Today and Yesterday.

Today, I've got to work at the hospital all day. I'm dreading it, but I'll live. I guess.

Yesterday, I got up in a really crabby mood and didn't want to do my list, so I didn't, giving the kids a day off, officially. About noon, after coffee and breakfast and some reading time had taken the edge off of my crabbiness, I suggested that we take a field trip so that we could still count the day as a school day. Our art teacher had suggested that we walk along main street and look at the buildings architectural details, which are art. We did that, and fortunately, there are several art galleries in our little town so we checked out a couple of those too. After we got home, the kids were inspired and did several drawings each. The strewing of library books I did earlier this week is still giving educational benefit, as they were using a book about how to draw dragons.

Also, one of the books had a cute picture of a sloth in it. My youngest son was very taken with it and drew a picture of a sloth and then started investigating sloths, getting out the animal atlas and another book on animals, having me look up sloths on the internet and reading a ton of stuff about them.

I'll be strewing a bunch of books around next week too. I 'd forgotten to do it lately, but it really works well around here, especially now that all 3 kids are reading well. My youngest son's reading has really blossomed in the past year, going from reading Suess to novels and now series of novels. This week he checked out a bunch of library books about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals like saber toothed cats and read them all himself, unlike the last time he checked them out, when I had to read them all to him (about a year ago)!