Happy Spring!

It was 35 degrees outside this morning, but that didn't stop us from heading to the nursery and picking up some seed starting supplies. Within a month the weather will be warm enough for the cool weather veggies, though I'll probably end up keeping the warm weather stuff indoors a bit longer (I've got heaps of containers to transplant them into, also).

Colwyn had fun picking out seeds. I've never tried watermelon and have a feeling it won't go so well, but who knows.



Alas, all my gardening tools are somewhere out back, so I let the boys use spoons to fill the trays with dirt. They were so impressed that I was completely unphased by the inevitable spills on the floor.

Warm Weather!

What a great end to the week. Monday-Wednesday was pretty rainy and warm, so when we woke up on Thursday morning to find sun and no snow, we headed to the playground. We met friends of ours there and the kids had a fantastic time. They were so excited to be at a playground and everytime they did something daring (which had become routine last summer) they ran up to me, beaming with pride, saying, "I did it, I did it!" The sun, fresh air, and warm temps sure did a lot for my disposition, too. Afterwards we went to a little pizza place we'd never been to before and I was amazed at how good their chicken fingers were. Like.. I could go for some right now. :)

When we got home, it wasn't quite naptime so the kids played out front and in the car while I got all the trash and soggy hats/mittens and whatnot out of the car. After naptime, we went back out again for a walk around the block. Our neighbor had some flooding and had lots of tubing pouring water into the street, so the kids marveled at the 'river' and then spent a good 20 minutes finding stuff to drop down the drain. On the way back we found some lovely sticks to bang on the sidewalk, then threw them in the marsh, then found more pinecones to bring home. Fun stuff.

So today, it was nice again, though a little bit chillier. We met some different friends at a different park and, once again, had a great time. The kids played tag and hide and seek, pretended to be the billy goats Gruff, and made mulch soup. Afterwards we went to Kelly's for lunch with our friends and the kids had fun there, too.

Not bad for early March. :)

Health Education

Our approach to health education is to address topics as they come up in our daily lives (obviously, since we're unschoolers). With me being pregnant, lots of questions come up, or the kids make comments about the pregnancy that open the way for discussion.

We decided a long time ago to always use the anatomical names for body parts, rather than euphemisms. My family uses terms like 'noodles' and 'monkeys' and that always seemed like it would be confusing to little kids. I've also heard that nicknames for body parts complicates molestation matters (I'd heard of a girl who used the term 'cookie' and tried several times to report molestation to her teacher, but the teacher never took her seriously because she said, 'My uncle ate my cookie.').

Anyway, we'd had plenty of opportunity to use the words for boy parts, but few other words really came up. To be honest, the lack of naming girl parts is due to lingering discomfort on my part, though I'm trying to work through it for the sake of the little girly who'll be joining our family soon.

I ended up buying It's Not the Stork by Robie Harris, and we got How Was I Born by Lennart Nilsson from the library. They've been very educational. We haven't gotten to the part about how babies are actually made, but they're very interested in the anatomy pictures and now know the correct anatomical terms for their body parts and corresponding parts on girls.