People have been telling me for more than two weeks to go to the doctor. I thought they were being overdramatic and/or were calling me a sissy. It’s just a cold. A cold that makes me cough at night and have no energy. Well of course I have no energy! I am busy and my kids are loud and they spin and jump and climb on the furniture while I run behind them and wave pictures of the cave in Lasceaux at them. That makes it educational.

I went to the doctor today and was diagnosed with bronchitis and stupidity for avoiding the doctor. The good news is that it’s not normal to be this exhausted and scattered. They make this thing called the zpack that’s going to put everything right.

I was going to tell you so many things about my punk child’s happy birthday but the lady gave me codeine and cough stuff and then I drank some. goodnight.

Graham’s birthday is tomorrow and we still haven’t figured out what to get for him. He is always hard to buy presents for which I realize is a very suburbanite problem, and we are already spoiling him beyond reason just by living in a first world country and buying air-dry clay so often but we really want to get him something. Even in the olden days when families had nothing but dirt floors and some sticks to play with, kids always got a wonka bar or something for their birthday. It’s an ancient tradition.

You shouldn’t compare your children. I always say that I’m not comparing them; I’m contrasting them. But Kevin says that’s not really good either. Rats. So completely unrelated to any discussion about Graham who is his own unique snowflake in every way, I was thinking about how Nicolaus makes gift shopping easy by developing narrowly-focused passions. When he turned two he loved tools and nothing else in the world. The Christmas before he turned three he loved the ocean, but by his third birthday he’d switched over to dinosaurs. His fourth birthday he liked… oh, gosh I don’t remember now but I promise you it was something that was very specific and available in toy form.

The only thing Graham mentioned that he wanted for his birthday was A GIANT, real lovebird. We aren’t getting him a real bird. He’s only four and Kevin and I have both read Of Mice and Men. I had the brilliant idea of getting him a fish. Perfect! He’d have a living creature all his own that he could form a loving bond with just like in all those childhood novels about a boy and his neon tetra.

I asked him if he’d like a fish for his birthday and he said “Yes!”
Awesome. So we researched tanks and looked at fish and talked about fish fish fish and read debates about the proper way to make sure your pet fish has the most spiritually fulfilling life possible. We went to pet stores and talked to fish people and we studied the instructions on the filters and heaters and oh my god. We were so busy researching fish that it took us almost a week to realize that we were way more into it than he was. He was over the idea, and even seemed a little stressed by all the talk about it. One night at bedtime he told me that instead of a fish, maybe his birthday present would just be something else. Instead.

We really aren’t in need of new hobbies, so we scrapped the fish idea. But we still want to get him a present. How do you buy a present for a kid who somewhat likes everything? He doesn’t have any passions. Wait, that’s not true. His only true passion in life is this:

He calls it the button machine and he will sit and click those buttons up and down for hours every day. Click click click click click click! What he does with it is makes shapes and patterns and mazes. He pretends his fingers are tiny people who are lost in a clicking, changing labyrinth of numbers. Please tell me what we could buy that would appeal to a kid who loves the button machine enough to forsake all other toys. The only thing I can think of is another button machine. Seems lame.

We’re going to take him out to eat and give him a mylar balloon and sing happy birthday. This year he wants a cake shaped like the earth. Easy, I thought – a round pan, there, done. Then he clarified that it will be so funny when we try to cut it and it almost rolls away!

Oh, you want it to be an actual ball. How the heck am I going to make a cake shaped like a ball? I suggested maybe earth-decorated cupcakes? How about that, Graham, would you like that?

He said, “No, it needs to be a big earth cake. Or! You could make a cupcake shaped like dog poop so people will think WHAT? Is Graham EATING REAL DOG POOP?? And then all the people will just FREAK OUT! AAAaaaaaahhhh it’s real dog poop! But really it’s chocolate. Because what color is chocolate? DOG POOP COLOR.”

So today in between school and packing orders and finding a birthday present for this weird little boy, I’m going to figure out how in the heck to make an earth cake.

RAWRRRR!!!! More complex creatures!

Which, I’m mad at myself because it just occurred to me last night that in between cells/early life and dinosaurs (RAWR!!) we should have spent a week studying on the oceans. Dang it. If you ever notice me missing an obvious step like that please say so. Anyway next year we’ll do ocean life before dinosaurs. RAAWR! Sorry. I’ve spent the week playing with plastic dinosaurs (RARR!!) and I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

Monday
On Monday we talked about the time scale and what happened in between cells and dinosaurs. We wanted to show that evolution isn’t linear and deliberate, and that the environment shapes what works and what doesn’t. So Graham and I did what most people do when they want to learn about the mechanism of natural selection and environmental pressures: we went to the store and bought 16-bean soup. Which isn’t really soup so much as a bag of sixteen different kinds of beans. It contains sixteen because fifteen would be too bland, but twenty different beans would be a cacauphanous mess.

None of that matters because we weren’t going to eat it. We zipped home and set up a game called Evolution. The first time we played, each player started out with a cup of beans and a big piece of colored construction paper. I’d written survival rules of the environment on slips of paper and put them in the middle of the table.

Kevin and each of the boys drew their rules randomly and then spent ten minutes or so culling beans that didn’t work under their set of rules.

When we start doing most of these activities, I have no idea how well they’re going to work so the result was a pleasant surprise. The bowls all started out with similar random mixes and each person’s bowl ended up looking quite different.

