Laundry and dishes, laundry and dishes....

I think "Laundry and dishes" has been Hawksbill's and my mantra this semester. That is pretty much all we have time to do and the number one and two things that need to be done in our house. Sure, it WOULD be nice to clean for real one of these days, and it seems like 2-3 weeks the house gets a "wash down" as Simon likes to call it, but on a day to day basis, all we focus on is laundry and dishes and cleaning up only major disasters. Right now, the house looks like a tornado hit it, even though I know Hawksbill straightened everything up on Tuesday. Oh, well...there is a holiday break between December 25th and New Years and I am sure one of those days we'll clean again.

I took the day off yesterday, and we all went to Romeo to a pumpkin patch to pick pumpkins and buy some apples and donuts. I am not a big cider person, so I skipped that part of the apple orchard. I took pictures, but as always, I do not have a digital camera so it will be weeks before I see how things turned out. I keep meaning to post pictures that would go with some of the previous posts I had written, but it seems so far away, it hardly seems worth it now.

We are still focusing mostly on math and reading this semester for homeschooling. However, Simon informed Hawksbill on Tuesday that his math worksheets were "boring". Sigh...but he is right...the pages where he has to fill in the 20 math questions (which are really 5 math questions repeated 4 times) ARE boring. He doesn't mind the pages where they ask him to color in things, or write his own math problems. He also hates it when they list 3 numbers and ask him to write the number that is one larger than the number listed. For example, it will say, " 13 ____, 27 ___, 18 _____," and Simon will tell one of us, "I don't want to write 14, 28 or 19, so I am going to put in my own numbers," and then proceeds to write down any darn number he wants which is fine by me.

Simon has also been asking a lot about how to read numbers in the thousands, ten thousand, hundred thousands, etc. I think he wants to do this so he can read his score off of his Star Wars Lego games. He wants to be able to tell us how many coins he has. Also, this way he can tell us what the numbers that are on buildings when we are driving.

I want to find some more puzzle books for Simon because he likes to do word searches and mazes and puzzles...so we will probably go to Target tonight and see what we can find. Simon is also becoming an expert in Star Wars Lego I and II on the playstation. I feel bad when he asked me questions about Star Wars because other than the characters' names from the first 3 movies, I know nothing about Star Wars. Hawksbill bought him a couple of "I can read" books on Star Wars that he LOVES, so those are the books he is asking me to read over and over again to him right now.

Gwen is really into being read to now. She really likes these alphabet books that we bought when Simon was a baby, and she knows probably half of her letters. I think it is funny because when Simon was 18 months, Hawksbill and I read those over and over and over drilling the alphabet into his head so he knew his letters by the time he was 2, and now with Gwen, I am not so worried. If she knows them by the time she is 3, that is great, but I am not psycho-obsessed with forcing them to learn things by a certain age.

We all have been watching Northern Exposure lately in our little Alaska fantasy. Gwen informed us she only wants to go to Alaska if she can see moose!! I have been wanting a kid to be obsessed with moose and it looks like it is going to be Gwen. We also tivoed (is that even a word?) some travel channel shows on Alaska, but I think they were narrated by the same guy who narrates the Texas hold-em poker tournaments, so they weren't exactly what I was hoping they would be. I guess what I wanted was more of a National Geographic kind of feel. Ah, well...it would be nice if we could save up enough for a trip for 4 to Alaska. Simon said he wanted to go next week, but we had to disappoint him and tell him it wasn't possible. Maybe in a year and a half we can save up enough to go, but for now, we will just have to keep watching old reruns of Northern Exposure and movies that use Alaska as a setting.

Please forgive the typos. To say I am tired is an understatement...I will worry more about grammar when it is truly necessary. :)