Today

...turned out to be a Keeping Day.

*Mr. Honey had to stay home and deal with a computer glitch until after 8 am. We got to visit with him and tease him a bit while he waited on our Internet Provider. And he liked it. :OD

*We opened our windows to the beautiful autumn air, and Cornflower's allergies were well-behaved enough not to fret themselves into hives.

*Math was peaceful-- subtraction of three- and four-digit numbers for Cornflower, exponents and scientific notation for Mariel, and a quiz on motion problems for Aravis. I discovered a fun activity and three living math books while looking for info on exponents.

(Slight aside: I tend to look for a different way to present a math concept whenever my student is not 'getting it'. If the new approach doesn't help, I look for another one. Ad infinitum, world without end. It's kind of an obsession. I want my kids to 'get' math! Although I like our Scott Foresman Exploring Mathematics textbooks, I recognize that they do not contain every last way to explain each concept. And I love, love, love math storybooks.)

*I turned in 90 Swagbucks and am awaiting $10 in Amazon e-Gift Cards so I can purchase aforementioned living math books. The books are:

Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jar by Masaichiro Anno
The King's Chessboard by David Birch
One Grain of Rice: a Mathematical Folktale by Demi

*The girls, having been admonished for over a week about their unlawful use of 'this part was about', 'and then', 'so', 'um' and other unnecessary noises, turned in and/or delivered excellent narrations. Yay, girls! They were cheerful about it, too. It's like they realized I was serious. ;o)

*Each of the following came up in reading and discussion at some point in the day: Jesus' ability to disappear into a crowd when people wanted to stone Him; the woes of a 15th Century Italian duke; how faith without works is dead, being alone; irrigation and hydraulics; fruits and vegetables; what it means to be adorned with decency, order and good works; how different areas of America came to be settled by different European peoples; being made perfect through suffering; the abduction of the Sabine women in early Roman history; and Petruchio's hilarious courtship of Katharina.

*We finally got to Shakespeare and Plutarch after neglecting them for almost two weeks. (Sorry, gentlemen.) We spread a quilt on the lawn and read outside, it was so beautiful-- and found a caterpillar, visited with a neighbor, and colored on the sidewalk with chalk. The kids diagrammed sentences on the driveway for fun, which I thought was pretty silly.

*And last but not least, Cornflower made cinnamon biscuits all by herself. Another neighbor gave the girls a fancy rolling pin with cut-out designs all over, so it rolls out pastry with imprints of pineapples and flowers and birds and other things. She needed to test it out. ;o)

:happy sigh: What a great day. And when the alarm went off this morning, I thought it was going to be drudgery. The Lord is good.