Team Gray!

If you’d have told me 25 years ago that I would be going to the club at 8 PM on a Friday with my girlfriends and working out for 2 hours, I wouldn’t have believed you. And that I would have so much fun that I’d have a permagrin, be hoarse from screaming, and shaking my (oh so sore) hips several days later?

I could tell Zumba was fun just from watching the infomercials. But zumba is much better when you participate.

The zumba party? Brilliant.

I wondered about those jingly skirts the first time I saw them.

This was Latin dance, right? Not belly dancing. But, there are a few belly dancing moves, and Bollywood, and hip hop, disco, you name it, zumba had some of it. There were even a couple show tunes thrown in the mix.

And we loved every minute of it.

Ok. the commercial is over. Go back to your lives. And attend every zumba party you can!

I write it on the schedule every week. Under my hand-scrawled heading, science, I write, “2 exp.” Before that it was “2 nature walks or exp.”

Then I wouldn’t get to it. I We took a few walks, drew and painted some pictures of the changing landscape, but I never made the time to pull out the science experiment books.

But last week we made dish soap. The children had been collecting old broken bars of soap for months, and finally we’d filled the empty truvia jar I’d been using to collect it.

I googled the recipe, and the children cheerfully grated the soap with cheese graters. We poured hot water over it and the children could hardly contain themselves until the next day when they could stir it. Imani chose the yellow food coloring gel for our goopy mixture, and I added lemon juice to cut grease. We use the soap, but don’t like it as well as our homemade laundry detergent from this summer.

Friday night, Imani made caramel. First she tried to make sponge candy again, ala this fall, but she learned something about sugar’s burn rate when she looked away for just a second. She decided caramel was easier and tastier, and she made that instead.

Today Esteban learned about lines of symmetry in math by folding a piece of paper in half and spreading a drop of paint from the middle outward. Chanya and Imani and Joy joined in, and soon we had pictures drying on most surfaces in the kitchen.

It’s a shame about not getting around to science…

Maybe that’s the better word I was looking for. In honor of Megamind, I’ll call our little operation at home shool.

So after two weeks of vacation, we started back to shool yesterday.

We know the drill, but need new music for the practicing part, and people have misplaced the Suzuki CDs, etc., etc.

The handwritten wordsearch experience today showed me that Esteban can’t really read my handwriting.

But Imani knew an example of an epic Greek poem. If you had any idea of the disinterest and disdain with which Imani has looked at history, you would leap for joy at this little milestone.

And Esteban got 100% on both his tests and fact sheet today, so that’s good.

Meanwhile, people are busy setting up stores, tents, and begging to make the classroom into a rocket ship. They went outside and shaved their snowman to such proportions that Imani thought it better to just destroy the poor guy.

Welcome back, shool!