We're getting so big!

Happy Birthday!
Monkey and Bug celebrating their birthday was clearly the highlight of the week! One of the benefits of home schooling is that I can declare birthdays a school holiday, and since Daddy also happened to have a day off from classes, the girls saw no reason to delay the celebrations. The result: M&M cookie cake for breakfast! Followed closely, of course, by opening presents. The girls spent the rest of the morning looking at books and playing with toys, old and new. (The afternoon involved a leisurely library visit and a rescheduled violin lesson.)

Arts & Crafts
The girls got very crafty this week. They spent a lot of time on paper crafts, making dolls (ladies in kimonos to be exact), flowers, baskets, fans, etc. out of origami paper, wallpaper samples, and washi tape.

We also recently purchased a tub of clay from the craft store, and the girls tried their hand at making little coil pots (and a snowman). Now we're waiting for them to dry properly, so the girls can paint them.

Thanks to a few other craft store purchases (fake flowers & pipe cleaners), Bug finally got to make a craft she's been thinking about for ages (or at least it felt that way to her): a flower fairy! I handled the glue gun for her, and we were both very pleased with the result.

The Maps Are Lying!
Even before we'd eaten breakfast one morning, Goose wanted to know if the U.S. was the biggest country in the world. I told her I thought Russia was bigger, and we consulted Google to see if I was right (I was. It turns out Canada is also bigger.) Of course, we pulled out the big world map so she could located the countries. At some point her sisters wandered in, wiped the sleep from their eyes, and insisted we go down the rest of the top 20 list and locate the rest of the countries. We ran into a snag at number 12, Greenland, which appears significantly larger on the map than most of the other countries that outrank it. This led to a discussion of how people make maps and how map projections work, and resulted in my downloading Google Earth, so the girls could at least see the countries on a virtual globe. I think they would have continued happily comparing the countries on the map and the "globe" for a good long while, but tummies started growling and we opted for breakfast.

A Gopher! . . . Or Not.
Another morning started with a bit of excitement when a gopher emerged in the middle of our backyard during breakfast, and we watched him trundle around the yard and across the patio for the next 10 minutes or so before settling in to dig another tunnel entrance. The girls and the cat were utterly fascinated. When we finished our Bible reading, we looked up some information about gophers and their habits, and suddenly the girls weren't so excited about having this little beastie so close to our garden. Fortunately for our plants and unfortunately for the gopher, not five minutes later we spotted the neighbor's cat prancing across the back wall with a lifeless gopher in her mouth.