this and that from week 30

Just because I wasn't around for much of it doesn't mean that it didn't count as a school week! Plenty of learning and practice work went on, believe me.


We started the week with an egg hunt. It's funny, because Easter isn't a holiday for us, but it is for my and The Map Man's families,
so we stick with holding a half-hearted egg hunt on Easter Sunday every year. Zoo Boy sort of connected the dots on who exactly is hiding the eggs this year, but fell short of actually admitting that he'd figured it out. Probably he's afraid that it would mean the end of the tradition, so he kept his mouth shut before he said anything too revealing. J, meanwhile, still lives in the happy world where giant rabbits hide eggs in impossible places....


The Map Man took the boys to the "Mindbender Mansion" exhibit at the CT Science Center. It's basically a huge mystery to solve, where you solve individual puzzled to attain clues. In the end you feed your completed answer card into a computer and generate a certificate -- here's J's (top) and Zoo Boy's certificates. The Map Man got a certificate too, and I'd
publish a photo of it as well, but am afraid it might scare small children....






I left plenty of practice work at home for the kids to work on while I was gone. This piece of handwriting work (done by J) is a stanza from the poem "The Weaving of the Tartan" by Alice Macdonell.

My intention had been to weave an actual Tartan during this block, but it never came about due to circumstances beyond my control. Oh well, we've done plenty of weaving and wool work in the past, and will do much more in the future as well, I just thought it would have been a nice tie-in to the Scottish culture. But we've been in Scotland quite long enough, it's nigh time to move on.



Finally I was home for good, and we welcomed 65 new baby chicks onto the farm. The vast majority of these little gals are Red Stars, but we've got a handful of Silkie chicks also. Silkies are known to be good setters, and I'm hoping to employ them to help me hatch out Call Duck eggs next year.

And one more new arrival. The pooch on the right is Mae, an 8 month old Border Collie. (She's playing with our Lab, Kiri.) Mae was owned by an elderly couple who found her high energy level difficult to live with, and ultimately decided that she would be better off somewhere else. She's here for me to work with a bit and (supposedly) find her a permanent home. Of course, now that she's here, she might very well wind up staying on more than just a temporary basis....