What to take...

Katie had a project to name some important things to take with her as an immigrant to America in Colonial times. The first thing on her list was books- doesn't sound bad. Then I had to explain to her that a cell phone wouldn't be one of them. She was a little upset that they couldn't call their families from the boat and tell them they were doing okay and to send more corn bread and juice. Somedays it is hard to save the laughter for later, but I think she learned a lot. Her final list looked like this:

1. Books (she has to learn on the boat)

2. Food (she might get hungry)

3. Water (she might get thirsty)

4. Paper and Pen (to write home to her friend M down the street)

5. clothes (an afterthought with some prompting)

First Day of School

We had a big party to celebrate our opening day of school. We introduced our learning adventure for this year- Colonial America. We gave each of the kids a costume and had Captain Moroni come as a guest to tell us about his fight for freedom. I am excited about our learning year. It's been a big thing to put together. I got the idea for the curriculum from courageousbeings.com and am basing this year on their Noble Birthright adventure. However, I've had to write the language arts portion to better suit me, sew costumes, decorate the school room, plan field trips, gather supplies, etc for the year. It almost feels like putting on a play. It's worth it now. A lot of that work will last for the year and I can sit back and enjoy the ride.

The kids loved their first week of school. How it works is they have a certain amount of math and language assignments to do each week and then they can choose their science, history, art, special theme math, music, etc assignments from a list of projects (or come up with their own on mom's approval) that work with our key information for the week. They love having the choice and say they are learning a lot already. It's been great so far. Jon is really getting into the theme as well (I'm so glad I married a man who doesn't mind dressing up like a Nephite for our kids) and is even helping me begin an outline for next year when I plan on writing my own adventure. Fun stuff and also very busy stuff.

Lilly at 9 months

It was really hard to get her to sit still for her 9 month portraits. She's got crawling down this last month and she loves to explore the world around her. Her first experiment when encountering a new object is to put it in her mouth and taste it which was the other difficulty in getting her pictures this month. She's also got her first two teeth in at last and was trying to bite my nose today with them :) She loves to do tricks and we've nicknamed her "monkey" because of it. She'll make sure she is being watched and then will dance or some other thing for people. She also loves waving at people she meets.