particularly enjoyed playing with their friends D and L--especially when Mr. K armed them all with Nerf guns and swords and declared himself the bad guy. Of course, he ended up cowering behind the dining room table being attacked from all sides, but he was laughing hysterically, so we didn't feel too sorry for him.

We've visited a couple of churches already, and we think we'll be attending one of them, but we have one more we'd like to visit first. We met some great military and homeschooling folks, and the girls really warmed up quickly to the Kids Club teacher and the other kids. Unrelated to the church, but involving some of the same people, we attended an Officer's Christian Fellowship small group Bible study this week too. Of course, this is mostly going to be an "educating the parents" thing, but the girls had a blast playing in the next room with the other kids.

The Three Rs
Goose turned three during our road trip out here, and I decided I needed to start being slightly more intentional in teaching her letter recognition. We've been going over the whole alphabet and the ABC song, but I'm going to do more fun activities focusing on just one letter at a time. We started with A this week. She's very interested in writing like her big sisters, so I had her practice making the letter in a tray full of dry rice. She also practiced writing As and Cs on a white board. (She desperately wanted to do another letter, so Bug showed her how to make a C, figuring it'd be the easiest one for Goose to master. Except for being consistently backwards, they look really good!)

Bug and I discussed it (on her initiative) and agreed that she has reached THE major reading milestone: no more reading textbook! She reached lesson 82 out of 100 and realized that her lessons no longer contained phonics clues, she was totally capable of reading real books, and she wanted to start just doing that. She'll still have a formal practice reading session everyday, when she'll work her way through books we chose together. Her first book that she was begging to read is The Alphabet Tree by Leo Lioni. It's a picture book, but certainly not an easy reader, and I've been very impressed with how well she's done. For math, she's been working on pages from her addition and subtraction workbooks. Many of the problems she can work out in her head, and she uses a number line for the rest. For writing, she started copying down a story she made up for Monkey and Goose in her composition book, wrote me a letter (so sweet!), and practiced making letters in the rice tray.

Monkey is now halfway through the reading textbook! It's starting to throw some harder words at her: ones is -s and -ing endings. But she's handling it pretty well, and getting better at knowing when she needs to take a "brain break" and come back to it in a few minutes. We discovered on the first day back into lessons that she needed a review session for math though, and we had fun flipping through some Sesame Street flash cards to brush up on her number recognition. She also practiced writing the numbers in the rice tray (less intimidating than pencil and paper), and completed a page or two in her workbook by the end of the week.

It's been awhile since I've posted, I know, but here's our few weeks leading up to Christmas by the numbers:

2 determined grown ups
3 small children
1 very large cat
2 cars
4,500+ miles
8 states
9 hotels
2 visits with relatives
1 trip to the ER
2 car sickness incidents
8 national parks
5 cultural/historic attractions
1 morning of playing in the snow
1 afternoon of playing on the beach

And here's all the fun details:

Bug at the top of the Peachtree Plaza Hotel

Atlanta, GA: Our first stop was actually just a pit stop in downtown to take the glass elevator up the side of the Peachtree Plaza Hotel (the tallest hotel in the US) to the observation deck, from which we got to learn about the other buildings of note in the Atlanta skyline. Bug, our budding architect, was bouncing up and down with excitement that she would actually get to visit one of the buildings her skyscraper book!

Nana and Papa Bear's House: For the first leg our grand adventure, we spent a couple of days with Daddy's family to celebrate a very early Christmas on December 8. We were thrilled that the usual crowd was able to gather and participate in all the traditions (except for Aunt A, the girls realized after we left, but then they remembered she would be celebrating Christmas with Jesus himself this year, and they thought that would be pretty exciting for her too). Our first Christmas celebrations completed and goodbyes said, we packed up our stuff plus all the new presents, and headed west.

Hot Springs, AR: We toured a historic bath house and learned about the history of the area and the logistics of hot springs bathing. We tracked down an actual hot spring fountain and collected our own jug of crystal clear, steaming water, and we took a scenic drive up the mountain to admire the view from the top and the ice encased trees on the way up (fortunately, the road itself was no longer icy).

Blue Bell ice cream straight from the source--yum!

Mommy's Extended Family: We made an overnight stop, and the girls got to meet their great-grandparents, great aunt and uncle, and Mommy's cousin. We toured the great-grandparents new retirement home and admired Christmas decorations, visited Great Aunt G's artist shop (Monkey, the budding artist was especially excited about this), and (perhaps the entourage's favorite bit) rocked the house with a jam session on Uncle R's drum set.


Brenham, TX: This was actually just a pit stop on our way to next destination, but we got to tour the Blue Bell Creamery and enjoy a bowl of ice cream before hitting the road again.

San Antonio, TX: Our first stop of the day was the Alamo, where we learned the history of the tragic battle and got a glimpse of life in that time and place by touring the chapel and museum and watching a short film. Next, we walked the Riverwalk, tracked down some Mexican food for lunch, and took a 30 minute cruise on the San Antonio River. We punctuated a rather damp walk back to the hotel with a stop at the USO where we refueled with snacks and the girls got to play in the playroom. That evening we took a stroll through the Marketplace across the street.




