Muppets and Museums

Well, Dagfari is pretty much over the fascination with workbooks and to-do lists. I figured it wouldn't last long, and frankly, I'm a bit relieved. I mean, if he wanted to math problems and analogies and books reports all day, there was no reason for us to overhaul our lives in order to homeschool him.

For the past week and a half, D's time has been devoted to watching Season 2 of The Muppet Show (got the DVD set cheap at Costco), and turning the upstairs into an art museum. He's back into drawing, and even painting, which he hasn't done much of for a while. And he even unearthed the bin of plastic dinosaurs, which haven't seen the light of day in about five years (the dino era came to an abrupt end when we started reading Harry Potter, the week after D's 5th birthday!). He's spent a good bit of this week watching his old favorite video, Walking With Dinosaurs, and setting up dino exhibits. I figure this counts as science.

We also survived two visits to the dentist, the first a checkup, the second a cavity filling. D wasn't thrilled, but he was 100% more tolerant than last time we attempted the dentist (which, was, ahem, nearly four years ago). Nitrous oxide was a bad idea, though. It seemed to have the same effect on D that it does on me-- increases anxiety, rather than the reverse.

In critter news... we have acquired two more guinea pigs, Fred and George. These came from a person on the local homeschool list, who needed a home for her two female guinea pigs. Thinking that Robin and Percy might like to have girlfriends, and maybe eventually father a few baby pigs, I volunteered to give these pigs a home. D tentatively named them Petunia and Lily... until a look at their back ends necessitated a name change. Robin and Percy were not at all happy with the idea of two much bigger roommates, so Fred and George now have their own cage, and half of our kitchen is now a pig farm. D finds this all very amusing and thinks we should now get four female pigs. I'm not sure I'm ready for quite that much of a biology lesson.

And here I worried that science was going to be the weak point for our homeschooling!