It’s only 6:35pm but I’m wiped out. Today was a full day and a very hot day. Quite bizarre to be the middle of October, feeling like it’s 100 degrees, my daughter’s cheeks flushed red from the heat as she plays in her summer dress. So I know that heat drains me. It leaves me feeling exhausted and sluggish. But on top of that it was also a full day. So I’m beat tired. The kids are already down for the night. The night air is now cool and I’m unwinding, thinking of how much I love my life as mama and educator of my children.

Played 18 rounds of Double Shutter with Jacob while at the same time teaching him how to keep our scores using place value blocks. Whoa! That was something to keep my mind active and busy. There was adding of the dots on the dice, thinking of different number combinations to make certain sums (10= 9+1 or 8+2 or 4+6, etc), adding our final score of the tabs left unused, then transferring that total number into the use of the place value blocks of hundreds, tens, ones. I’m getting tired just thinking about it again. But the great thing is that I know Jacob’s brain got stretched. That’s an awesome feeling.

A very exciting part of today was profusely celebrating Natalie that of her own accord, for the 1st time ever, she made her bed. Okay I have no idea at what age other people expect their kids to make their beds. But Natalie is 4. And today she came running to me to show me what she had done. I was astonished and overjoyed. It was a beautiful moment of her feeling super proud of herself. I too was shouting her praises.

There was the reading and discussion of random things to add to our wall-sized timeline: the invention of wigs, remote-controlled toys and the death of Mozart.

Then there was Natalie’s preschool field trip to a pumpkin patch. Feeding goats, sheep and the llama. Riding ponies. Jumping in the bounce houses. Realizing that these hoofed animals (goats & sheep) have horizontal rectangular shaped pupils instead of round ones like we do. Having Jacob use his math skills to figure out how much tickets would cost for both he and I for certain things and then having him calculate how much change he should expect to have returned to him if he paid with my money. Inquiring about all the things that our minds were curious about:

• Question: Why does the hay on the ground look different than the hay that the ponies eat?
• Answer: the ‘hay’ on the floor is really straw, but the ‘hay’ that the animals were eating was a combination of alfalfa and two other kinds of special grasses)

• Question: How can you tell if an animal is a boy or a girl?
• Answer: (yeah, that was interesting- the farmhand didn’t know whether she had permission to go there or not; I nodded to her and let her know it was okay and I started the conversation. Jacob, how do you know that you are a boy? His answer: I have shorter hair than Natalie. Well, yes, that’s true….but specifically what’s different about your privates? Ohhhhhh……yes….then he knew. So we crouched next to the fence by the ponies to look carefully at who had one or not.

• Question: Why do some goats have these long hanging things under their bellies?
• Answer: turns out they can get mastitis when their baby goat chooses not to drink from a particular nipple. If a baby goat shows a preference to only one nipple and the other goes unused and undetected by the farmer, then the goat gets these enlarged masses of milk that over time become hard tissue and then hang there. With time and the pull of gravity, they become quite the unsightly body appendage.