School started FurRuhl

We did indeed start school.  I did not get that "first day" picture I was going to attempt though.  Oh, well.  We did portraits though.  So yay for the beginning of school!

     Gwyn had her first consult with an orthodontist this week.  Yep.  She'll have to have braces.  But not for a while.  Apparently there are other means of torture they can do before braces that might help.  Just kidding.  She still has lots of baby teeth and they are going to do *things* before braces.  We aren't sure yet what that means, but we'll find out in a week or so.

     The girls did their last Art Club meeting.  It's funny that no matter what the project is, if Marta brings out chalk the kids inevitably want to crush the chalk or shred it to make something.  So they ended up grating the chalk and mixing it with buttermilk to make paint.  Pretty cool.

Lyla is often my little helper in the kitchen. She's getting to be a pretty good wonton wrapper too.  She loves to help me do this and is so proud when we're eating and she can say SHE made the wontons.

     We had our first History Club meeting.  We did a geography lesson and learned about hemispheres and continents.  The kids made their own globes with the equator and prime meridian on it and the axis poles.  Then we attempted to paste the continents from flat paper onto the round globe.  Later we peeled grapefruits and oranges and attempted to make flat maps with our round peels.  This was all to illustrate the difficulty that cartographers make when they create world maps and how they have to choose what is important to the purpose of the map in deciding what to cut or distort to get a flat picture of a round object.  Then the kids also did a health lesson.  They are doing the presidential challenge so they had to take measurements to gauge their level of flexibility and strength.  Later we'll remeasure and see how they've hopefully gotten better.  I love Gwyn's posture in the last picture.  She's my least "athletic" child.  But she and Celee did ask to sign up for soccer this Fall, which starts this week, so who knows?  She may surprise us all.