Week 19, day 2

Tuesday: Science. Today's theme at Titmouse Club was dragonflies. The kids learned about the dragonfly life cycle: they start out as eggs, hatch into nymphs that live in the water and hunt water creatures like mosquito larvae and even small fish, and then, after a couple of years, crawl out of the water and molt a final skin, revealing the adult form of the dragonfly. Adult dragonflies also hunt critters, mainly insects - including mosquitoes. I always liked dragonflies; now that I know they're mosquitoes' predators, I like them even more. It's still too cold for adult dragonflies, but the docents had some dragonfly nymphs in pond water in viewers, so the kids could look and see the nymphs magnified and moving around. They made a dragonfly craft with a clothes peg, pipe cleaners for legs, and translucent wings.

After Titmouse Club, we needed to leave for an appointment downtown. B had a dimple on his spine that apparently can sometimes mean there's a problem with the spinal cord, so we had an ultrasound on his back to make sure that there was no problem (which turned out to be the case - thank God for a totally healthy baby). We spent 2 hours in the waiting room because they were really behind schedule, and we hadn't had lunch before we came because we thought we'd be done by 1:30 (it turned out to be 3:30 before we ate). The kids handled it well, though. We were able to explain to them some of the anatomy and the physics of the ultrasound machine (why they had to put gel on B's back, for example). We decided to run some errands on the way back, reasoning that if we'd already lost most of the day, another hour wouldn't make a huge difference.

Once home again, I had P read her reader and do her math 5-a-day, which she did smoothly and easily. It was almost 6pm by the time this was done (we only started at 5:30), so that was all the school that happened today. Real-life learning is good, too, though (in the waiting room, we had some scintillating discussions on the subject of physics in Tom and Jerry cartoons).