Delicious Minutiae

I was planning to do a weekly wrap-up of our previous week, but I can’t remember most of the details of what we did.

I vaguely recall a few things, such as selling Cub Scout popcorn with the boys at a grocery store, selling crack of dawn popcorn at the train station, selling popcorn door-to-door (okay, one door)…  The kids have significantly slowed down in their efforts and are still a long way from their goal, but have worked really hard up until now!  I imagine I’ll just supplement their gift card earnings and help them get what they want the old fashioned way…deep pockets of mom and dad.

I also remember getting stung in the armpit by a bee last week, coining the phrase “arm groin” and considering the positive consequences of beekeeping inside my shirt, such as free honey!  The drawbacks of becoming a walking apiarist (look it up: I did) is the occasional yeast infection from all the sugar and moistly heated hive locations.  (Do you love the word “moist” as much as I do?  Not bloody likely.)  It was close, but I think I’ll pass on the opportunities pointed out by my weird, yet funny, friends on Facebook.  I am eternally grateful the friends that N, E and I were having breakfast with had already driven away and didn’t witness my embarrassing Oscar-worthy disrobement in the parking lot of Blueberry Hill…nor will I have to worry about the posting of grainy YouTube videos of N looking up my undershirt to see if there were bee parts still piercing my pit.  🙂

We did a bunch of educational stuff too, for the schoolie-minded folks, and family, that wonder what the heck we do with our time.  N is studying the Great Depression in his history class.  I forgot to buy the next play for his Shakespeare class, but he’ll be reading As You Like It later today.  He studied some great speeches for his Friday Speech and Debate class:  The Gettysburg Address by Lincoln, “Ain’t I a Woman?” by Sojourner Truth, Speech to the Troops at Tillsbury by Queen Elizabeth I, and “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” by Frederick Douglass.

The Douglass speech was new to me and pretty incredible.

N and I watched a bunch of different people giving the speeches so as to compare delivery, but Morgan Freeman took the prize, in our opinion.  N wound up choosing The Gettysburg Address to present, but I was glad to study Frederick Douglass with him for a bit.  He also glommed on Neil deGrasse Tyson for a few days and enjoyed some Teaching Company astronomy lectures, though E thought they were a drag and wanted to watch NOVA Science Now instead.  Oh yeah, he also got a deck of cards for his Probability homework, so I think we’re playing Poker this week.  Yay, homeschool!  I hope we play for money.

He did a bunch of other stuff, including sonnet writing, but those were the highlights.

E was feeling mathy this last week and enjoyed playing with the popcorn money quite a bit.  He counted change and came up with a lot of different coin combinations for the same dollar amounts, among other mathy stuff that cropped up in the course of daily life.  He seems to be very intuitive with numbers.  I have to take my shoes off to count to 20, so this is a great development.  E also loves science, so he and his brother decided to do a bunch of experiments and record them for their blogs.  This is not a new idea.  They’ve been chatting about it for a couple of years now with not a lot of follow-through.  Anyway, they did a magnet experiment and made their own compass.  N already knows the material, so he is sort of the mentor to E.

They are still working on their concept.  N gets carried away with ad-libbing, so short and snappy easily becomes the Epic of Gilgamesh, and much of the meat and potatoes of the science still gets left out.  E seems to take on the role of the wacky random-maker in their pursuits, which fits his personality, but I worry he’s typecasting himself at the tender age of 6.  They’re currently trying to decide on a signature catchphrase to close up their show.

Here’s their first attempt:

Gosh, I remember more than I thought from last week!  Lucky you!  Jeff would comment that he remembers E’s art project of collaging leaves onto a paper sidewalk canvas…and how the cats ate his leaf inventory overnight and vomited on the carpet.  I have no such memories, however, so I won’t mention it.

Maybe my next Monday Morning Quarterbacking session will be more philosophical and reflective.  I doubt it.  I’m not that deep.