Delicious!
While we haven't been reading up on nutrition anymore, it's a topic that continues to be discussed. The girls really love the "red light"/"green light" categories! They're also continuing to help plan and cook meals. Recent meals have also been influenced by a French cookbook given to them by their Aunt S and Uncle J (Thank you! They love it!), and a kids cookbook we checked out from the library last week.

• Monkey's menu: baked salmon over lemons, cheesy garlic biscuits, and peas
• Bug's menu: roasted pork tenderloin with a sage rub, puree de panais et pomme de terre (parsnip-potato puree), and watermelon
• Goose's menu: biscuits, baked chicken legs, peas, and grapes

Gardening

The girls have taken an interest in gardening, and I'm really hoping the three of them can compensate for my decidedly black thumb (seriously, I killed a cactus once). We have a couple of mini greenhouse kits that we finally took the time to set up. One of the veggie plants is sprouting already! (No sprouts in the others yet, but we have some very interesting mold growing.) Bug took the extra greenhouse seeds plus some watermelon seeds and planted a garden in the yard. They're also lobbying that we try to grow a potted lemon tree (they miss the one at our former house here on the West Coast). I told them if we can succeed in growing things during our relatively short time here, we can do some research and give it a try at our next new house.

Of course, gardening isn't just about digging in the dirt! The greenhouses came with info pyramids about the life cycles of plants, and the girls watched a Magic School Bus episode about what plants need to grow. (I saw a couple of other relevant episodes in the list, which I'm sure we'll get to later.)

Hablas Espanol?
Bug recently announced that she's going to learn Spanish, and of course, she's pulled her sisters into the fun as well. We've always dabbled in it: we have a number of bilingual picture books around and the Little Pim DVD series. But this is the first time one of the girls has declared a real interest. So, I pulled out an old cell phone that will still connect to our wireless and downloaded a number of kids Spanish apps (mostly flashcards and matching games) as well as Google Translate. I also downloaded Translate on my phone, so I can answer those out-of-the-blue "How do you say . . . ?" questions while we're out and about. She can now occasionally be found wandering around the house repeating Spanish vocabulary words.

Art in Life
I really love seeing how our artist studies have seeped into how the girls see the world. For example, the other day, Goose and I were snuggled on the couch still in our PJs discussing the plan for the day, when Monkey wandered over and noted that we looked just like a Mary Cassatt painting--with the way we were sitting and the colors we were wearing.

After perusing the book of Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, Bug has been taking an interest in flowers, bringing samples inside and sketching or painting them. She noted though that her work was more in the style of Monet--it gave an impression of the flowers, but she couldn't do all the details that O'Keeffe did.

We finally put down an area rug in the study, and the girls got to break out the paints! It's been so long since we've had them that they mostly experimented with shapes and colors; although, Bug and I teamed up to make a painting of sunflowers.