Week 19, day 5

Friday: Geography. For breakfast, I made omelettes, since we were studying France. I wouldn't have wanted a genuine French epicure to taste them, but my family thought they were pretty good. Over breakfast, we talked about Bastille Day and the French Revolution, and how the nobility's oppression of the poor came back to haunt them - it's better to help the poor than to steal from them...

We reviewed our hymn, catechism, and memory verses (last week's and the one I introduced on Thursday), updated the calendar, and had P read her reader and do her math 5-a-day. I was busy with the baby as she did her 5-a-day, and she did most of it well, but made some minor errors. Usually, I'm around and say as little as possible, but she talks the problem through even though I don't say much in return, which helps her avoid making mistakes. I'm not going to insist on her doing her 5-a-day without any input from me until she's reading fluently, since reading errors are a major part of her problem in working independently.

We started our geography study by outlining and labeling France on the Markable Map. We looked at the France page in the children's atlas. We also read "Madeline" and "Babar" from the 20th Century Children's Book Treasury, and "Puss in Boots" from Stories From Around the World. We then paged through a library book on France and looked at the pictures. P informed me that she did not want to make her own book about France, so I gave her the choice between doing it right away anyway or doing it on Saturday. She decided to do it on Saturday (today), and when I reminded her of her choice this morning she was happy to do it. She made a book with "France" on the cover, she drew the French flag, coloured a map I drew, and drew grapes (for wine), a beautiful old building, the Eiffel Tower, the TGV (high-speed train), and 2 people cycling in the Tour de France.

On Friday afternoon we headed over to Ari's aunt's house. Her house is the same size as Ari's parents' house (where we're living), but her house has 1 person living in it right now and ours has 7, so there's a good bit more space at her place, including a few empty rooms. So we had 3,000 books delivered to her house. These are more copies of the first book in the series, since we hope to sell a lot more of the first one in order to inspire people to buy the second through fourth once they're ready. While looking at the huge stack of boxes in Ari's cousin's otherwise empty former bedroom, I was struck by the idea that God has someone who will be blessed by each of those books, so I prayed that each one would find its target. I have a fun mental image of books flying one by one out the window of the room and landing in people's hands all over the USA and the world as the stacks of boxes of books in the room slowly shrink away.