Daddy's Home!
The biggest event of the week actually came at the end of the week: We got to pick up Daddy from the airport! We are all really excited to have him home again, and the entourage has already gotten in lots of snuggling and roughhousing. Goose continues to occassionally exclaim, "Daddy home!"

Daddy also brought with him two new games for the girls. One is a magnetic fishing game, and they have already inquired about the names of all the different creatures in the game (turtle, seahorse, saw fish, etc.). The other was a pack of playing cards with cartoon camels on them. Daddy taught the Monkey and Bug how to play War, which they really enjoyed.

Field Guides
We actually used our field guides for the first time this week, and the girls have spent plenty of time since then just looking through them. We used the insect one to read about cicadas (we found one in the front yard) and praying mantises (we found one on the patio) and to identify the kind of evergreen in the woods behind our house (longleaf pine tree). For the last, we used a chart of leaf samples to narrow down that it was a pine tree, then we went throught the pine tree section comparing the shapes of the trees and looking at the maps on each page to see if each tree lived where we do.
Overheard
Bug explaining the following while she was teaching Monkey how to make rockets out of a set of magnetic pyramids: "Rockets go into space. Do you know what space is? Space is big and dark. And it has one sun and one moon always up at the same time, but they follow different paths, so part of the world is bright and part of the world is dark." After a fleet of rockets had been completed, Monkey decided that our house was a rocket and informed me that soon we'd be blasting off to go "up higher than the trees and the clouds and into space."

The entourage hijacking the the Three Bears story and enacting it as follows: The three bears (Monkey, Bug, and a teddy bear) stay home while the porridge cools. Goldilocks (Goose) shows up and the bears are the perfect hostesses. They pull up an extra chair, serve Goldilocks her own porridge as well as a cup of tea. Nothing gets broken, and everyone has a lovely time.

Projects

Monkey and Bug finally dug into the collage materials box that I've been filling. This is the first time they've used glue bottles instead of glue sticks, and we're still working on how much glue is really necessary. They loved showing me all the odds and ends they "discovered" and had a blast getting them all onto paper.

This week I also decided to attempt working on my own project while the entourage was awake (a very ambitious cross-stitch project that I've picked up off and on since before any members of the entourage were born). It worked! And, of course, it spiked their own interest in sewing projects. I set them up with pieces of felt and embrodery needles and floss. I showed them a couple of sample stitches and they took it from there. Pictures didn't show up, but Monkey made remarkably neat stitches around the edge, while Bug decided to concentrate a vast number of stitches in one corner of the felt.

We also made a trip to the fabric store this week, which resulted in an impulse buy of a $1 bag of a variety of pretty beads. Monkey and Bug made bracelets while Goose played with a pile of colored noodles and a string.

Math
This week Monkey grasped the pattern in counting (repetitions of 1-9) and with my assistance counted all the way up to 50! She accomplished this by lining up Bug and a number of dolls on the couch and counting all of their toes. Monkey and Bug also like to play a game with their fingers that involves adding/multiplying/counting depending on how you look at it. First, they hold up both hands open, "How many is 2 fives?" Then, closing one finger, "How many is 2 fours?" and so on all the way down to 2 zeroes. Sometimes I tell them the answer, but more often I make them figure it out. Of course, playing War also involves numbers and figuring out more and less than.

Reading
Our reading lessons continue. They've added officially added the letter r, and they're realizing that they know a lot more letters sounds that we haven't formally covered yet, which they think is pretty exciting. This week Bug even sounded out her first word outside of our lessons: We got a new book in the mail called Zoom! and Bug noted that z-o-o spells zoo. I pointed out that she knew the last letter sound too and she pulled it all together by herself. She was so proud! I also made the girls a reading toy/game out of paint cards from Walmart that include the words they know how to read from our text book.

We've also started reading the Illustrated Classic edition of Heidi, a choice inspired by a picture book they enjoyed while visiting Nana and Papa Bear.

Goose now kind of has memorized a few of her favorite books (Pete the Cat and Go, Dog, Go! among them). One of her favorite activities recently has been to pull a stack of books off the shelf and settle in on the floor leaning against the couch to look at them. At some point this love of books got the best of her. We heard a little voice yelling "I stuck! I stuck!" and Daddy walked around the corner to discover Goose pinned beneath a stack of about a dozen books she'd been attempted to carry all at once.

Library Day
This week we came home with these books:
Bedtime for Frances
Little Bear (the original, not the ones based on the TV show)
Matthew's Dream
Kittens Are Like That
Honey Bees (These last two were our "What do you want to learn about this week?" books)

We ended up at the mall playground twice this week, and the entourage loved it.
They tried to climb to the top of everything. Photos of Monkey successfully atop a caterpillar,
and Bug attempting to climb the tree--they actually got several feet up the trunk.