To distract myself from thinking about confined whales...

I will post a bit about our first day. Seems like I should; there were a few sweet moments that I took careful note of, and there rest of it was just a nice, mellow flow.

Before the snow started in earnest, we made a trek down to our lovely Appleton Library.  We haven't been for months.  It gets back to that time thing. The Rockport and Camden libraries have more open hours, and being in town for afterschool activities, it was more convenient to stop there. It was great to get back to our local library, though, and Angie is so helpful. Liam is a great reader, and he loves books, but I have realized that he doesn't know how to choose one. How to meander the shelves, pull out one that looks interesting, and either accept it, or put it back. We talked a bit about that. Mostly he went for his old Star Wars graphic novel stand-bys. Which is fine. I put a few on his pile to take I thought he might like, but I am trying to hold back from this, honestly. If I keep feeding him books- how will he learn to do the browsing and choosing? I took out The Theif Lord by Cornelia Funke because they didn't have InkDeath (3rd of the InkHeart trilogy).  By mid-afternoon, Liam had me reading it aloud to him and so that was a win.

Raelin goes for the old books. She hauled over about 4 big guys about 2 inches thick apiece, each a treatise on an ancient civilization. I pointed out that it seemed a tall order to get through all 4 of them in three weeks, maybe. Maybe not. The final stack was a mixture of books she's read, Babysitter's Club, an Italian dictionary, and several old books on various non-fiction subjects.

Then she spent the afternoon beginning her study of Italian on a free kindle app she found. The coolest part of this was what I heard about it. She told me about why she liked this app; what was more appealing about it than the website she found earlier, and how she preferred to learn phrases over the vocabulary she had been learning in Spanish. And then she translated beginning Italian phrases for the better part of 2 hours.

One of the things that bummed me out was never hearing about what happened at school. I would get snippets, but not much. I heard some stuff from other parents, I gleaned a bit from homework. But i would never get- from Raelin, or Liam- a detailed review of what was being studied and what was great about it or hard about it or any variation in-between. It was just home- snack- leave me alone- homework- the day was fine... you get the idea. To actually have her volunteer information about what she's getting into and why and what she thinks about it? Priceless, really.

And so our day was pretty much that. A couple of thank-you cards were written. There was much lounging between reading sessions and Lego building. Toward the end of the day, Liam and I took on Khet (awesome laser/Egyptian inspired strategy game) he got for Christmas. After a few rounds of using the pre-sets, he started making up his own configurations and trumped me soundly several times.

In the meantime, I'm reading John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down, which I had back in my own stacks from college days. It's not for the faint-hearted. He doesn't mince words, and I had forgotten a lot of it, but its the perfect book to be re-reading as we are wading into this new way of being. He has a lot of good stuff to say and stuff you can take away, whether you have kids in school or not. But, more on that another day!