Sick day

I finally gave in and got the cold everyone else has been passing around and...it's rather miserable. So today was a homeschool lite day. We finished listening to Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, which I could only access as a book on CD. I probably would have stretched it into next week if I'd been feeling up to doing more but the kids wanted to keep listening, so I was like...sweet.

I had already planned for them to do some review on Khan Academy and play some online math games for practice, but they really wanted to work on their coursework (Miriam asked if she could spend her bedtime reading time finishing up her first textbook last night instead of reading, so she was excited to start in her fresh textbook this morning and Benjamin is coming close to finishing his first textbook as well so he wanted to go further). So I let them do that. And we played some math games.

Then Benjamin wanted to watch a Bill Nye movie he'd chosen from the library (on architecture), so we did that and then the kids all went down to the basement and got out the trains and blocks and lego and built an metropolis spanning the entire basement while I took a nap. Science rules.

When I woke up we had (a rather late) lunch and then the kids disappeared into the basement again and I had to coax them out to do their real science work. We're on lifecycles right now and we've covered reptiles, amphibians, and fish, so Benjamin is doing a report on salamanders (which I've only ever known as relatively small creatures—the mudpuppies at Sunshine Lake were the biggest kind of salamander I've ever come across—but he learned there are giant (monstrous, really) salamanders in Asia (like as big as people, which is crazy). Miriam chose angler fish, which have some crazy mating habits (the males of most species of angler fish are unable to survive on their own so they simply bite into a female and release a hormone that dissolves the flesh of their mouth as well as where they bit the female and then they fuse together at the circulatory system and all his organs eventually dissolve, save his testes, and he just...lives on the female for the rest of his life, taking nourishment from her bloodstream and constantly inseminating her and...nature is terrifying).

Aside from some recreational reading (which, of course, involved history books for Benjamin), that was pretty much our day. Here's hoping I kick this sickness to the curb sooner rather than later!