Carlsbad Caverns, NM: The entourage is awesome! They cheerfully completed an approximately 2.5 mile walk through the caverns and even managed to keep their voices to a whisper. We also realized while waiting for the elevator ride back to the surface, which noted the changing depths, that we had gone down underground even farther than we had gone up in the air in the skyscraper. We learned all about caves and got to see some really neat formations. We also took a short walk to the top of one of the nearby hills and learned a bit about local plants. They're very excited about all the cacti.


Gila Cliff Dwellings, NM: The drive out to the cliff dwellings was an adventure all in itself--all twisty roads and gorgeous vistas! Once we finally got to the park we had a short hike to the dwellings themselves, which we all found fascinating, despite the

The girls most of the way up the cliffs--you can see one
 of the cliff dwellings in the cave behind them.

fact that archaeologists know extremely little about the functions of any of these spaces. Particularly exciting for the girls was getting to climb down out of the cliff via a wooden ladder just like the original occupants would have.


The Painted Desert & Petrified Forest, AZ: We broke up a really long day of driving by stopping to see the Petrified Forest and taking a hike through the Painted Desert. We learned all about how petrified wood is made and admired the huge, beautiful specimens on a short walk through the park. Then we drove through the Painted Desert noting particular landmarks along the way before stopping at a trailhead for a mile-ish hike through some amazing rock structures. The trail had lots of informational signs along the way, so we could learn about the different structures we were seeing and how they formed. This park also included the remnants of a pueblo village and some really neat ancient rock drawings.

The Grand Canyon, AZ: We actually spent two full days here and stayed in a lodge about a quarter mile from the rim. On our first day we did some walking along the rim (and rode a bus--a first for the girls!), watched a film about the canyon, and explored the visitors center and a number of the historic buildings nearby (many of which were designed by a female architect in the early 1900s--lots of fascinating tidbits for Bug). On day two we woke to find about an inch of snow on the ground! 

on the Bright Angel trail

None of the girls remember experiencing snow before, and they had a blast--snowball fights with Daddy, snow angels, and even a small snowman were all part of the fun. We walked to the rim to get some photos of the canyon itself in the snow, but it had disappeared! A huge dense fog had settled into the canyon and left us just enough visibility to watch our snowballs rolls down a ledge or two into the canyon. Fortunately, it cleared off in the afternoon, and we were able to take the girls on a hike a quarter of a mile down the canyon (because of all the switchbacks that means a total of 3 miles of hiking). We had the added adventure of dealing with an icy trail and figuring out how to hike with crampons on our shoes. The entourage were amazing little hikers! Monkey and Bug made it the whole way, and Goose made it down but had to be carried back out (they didn't make crampons small enough for her, she slipped in mud twice, and we were hiking during naptime--all things considered, she was quite the trooper!). 

L: The entourage posing at the trailhead with Daddy (not the day we actually hiked). R: Proof that even Goose
made it down to the resthouse!

inside the Watchtower

On our way out of Grand Canyon National Park, we stopped at the Watchtower, a historic building designed to resemble ancient pueblo towers and filled with Native American Art. The girls were incredibly excited about this one.

Sunset Crater Volcano & Wupatki Pueblos, AZ: We backtracked a bit on leaving the Grand Canyon in order to visit the Sunset Crater Volcano on the way to our next destination. We learned all about this particular volcano and the volcanic range it's part of. There was still snow on the ground, but most of it had been cleared from a mile-long loop trail that allowed us some great views of the volcano as well as a close-up examination of some of rock structures and lava field it created. 

the entourage with a huge rock in the lava field

At the visitor center we discovered that this national park connected to the Wupatki National Monument, so we stopped to see that too--well worth the additional driving time! While the pueblos we saw before were merely the foundations of village buildings, Wupatki is the remnants of an actual city that includes the ruins of many full-sized rooms and recreations of a gathering space and ball court. Slightly more is known about these structures, so it was a pretty fascinating stop.

inside one of the storage rooms

outside the city (It was really windy!)

Las Vegas & The Hoover Dam, NV: The closest lodging to the Hoover Dam is actually in Las Vegas, so the evening we arrived we took the girls for a drive down the Las Vegas Strip. The spectacle of all the lights, cool buildings, and novelty structures was so interesting that we never even had to get into what purpose all those building served anyway. The next morning we drove to the Hoover Dam where we watched a film about its construction and uses, took a tour of the power plant, strolled through the exhibits about the science and history of the dam, then took a short walk out onto the dam itself. 

Of course, we drove for hours in between all those fascinating places, but those were hardly times of boredom. The girls invented storylines for their figures and toy vehicles to act out, colored (paper &
crayons, magnadoodles, or etch-a-sketch) and completed activity sheets (mazes, hidden picture puzzles, sudoku, word searches), read books to each other, sang along to Christmas CDs, and watched classic Christmas movies and episodes from their new Spanish curriculum. And obviously, we had lots of discussions about the changing scenery as we crossed the country, particularly as we crossed Texas and saw new things like cotton fields, oil derricks, solar farms, and wind mills.

Home--the Beach! We finally arrived at our "next new city" on December 23. We did a lot of exploring of our new town, visited a church for their Christmas Eve service, celebrated Christmas morning in our empty living room (our furniture didn't arrive until the 26th), then in the afternoon we went for a walk on the beach and played at a huge, fun playground nearby. We are all SO glad to be settling in to our new place!

Merry Christmas from the beach about 10 minutes from our new house!