Monday's Montessori

On Monday, Alison opened up the new Montessori room for the kids. It was a big hit. They have had no trouble choosing work to occupy themselves for the entire 3 hour work cycle every day and usually wish it were open longer. It was set up perfectly for Sara and Timmy, but Rea's part needed some work. Her school is much more book focused; Alison has a list of classics for her to read and do something with. This week she read The Secret Garden, then looked up the flowers mentioned in it and drew pictures of them and labeled them with their Latin names. She also has a microscope and some science and history work to do (along with the math we do as a family first thing), so we decided Elementary needed its own set of shelves. But it was still a great start.

Also on Monday, in the middle of the day, Mike got a message from Google Flights (which will watch airplane ticket prices for you and notify you when the change) saying that we could get to Italy from Utah and back for $400 each. This is a really good discount (about 50% off), so we immediately bought some. We are going to be in Italy from Oct 9th to Oct 30th. We already had a place to stay for one of the weeks, but we immediately started searching for places to stay during the other weeks. We are really excited!

On Tuesday, we found a castle in Italy that is renting rooms out, and we decided to stay in one. If anyone else wants to join us, there are other vacancies! It is in Tuscany, and we will be there during the height of mushroom season. You can only imagine how exciting that is ;)

On Wednesday, our fishes nearly died. Timmy fed them a massive handful of food. It was touch and go for a day or two, but they have all perked back up since then, so we are hoping that there was no permanent harm.

On Thursday, for our next-to-last party of the Carnival season, the kids got a pinata and took it to the park. Timmy announced that he wanted a zebra pinata (it was his turn to plan the party), and Alison thought there was no way they'd find one. But Mike took the kids to the grocery store down the street, and lo and behold there was a zebra pinata! Pretty cool. We had our party at the park with the Dalyais again. Our last party will be next Tuesday for Mardi Gras. Carnival has been great this year. We've really enjoyed having something to look forward to this time of year.

Thursday night, someone on the internet offered to make card art for one of Mikes games. He said yes, and then on Friday, the guy delivered some amazingly polished looking artwork. Mike doesn't even know how to thank the guy enough, since he just did it for fun, and Mike wasn't even offering him any payment.

Mike plans on showing the game to a publisher at Saltcon, so he am really excited to have such a clean looking game.

On Friday, since we didn't have a babysitter, we went to the DI to look for an orange shirt, and a food processor. We found a book case for the Elementary work in the Montessori room, and some dishes to replace the broken ones that always happen. We found an orange shirt, but not a food processor.

Saturday morning we tried to potty train Gideon. He figured out that he was supposed to be tinkling in the potty after a while, and got a ton of treats, but then he also tinkled all over the house after that, so it is definitely not done yet.

Later we went back to the DI, because we wanted a lamp, and we also got Sunday boots for all of the kids (we didn't find a lamp, nor a food processor).

Rea wants to add that she got a green light up bracelet (for St Patrick's Day), and that she has been reading Harry Potter 1-3.