Back to Earth
So. The trip is long since over, and life is humming along at home as usual. We’re wrapping up our Journey North project tomorrow with a feast: each kid is bringing a food to represent his or her mystery city. Jane’s mystery class wasn’t a city; it was a research station in Antarctica. She wants to serve ice cream in honor of, you know, the ice. I’m game.
We’ve befriended a crow who visits our backyard several times a day. He was attracted by our compost pile, and now when we see him we throw bread crusts in the grass. He watches us from the fence and sidles over to our offerings as soon as we slide the patio door closed.
Speaking of the compost pile, something has taken it over, something that sprouted from seeds in scraps we threw out. Judging from the leaves, it is probably a pumpkin. I do remember shoveling the soggy remains of our Jack-o-lantern into the heap a month or two ago. I was turning over the compost regularly up till our trip, so all this leafy action has happened since we left.
Beanie and I are doing Rosetta Stone Spanish together most mornings, via the library website. She loves languages and says this is her favorite thing to do with me. Of course, Rosetta Stone is a lot like playing a game. Rose likes to play with the English section of Rosetta Stone: she selects the typing option and sees if she can spell and punctuate everything correctly. And all the kids like fiddling around with the pronunciation feature, recording their words (or nonsense sounds) and playing them back. Very fun.
After ignoring my Twitter account for months, I have finally figured out a way to use it that is really helpful and not so superfluously navel-gazy as Twitter can sometimes be. I have tried a dozen different ways to keep running reading logs for the kids, mainly for my own enjoyment because I love booklists of all kinds, and it’s fun to keep track of what they’re reading. The trouble is, I’ve never hit upon a way of keeping track that I could stick with. Twitter just might be the ticket. It takes two seconds to make a quick tweet about what someone is reading. Of course this probably makes my twitterings less interesting to the mainstream, but that’s all right. It’s working for me. I’ve added the widget to the righthand sidebar, again mostly for my own convenience.
I linked all the Barcelona posts together on one page which can be accessed at the Best of Bonny Glen page. Twitter widget notwithstanding, I’m trying to keep my sidebars streamlined for a while.
I can’t believe we’re already a week into May.
Mrs. Happy Housewife says:
You’ve convinced me to finally join Twitter. By the way, my whole family enjoyed your Barcelona posts.
On May 7, 2008 at 4:21 am
Sarah N. says:
You’ve convinced me on Twitter too. I’ve tried lots of ways of keeping up with reading lists and never succeeded consistently.
On May 7, 2008 at 5:39 am
Meredith says:
So happy to have you back, but am missing your trip, I mean my trip too :)))
On May 7, 2008 at 9:03 am
GailV says:
Oh, we had a pumpkin sprout volunteer in our compost pile one year. It was so much fun! They grow like crazy, and we had a great selection of pumpkins for Halloween that year.
On May 8, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Mary Beth P says:
My father had a watermelon grow in his compost pile one year!
On May 10, 2008 at 3:20 am
Nancy says:
Hey, Lissa! Your library still has Rosetta Stone? We were told by ours that RS no longer has licensing agreements with public libraries and so they were no longer able to make it available to their patrons as of Jan.31, 2008. Lucky you!
On May 10, 2008 at 4:24 pm