To the Beach!
We had an exceptionally warm day this week (High 70s!
Anybody jealous? It's usually too cold to get in the water). The girls and I decided to spend the afternoon at the beach. They had a blast frolicking in the waves and making friends with another little girl. We saw lots of seagulls, a few sand fleas, and even a seal playing in the waves!

Music for Everybody!
I actually managed to find a local music school that not only teaches piano, violin, and drums, but could fit all three girls into the same time slot! (Do have any idea how amazing that is?!) The piano teacher could start Goose last week, and the other teachers were able to start Monkey and Bug this week.

Goose was decidedly anxious (and a bit teary) about meeting her new teacher, but she still played well. She went into her second lesson with no hesitation, and she and Miss T were able to get a much better handle on how much she knows and do some additional activities with flashcards and hand tracing activities (to help her match notes and fingers). The very next day her keyboard was delivered! She absolutely loves it--especially since it comes with headphones, so she can play whenever she wants without having to worry about bothering anybody.

Bug has renewed her love/hate relationship with violin. Fortunately, she really loves her new teacher, Miss A! They did her first lesson without her actual violin (which arrived a couple days later), and reviewed things like notes on the staff and proper stance and holds with a fake violin. However, her violin arrived out of tune (apparently), and Bug dramatically refuses to play it until it's been tuned (not entirely unreasonable). Miss A said she'd teach us how to do that next week.

Monkey was thrilled to discover that her new drum teacher has a full electric drum kit for her to do her lessons on! Mr. E threw a lot of new information at her during her first lesson (names of all the drums & cymbals in the kit, different kinds of notes, proper holding technique--different from her previous teacher--etc.), but she handled it beautifully and came home with a dozen lines of rhythms to practice.

Good-byes
We had to say a couple of very different good-byes in the past couple of weeks. The first was a long-distance good-bye, when Daddy's grandmother passed away after fighting Alzheimers for nearly 20 years. The girls didn't know her well, but they knew of her. We talked about our beliefs about the afterlife (Ma gets her memories back!), and the importance of being there for family (Daddy flew back East to be with Nana for the weekend).

This week we also had to say good-bye to some good friends of ours who moved across the country this weekend. We watched their toddler one afternoon, so the parents could pack. Then we met Miss H and the kids at the park to play while the movers packed up the truck. I have to admit, I think it's good for the girls to be on the staying side of a moving away good-bye for a change.

The Three Rs
The only real three Rs update this week is that Goose has started a new reading curriculum: Alpha-Phonics. It's a similar phonics program to the one we started and quit months ago, but this one assumes letter recognition and the ability to sound out. As a result, it moves a lot faster, which Goose appreciates. She'd still rather read real books, so we do some of that too.

All the other formal lessons continue as usual!

What's Coming Up
On this week's grocery shopping trip, we discovered a bird's nest
with three baby birds in one of the concrete barriers in the parking lot. Obviously, this discovery let to a whole slew of questions about birds, nests, bird life cycles and habits, etc. As a result, I checked out three books about birds from the library that we'll be reading over the next couple of weeks: Birds (picture book), About Birds (kids non-fiction), and Everything Bird (kids non-fiction).

At Monkey's request we've started another study of a female artist, this one more contemporary: Georgia O'Keeffe. We had to go into the regular non-fiction section to find a book with many pictures of her actual paintings, but we came home with a total of three books about her life and work: My Name is Georgia (picture book), Georgia O'Keeffe (kids non-fiction), and The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (adult non-fiction).