I'm up in the middle of the night, on accounta spending the last few days in bed, recovering from a non-flu virus (it was interesting to discover that my doctors are still testing for the flu, even though most articles I've seen say doctors have mostly stopped testing and just started treating anything flu-like as if it is H1N1). I'm still a little under the weather, but much better than I was on Wednesday or Thursday -- and apparently I've slept my full, for the moment, because despite feeling like I'd been hit with a sandbag as of 11 last night, I'm bright eyed and bushy tailed at 2 this morning!

Sarah and I've had an extremely quiet week, for the most part. Tuesday at co-op we read about scroll books and made our own, played some Munchkin Booty, and then did alien-of-the-week club, in which we were each assigned a type of planet at random and charged with coming up with what types of aliens would live on that planet, what their homes and clothes would look like, what their culture and religions would be, etc. I got a gas giant, and had a lot of fun with it. Sarah also had a lot of fun with her lava planet.

Other than that, we've mostly done lots of math play, this week. Joe and Sarah's math adventures have continued -- Joe is now leading them through a dungeon crawl in which Sarah charges her magic wand by doing arithmetic. They're both loving that. Sarah and I've been playing with her calculator, talking about place value and a little multiplication, and doing lots of Sudoku together.

She's also making progress on our readathon month -- she's got three books up on our readathon line on the wall, and is working on her fourth. She's making better progress than I am -- I've barely been able to make my eyes focus, the last few days -- but I'm hoping to catch up over the weekend!

Sarah and I decided to do a month-long readathon, although our focus will still be our Great Big Giant Readathon Day on Friday. She already finished her first book -- Calvin and Hobbes It's A Magical World, and I finish mine today -- Ex Libris, again. :)

Today we started our co-op. We started out by deciding on a schedule for our Tuesdays:

* morning circle (show and tell and planning the day)
* Everything Coffee Play Club (arts and crafts)
* class 1
* No Free Lunch (anyone can sign up to talk about anything -- but it's usually me, talking about history or science or world cultures or current events)
* class 2
* class 3

The classes are what we decide during morning circle -- we agreed that I'll be prepared to provide science class, math class, spy class, writing class, and fairy scouts (as well as ECPC and NFL), and we've got a friend who's offered to teach Ireland class, but each week which classes we do will depend on what the girls are in the mood for and whether they want to offer any classes of their own. It seems like it'll be a happy medium between structure/commitment and spontaneity/whim.

Today we decorated our folders, did morning circle, did a more formal meeting, and did fairy scouts, planning our badge requirements and making some badges with Joe's button-making machine.

Holy hell I'm exhausted. I had a wonderful time, and it seems like the girls had a wonderful time, but those were some *packed* hours!

Another quiet week. We spent a lot of the week reading together -- fairy tales and folk tales, and Sarah's new magazine -- and playing many rounds of MadLibs and Sarah's new board game (Munchkin Booty). We put tgether Sarah's Master Tigress costume. The co-op was originally going to start this week but was postponed to next week, so we spent some more time poring over our books, planning projects and classes to suggest to our friends.

We talked about Samhain and the seasons, told some stories about Sarah's ancestors, spent a lot of time listening to music and dancing together. A good, quiet week.

Today we read Fox in Socks and the chapter in Story of the World about Egypt. We found Egypt in the Atlas, followed the Nile along its whole path, talked about deserts and scrublands and tundras, about nomads and the start of farming, and the concepts of fertile and cultivation and irrigation. We decorated folders for some of our activities and spent some time playing checkers.

This afternoon we pretended to be naturalists and then archeologists -- playing out in the backyard, examining things with magnifying glasses, admiring our new wildflowers, speculating about what ancient people might have used various plants and rocks and mostly-dissolved newspaper for. We collected some acorns, leaves, and flowers in one of our specimen jars to bring inside. We watched Animaniacs over lunch, and later recorded our observations from our outdoor adventure in Sarah's little moleskin notebook.

Tonight Joe and Sarah had more adventures with Stitches the pirate teddy bear, and read more of Harriet the Spy.

Notes to self -- suggestions by K of movies for lunch-and-a-movie

It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World
The Great Race
Operation Petticoat
Harvey
Back to the Future
Toy Story I & II
Fiddler on the Roof
The Court Jester
The Apple Dumpling Gang
That DArn Cat
The Shaggy Dog
Bednobs and Broomsticks
The Incredible Mr Limpet
The Cat From Outer Space

More Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

It Happens All the Time In Heaven ~

It happens all the time in heaven
And some day

It will begin to happen
Again on earth---

That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are
Lovers,

And women and women
Who give each other
Light,

Often will get down on their knees

And while so tenderly
Holding their lover's hand,

With tears in their eyes,
Will sincerely speak, saying,

"My dear,
How can I be more loving to you;

How can I be more
Kind?"

The place where you are right now
God circled on a map for you.
Wherever your eyes and arms and heart can move
against the earth and sky,
the Beloved has bowed there.
Our Beloved has bowed there knowing
you were coming.
I could tell you a priceless secret about
your real worth dear pilgrim.
But any unkindness to yourself,
any confusion about others,
will keep one
from accepting the grace, the love!
-- Hafiz


**********************

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving — it doesn't matter,
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times,
Come, come again, come.

-- Rumi