'13/14 Week 26 Day 1

We had a fantastic Spring Break. Although we had school for four days, the end of the week was nothing but fun. It all started with a visit to the local children's museum and the story time at the library. Then we spent the whole week end in the Gulf region visiting friends and having plenty of fun.

Andrew considered himself too old for the story time and preferred to 'play' a game of chess with a friend.

Saara, although too big for the story time too now, enjoyed it very much!

We have not abandoned our cloud watching. Often times there's nothing to watch - the days are cloudless and sunny.

Migration northward. Cranes on their way back.

Surprisingly, the fun and games are not over yet. Andrew's and Saara's baseball season is to kick-off this week with plenty of practices and then games. We are still going to ballet and choir, and it all adds up to a very busy spring semester.

Our main focus still remains on our day-to-day studies. Today, the highlight for kids was Saara's science lesson. We read about the digestive system last time, but to make it more 'real' we pretended to 'digest' a PB&J sandwich with a little demonstration. The kids had so much fun, they wanted to do it all over again.

We have been moving rather slowly in our civics studies. I do not mind. I'd rather take less facts with quality than lots of facts with poor quality. Today, we read about president Roosevelt - the last face in Mt. Rushmore.

Science. It all starts with us chomping off small bites from the big chunk of food.

Then it all gets mixed with saliva.

After the kids got done grinding the food with the 'molars' (fork) into a mushy bulk, I gave them a piece of pancake that they could do the same with real teeth.

A little bit of vinegar for the stomach acid, and the 'muscles' got busy breaking the food into even smaller pieces.

Now, all this stuff got pushed into the small intestine. This is when I started hearing the 'Eew!' screams.

All the 'good stuff' is taken out of the food in the small intestine.

And the leftover liquids are squeezed out in the large intestine.

So, at the end of it all ... what once was a delicious sandwich, we now have a ....

Andrew was roaring with laughter: "Mom, it does look like poop!" BTW, it is not a taboo subject in our family.

A little animation about the digestive system did not hurt one bit either.