The Learning Umbrella

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Robin tagged me for a meme!  I’m so excited - I haven’t ever been tagged before for anything!  Now I feel like a real blogland inhabitant.
 So, here it is:
Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the […]

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Last weekend, you could have found my family out on several short hiking trails.  And, if you had come across us, you might have seen Carbon skipping or galloping down the trail.  He happily tells people that his mom told him to skip if he got tired while walking.  This deep wisdom that I imparted to […]

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We’ve basically finished studying Antarctica.  There, frankly, isn’t much to study about the 7th continent, so it went pretty fast.  And I am totally sick of penguins at this point.  No more penguins!  We watched The March of the Penguins, Happy Feet (bad,bad,bad), IMAX: Antarctica, and Nature: Antarctica.  After all that, I don’t feel the […]

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I missed my blog last week.  I’m not upset that it went down - Andrea does all this for free, out of the goodness of her heart, and does an amazing job.
But I did find it difficult to be without my blog.  I find it very nice to write something for an adult audience, and […]

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I got to see what my esophagus and stomach look like, when I went in for a UGI this morning at Group Health.  I was really worked up and nervous about it - I always am for medical procedures that I’ve never done before.  It was actually pretty easy, quick, and painless.
But as I was […]

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  For Mother’s Day, we repeated last year’s trip to the Rhododendron Species Garden that is about 45 minutes from our town.  It’s a beautiful garden, and it also houses a cool collection of bonsai.  I used up a lot of film, and got back a bunch of bad pictures when the auto-focus picked the […]

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I’ve decided that it’s time for Carbon to have more chapter books for his bedtime story.  Hypatia has recently started asking for her own bedtime story (by bringing me a boardbook and climbing into my lap - pretty clear non-verbal communication).  With her I’m reading lots of Sandra Boynton and such, and then we read […]

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The Jester Has Lost His Jingle 
We had a very fun day in honor of our Letter J theme.  We read this funny and sweet book about finding the laughter in life.  Although some of the illustrations show people smoking (the grumpy people), I thought the overall messages of the book were great.  Believe in yourself, seek […]

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Kids copy us, and they are keen observers of everything we do, even when we think they aren’t paying attention.  Here is a funny conversation that I overheard yesterday:
 DaycareBoy: “My elbow hurts, just like my Grandma.  So I can’t pick up anything heavy.” Clutches elbow dramatically and refuses to pick up a toy.
Carbon: “Well, my […]

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