March 14, 2014

Today's word is mud.  I sincerely wish it was pie (or pi) to celebrate the date but I never got a chance to make one.  Still a bit sad about that.  I did explain the ratio to E though.  

We got a bit of rain last night, which handily turned our churned up yard into an awful, sticky, mess.  We live in a big pile of clay and rocks.

C stood in a mud pile this morning, got his boots stuck, and fell over.  Not a happy camper.

He rallied enough to play on his bike in the garage for a bit and then head back out.

That mud is awful.

My day was spent bathing children, sweeping dried mud, cleaning dishes, playing with C outside, chatting with my visiting sister, fixing snacks and meals, reviewing times tables and overseeing the completion of a slideshow report and a math test, helping load a couch and hutch into a u-haul truck (thank you trunk-like limbs and heavy children for making me stronger than I look, those boys weren't getting that stuff in by themselves!), trying to explain in Spanish that we want a little dirt around the edge of this concrete slab, accepting another 9  yards of rock.... As we do, right?

Mimi has been spending her afternoons outside, exploring the mud piles and woods.

E and I spent the evening at a stake activity days event- what a fun thing!  I was there to help out, and ran the carpool for our neighborhood girls to get home.  Strange thing on the way home- one little girl matter-of-factly stating "Home schooled kids aren't as well educated as public school kids." This was because Ernie is working on her times table right now, while this child's class has moved into division.  I had to tell her that we were finishing multiplication AND division through the twelve-times, so that didn't make any sense.

  Kind of broke my heart, because that's something you know she is parroting- what 8-year- old thinks about quality of education in their spare time?  Besides that, it's simply not true.  Home school kids score, on average, 70% on standardized tests while public school kids average out at 50%.  This is not dependent on family income, parent education level, etc.  I chatted with Ernie about that after we dropped everyone off- she just replied, puzzled, "But that doesn't make any sense.  Everyone learns their own way, at their own pace."