doo-in skool

• So, we're in India. Educationally geographically, not physically geographically. Levi sits down and reads this book. As he gets further in, he gets more intense. When he reaches the end, with fold-out pages of elephants carrying all the rice the heroine has sharply gained from the raja by understanding the power of doubling, he is near bursting. Then, the final page, the one many kids might ignore, shows the exact numbers that come from 30 days of doubling, starting at one. He reads, aloud, each and every number. All the way to 536, 870, 912. And, then, in his astonishment at discovering this new level of mathmatical truth, he reads the numbers again -- aloud -- to his could-care-less brother and sisters who were playing. He is flabbergasted. He is high on math.

• Speaking of numbers, Levi and Delaney got into a quite heated argument during lunch one day about whether there really was a "ten hundred". Delaney proves her point (yes, there is) with her counting prowress -- "800....900...1000 (ten hundred)". Levi shoots back: "No, there's no ten hundred! It's 1,000 ("a thousand"). Back and forth they go. Question: are you really supposed to stop sibling arguments like this as a parent? (Yes, they ended up taking the matter to Daddy, who explained how they were both right)

• In a move that has brightened the week around here considerably for the teacher, we bought a small laminator (Aldi special this week!). Levi and I were laminating fools -- geography game pages, cursive practice sheets, who knows what else I might feed in there?! I will laminate the cat if it keeps trying to sneak in to my warm house through the pantry.

• Finally, something that made our hearts melt. An unsolicited poem, by Delaney, which she delivered to my desk last week and which she says is her first ever.

Delaney's Palm

The world is so Big that i want to see all of it.