Some hid out during the day, while others hung out on their webs in the sun. All this activity called for a library trip to grab spider books. I found some on webspinning, on west coast spiders and the like. I'll let you know what we discover. For now we remain fascinated at the sheer width of some of their webs, one stretching all the way across our (now broken) pond. (More on the broken pond later.)
We've fallen headfirst into a great bunch of classes, ranging from gymnastics and soccer to aikido and wilderness camp. It's very busy, but it's also fabulous to have such great opportunities. Since we're talking about spiders, let's talk about rock climbing at wilderness camp. See the connection people? Climbing . . spiders . .
The Boys and Girls club wilderness camp has created a Wildkids program for us homeschoolers. It is way, WAY awesome, and I am impressed each week at what we get up to with great instructors who's goal is to support you in challenging yourself, without overdoing it and becoming afraid. This week was all about the 4-sided climbing tower. Check out Ms. Hannah:
If you recall from a summer entry, Hannah was not comfortable going higher than about 12 feet. Fine. So here she pushes herself, egged on solely by her own mastery of this wall. Once she got high enough to look down at me, she realised how high she actually was, and decided to stop there. I moved on to help support the next child up, being on the ropes (belay?) while they climbed. Then another parent comes over and says I might want to come check out Hannah. Here's where I found her, the little spider:
Dudes!! Do you see her little face up there in the middle? She's way up on a free-standing tower, that she's scrambled up on her own. She sat up there for about half an hour, as other kids climbed up, or attempted to, to join her.
Meanwhile, the original monkey boy was focused on taking the tower and going right over. His first climb he was playing it safe, testing the feelings, going about 3/4 of the way up and coming down again. Then before I knew it I found him up here:
From there, he tried it all. The free-standing tower:
And the tricky 'caterpillar' climb. It swings and twists people!
Pretty cool huh?
You know what else is cool? Notes written by little kids. Oh, wait, The pottery. Okay, so we finally picked up the amazing pottery the kids made at Japanese Art class. I brought 5 loads of it out to the car at pick-up time. I'll post more pics soon. Hannah made a gorgeous green tray/plate thing. I tod her how much I liked it and she replied that I could have it as green was her least favorite colour right now. (Pssst! Her birthday cake was her chosen colour, green!). So she put this down while I was brushing my teeth, with a note:
That IS exactly how my name sounds, right? Now note-writing is our new thing. I ask her regularily, "Can you write that down for me? It'll help me remember". We recently re-organised our bedroom, so their beds were on either side of ours, and I worried that late-night Kit would bang his foot in the dark, being unaware of the changes. So I employed our young scribe to pen him a wee memo.
Her current frustration is that she keeps running out of room to finish her statements, so I've begun drawing lines on big sheets of paper, telling her to write right on them, so she has enough space. Her latest note is an epic hung in the yard out back reminding people not to step on her bulbs she plans to plant with Kit soon.
When Leif surfaces from his Harry Potter reading, he draws pictures about, you guessed it, Harry Potter. Here's a quidditch match:
He's plowing through the first 'big' book, book number 4. It's real thick folks. He carries it with him everywhere, in case a chance to read comes up. I enjoyed the series as an adult, and think it'd be so cool to be reading it as a kid. We've talked about how Harry is ageing in each book, so the things he thinks about will be more mature than where Leif is necessarily at, as he's not ageing at such a fast rate. (He kisses Ginny in book 6 people!). And yet, while I feared this exposure at first, I've thought on it some more. In terms of material, this is fairly safe stuff, given the context (the viewpoint of the 'good guy'). Further, he knows about people loving each other because he lives with his parents. He sees us kiss and hug all the time, and it gives him context, again. Reading about love won't suddenly catapult him into a state of pre-teen fervor over girls. And it may actually be a good thing to learn about it in this way. So I'm happy now.
Hannah is still plowing away at Book 2. The plan has been agreed upon that for my birthday we'll watch the second HP movie, so Hannah has approx 4 weeks to catch up on this one. Nothing like a good chalenge with a great reward at the end. We may even manage to talk the grandparents into having us over to watch it on the big screen (wink wink nudge nudge). Woohooo!
And how is Ivy you ask? She's had a busy week. She was rescued from the mouth of a giant salmon: (or is it a trout?)
And then came home to rock out on the drums with hair like a spent dandelion. Be still my heart.
Kisses
C
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