Sisters

Solving the world's problems atop a hay bale.

The Accomplishment of the Weekend

I knew it wouldn't take long, but we are now officially a training wheel free family! In typical Kerri fashion, she took right off on the first try and got the hang of it right away! She's more than excited to be able to keep up with her big sister now! (Of course, it's the one time I didn't have my camera with me, so here's the best I could get with Andy's phone.)

Crazy Monkeys

You know, just when you start thinking that your kids are growing up and getting so smart you walk into something like this:

I wish I had a picture of her face when I walked around the corner and saw her. She was so scared that she was in big trouble! I just paused and stared and she hung up there and stared back. It was just one of those times when I thought it was too priceless not to have a record of. I asked them (because Emma Lee was waiting for her turn) how in the world they did that, and they were more than happy to show me.

I have a feeling that recording their antics might possibly take away from my strict instructions to never do that again. I asked Emma Lee how long they've been doing this and she said, "Every time you're upstairs." Guess I know now why they've gotten so good on the monkey bars at the park...

11-11-11

Here's my monthly challenge picture of the girls. It's supposed to be the last month, but I think I'll do next month too and then I'll have one full year of a monthly picture of the girls together.

Story time with Felix (on the top bunk).

Happy 6th & 7th!!

We had a great day full of family fun celebrating the girls' birthday yesterday. Although we've told the girls over and over again in the past year that we weren't going to get them bikes until we move and have a garage, Andy decided that they needed them after all. We decided we could just put up with keeping the bikes inside or in the van for a year. We knew that the girls were going to be so surprised. The evening that we were out birthday shopping, we couldn't figure out what size helmets they needed and had to call and have their sitter measure their heads (their little peanut heads are so small they both ended up needing the smallest size helmet for ages 3+!) Later when we picked them up they kept asking us why we needed their heads measured because they knew that we had been birthday shopping. We joked around about several different possibilities, but eventually stuck with the claim that they were getting wigs for their birthday. After halloween, I just happened to find some long blond wigs 50% off and thought it would be really funny to actually have them open up a wig and think it was their real present. Andy came up with a scavenger hunt for them, I wrapped up the wig and put the envelope with the first clue in the bottom of the box. They were a little confused at first but caught on pretty fast! They were so excited running around from clue to clue. They kept saying, "This is the best birthday hunt ever!" The hunt ended with them opening up the back of the van where their bikes were. They were a little confused at first and thought that they were our neighbors' bikes, but it didn't take too long for them to figure out that they were different and that they had found their real presents!

(You can check out other pictures from our day of bike riding here.)

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School Recap: October

We finished off another great month of school here in the Johnson household! The month started off with a week long vacation - nice, huh?! It was a nice little break with sleeping in, relaxing on the beach, and playing with family. I did count one day out of the week as a school/field trip day to account for all the educational things the beach has to offer. You know, like flying kites, seeing dolphins, fish, and crabs, and watching fudge being made. Hey, homeschooling has benefits like that! Seriously, one of my top reasons for loving homeschooling is the flexibilities it offers to make trips like this possible - especially with all our family being so far away.

Given that is was October (with halloween decorations everywhere), I decided it would be an appropriate month to learn about what's inside our bodies. We learned all about our bones and how we need them to keep us from being "floppy."

No bones

With "bones"

We put together puzzles and looked at cool glow in the dark books.

 We also learned about our brain, heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, kidneys, bladder and other "inside stuff." I outlined the girls' bodies on poster boards, and we began to fill it in as we learned about different parts. They studied books and drew in their brain and colored their heart and glued it on. It was funny to hear them talking about how their hearts didn't look like "real" hearts. We used some bubble wrap for the lungs and then moved on to talking about the intestines. We had LOTS of "potty" humor, and the girls insisted that they had to include a bladder too. We also used first aid tape and q-tips to add in some bones.

Kind of hard to tell in these pics, but this is Kerri working on her brain

and this is Emma Lee coloring in her heart.

We had a "light bulb" moment when they measured out how long the small intestine and the large intestine is

and then realized how it can squeeze into a much smaller space.

