So much for the super, snowy Colorado winter. All of our snowstorms have been mild (nothing more than 2 feet) and have melted fairly quickly. (Save the driveway, which was an ice rink for a good 6-week period.) In anticipation of a cold, blowy season, Mom purchased an amazing bounce house for the basement. Although the weather hasn’t been strictly indoor weather, we’ve logged some serious bounce-hours, bouncing almost everyday.
We have foam swords that we use in the bounce house, we’ve got our ninja outfits, and when we feel compelled, we train. We roll, we jump, we flip. We are sneaky. We are loud. We’ve worked in teams. We’ve worked alone. But rest assured, we are ninjas-in-training. We’ve also all advanced in our swim skills. We are all doing the crawl stroke. We are diving unassisted to the bottom of the pool. And we are jumping in from the side, surfacing, and back floating or crawling to the edge again. These skills will help with water-related ninja missions.
Our current favorite game is Miles from Tomorrowland. We go on space missions, saving aliens–sometimes saving entire planets–and we do it as a family. This is by-far Baby’s favorite. He sings, “Miles, Miles, from tomorrowland” throughout the day. He pretends his food is a rocket he’s flying through the galaxy. And this ties in nicely with our space studies. We learn about the planets watching this show, like we learn about planets with Mr. Neil in the show Cosmos. We talk to our friends about stars going supernova (a thought that has actually woken Tessa in the middle of the night) and finding another planet to live on that exists in the Goldilocks Zone (something we’ll have to do when our sun goes supernova).
We are also still very concerned about the Greenhouse Effect. We’ve been watching nature documentaries (our favorite being Great Migrations) and we don’t like what happens when the Polar Icecaps melt. We’ve seen what it does to the walrus migrations, how it effects the polar bears, and what happens to the coastal wildlife when the seas rise. This was already a concern for Tessa who said that when she’s the president, she won’t allow NASA to launch any rockets because of the Greenhouse Gases it puts into the atmosphere. (This is a real point of contention with Emmett who wants to be an astronaut when he grows up.) But, overall, we enjoy learning about our Earth and the animals that co-exist with us on it.
Like last year, we are greeting Spring with an insect metamorphosis. We are watching ladybug larvae eat and get fat so they can pupate and become ladybug beetles. Then we’ll set them free to help with garden pests and to lay eggs for a new generation of larvae to grow and pupate. We had a bit of a setback when Baby pulled the Ladybug Habitat onto the floor, spilling our larvae everywhere. But after some shouting from Mom, we made sure we didn’t step on any and recaptured those insects we could see. They are back in their home. Snug as a bug.
We enjoyed Valentine’s Day, making Valentine’s for all our family and friends and sending them in the mail. On a similar note, we’ve been writing a lot of emails to people to practice our spelling and sentence creation skills. Our favorite sentences usually include a reference to who we love, what we love, or who our best friends are. But recently we’ve branched out and we’ve been filling others in on our field trips and what we’ve been doing with our days. We’ve also been back at crafts. We made crystal geodes with egg shells, egg dye, and alum. We tie-dyed long sleeve t-shirts. We’ve been creating little critters with our AquaBeads. And, of course, we are hard at work at our Lego projects–mostly Ninjago sets.
Check back next time and see how our Ladybug launch went.
With love,
The Pigs
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