Here's the final product:

We began journaling this month, and the girls are still enjoying it. They love to choose their own quiet place and write away. It also didn't take me long to establish the rule that they are not allowed to ask me, "How do you spell ______?" Instead, they can ask, "Is this how you spell _______" and give it a try first. It helps with my sanity because they can actually figure out more than they think they can.

In math, we've been doing a lot of number sentences, learning the doubles, and using a balance.

We also took the girls one evening to see a performance of A Muskrat Lullaby, an interactive children's opera, which they loved (sorry - no pics).

We had one day when our "school room" was being repaired and painted, so we had to be creative and spend the day learning upstairs. We pulled out the games and played several math games with dice, a simplified version of scrabble, and monopoly. There's that flexibility again!

Kerri's face cracks me up in this picture. She gets really nervous about the "Go to Jail" space!

Of course, we had to make some yummy treats on the last day of the month!

A Tribute - The Conclusion

After parts I and II, I know I've left you hanging for a few days, but here's the final chapter of the story.

It was Sunday morning, time to head out the door for church, when Emma Lee started crying downstairs and Kerri came rushing upstairs struggling to get out through her own tears that Shelby was dead.  

Great.

I followed Kerri downstairs and assessed the situation. The crab was out of its shell, and from what I can gather it seems like Emma Lee picked it up and it just fell out. We spent some time staring and trying to see if it was going to move, but I couldn't really tell if it was alive or not (and I wasn't about to touch it!) We had a  mixture of emotions going on for a good 30 min while I tried to get the girls calmed down and figure out what was happening (or had happened). Emma Lee cried because it was dead. Kerri laughed and said it was just having a baby (because the curled up tail part was a different color it did kind of look like it). I offered up that it might just be moving shells. They both took turns exclaiming that they thought they saw it move every few minutes (I never did...). In the long run, we ended up closing it up in the bathroom, cranking up the heat (because I think it got too cold), and left with the hope that it would be fine when we returned.

Fast forward a couple of hours. We returned home, and it was pretty obvious that Shelby was no longer with us. As the girls stood crying in front of the cage, Emma Lee pronounced that Daddy was going to have to perform a ceremony for her crab.

Great.

The ceremony quickly consumed all her thoughts and conversations, and I finally suggested (after literally hours) that maybe she should just go away and write out an order of what she wanted instead of asking me about it every five minutes. (Just a guess, but the Sympathetic Mother of the Year Award is probably not going to be mine!) That suggestion was right up Emma Lee's alley though (I'm actually surprised my little list-maker didn't think of it first), so she set right off. After much thought and deliberation, here's what she came up with:

With a spoon from the kitchen, Andy and Emma Lee worked together to bury Shelby right outside the back door. Kerri was put in charge of the song. She stood "center stage" and right on the spot came up with "This Little Crab of Mine I'm Going to Let It Pinch." Andy and I were fighting as hard as we could to hold back the laughter, and I was wishing more than anything that I had grabbed the video camera to record the ceremony! Andy was up next on the agenda, and he choose to recite a quick verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death (slightly cringing in case a lightening bolt was headed his way!). We all had to contribute a gift to Shelby. Emma Lee placed grass on her grave, Kerri added some flowers, I chose bark (because she liked to eat it), and Andy gave up a penny. Emma Lee also really wanted a stone with Shelby's name on it marking the spot, but she decided to settle on sprinkling some of the aquarium rocks from the cage.The ceremony moved on to a joyous celebration of Shelby's life by playing a game. Emma Lee was in charge of that, and she came up with some type of a crab-pinching tag game that left everyone laughing.

Well, you might think that was the end of that because that's what I thought too. Not for Emma Lee, though, I should have known! She has still cried just about every day since (over a week!), and she often requests to go outside and have "private alone time" with Shelby. After the first few times, I asked her why she wanted to do this and she said that she wanted to spend more time with Shelby since she didn't spend a lot of time with her when she was alive. Almost every prayer time, she thanks God for the little bit of time that she did have with Shelby, and she's anxiously awaiting next year's beach vacation where she can get another hermit crab.

Kerri's been very sweet through the whole process and "shares" her crab (who's been given a new name of Shell Lee in honor of Emma Lee). Kerri's crab hasn't been very active, so we moved it back into its original cage and it seems to be doing just fine as far as we can tell.