Tuesday
We tried a different way of playing the evolution game, this time focusing on offspring. They called it the Baby Bean Game. Each kid started with just two beans. On every turn you had to draw a rule from the pile and you had to apply the rule depending on your environment — for example, “A tiger eats the first five beans it sees.” would mean death to the lighter-colored beans if you had a dark background.

We took turns rolling a die to see how many babies were added into the system. The babies always looked like the parents unless you drew a MUTATION card.

This way of playing, while still not perfect, was more fun and lead to more conversations about how the environment’s rules make it harder for some to have offspring and easier for others. So after that we had a basis for understanding why totally different creatures might evolve similar features — I could ask them “Well, what rules might they have had in that environment?”

After that we let the boys just play with the beans for awhile because little kids like playing with dry beans very much. Then the boys and I read part of a book about prehistoric life, starting with the development of ocean creatures and right up to the point where plants moved onto land. And then… guess what happened next…? Amphibians! which led to… RAWRRR!! DINOSAURS!

We practiced walking around like pre-dinosaur reptiles. To do this, lay down like you are going to do a push up. Now put your arms out sideways — think lizard, crocodile, and etc. Crawling around like that, your stomach stays close to the ground and you can’t crawl very fast. Now pull your arms under you and crawl around. Real hips! Supportive knees! That was the big fancy thing that dinosaurs invented.

Wednesday
It took us until Wednesday to really jump all the way into dinosaurs. First I wanted to introduce the idea of classification, because I’m a jerk that way. These concepts are important! I’ve decided. That morning I borrowed Nicolaus’ awesome nature quilt and we dumped out our huge enormous bucket of plastic animals. Sheep, snakes, horses, monkeys, cats, cows, birds, dinosaurs, tigers, elephants, sea creatures — they all live together in one giant clear plastic bin.

We played a pretend game, where we were all aliens from a far-away planet. Graham and I returned from a research mission to earth where we were supposed to bring back models and examples of Earth’s different life forms and present them to Dr.Nicolaus, the planetary life scientist.

BUT unfortunately on our return trip home, our ship was struck by a meteor. All of our models got all jumbled up and there was a fire that destroyed most of our notes. So now our job was to work with Dr.Nicolaus to come up with a way to organize what we’d found.

I first proposed grouping things by color. So tigers went together with certain fish, and dogs were grouped with dinosaurs. Graham’s idea was to group them by size. Nicolaus wanted to group them by what they eat. He’s always concerned about keeping his herbivore toys safely away from his carnivorous toys.

This went on until it occurred to Nicolaus to ask how they *really* group the animals. I acted all innocent as if that wasn’t exactly where this was headed all along. Oh! Well, let me think… they are grouped into first plants vs animals. Then animals are grouped on whether or not they have a spine. The boys were annoyed by this, they didn’t think that was a great division. So I lined up three animals: An alligator, a cow, and a jellyfish. We played “One of these things is not like the other” basically — which two are more alike? Which one is different? Thank goodness they said the jellyfish.

Next we talked about bugs and exoskeletons vs regular skeletons. The differences between mammals and reptiles. Annnnnd such and such.

Now… finally! Finally! It was time for dinosaurs. I asked the boys to group the dinosaurs into different types.

My original plan was to teach them the proper classification of the main types of dinosaurs, but then I stayed up late one night reading about this until I understood the difference. REALLY, dinosaur scientists? You divide them according to the relative angle of this one bone compared to the hips?

The difference difficult to see on a skeleton and impossible for kids to see when the toy or model or picture has skin and everything. Then you add that one group is considered bird hipped and the other is considered lizard hipped and guess which group birds evolved from? HINT: Not the bird ones.

So yeah. We’ll come back to that in a few years.

So instead we used play dough to make tracks and then tested each other’s dinosaur track identification skills. This was neat, except that Graham could not stand to see us suffer for even one second. “Try THIS one!” he’d say, nudging the correct dinosaur towards you. And if you guessed wrong he felt so sorry for you that he almost cried.

I also downloaded two audio books: The first Magic Treehouse, and another story which is basically Jurassic Park for children.

The boys listened to the stories while they cut and pasted together their own dinosaur skeletons while I gathered up a whole big bin full of plastic dinosaurs and all of our books and stories about dinosaurs, and listened with them and tried to figure out how the author of this doesn’t get sued by Michael Chrichton every single day.

Thursday
Thursday we woke up early and went to a little diner for breakfast. The boys wanted to bring their dinosaurs, which was excellent because my plan was to teach them about why fossils have to be handled so delicately. We ordered a blueberry muffin and their job was to find as many whole blueberries as they could and to extract them without damaging them.

They were excited because oh! This will be SO easy! The muffin appeared to be full of blueberries. But it turned out that finding WHOLE blueberries still in tact was difficult, and pulling them out in one piece was a challenge. Graham used a butter knife to gently scrape away crumbs while Nicolaus used his tweezers to pull each one out.

At several points some serious, semi-destructive excavation was necessary.

I don’t know how much we learned about paleontology doing this, but we learned that a large blueberry muffin can have as few as four whole blueberries.

That afternoon we did an activity aimed at emphasizing that no one really knows what dinosaurs looked like. All we can do is make good guesses, but really it’s another mystery box.

Which is good because I forgot to do a mystery box this week.

I printed out various dinosaur skeletons and let them each pick one. They taped it to the table. Then we put a clear transparency over the skeleton picture and taped it down.

Using a sharpie (we love sharpies very much here at the Ard School), they drew the shape they imagined their dinosaur’s body might have had based on his skeleton.

Then they flipped their transparency over and painted it. Nicolaus decided his dinosaur was metallic blue.

Again, it is always cool to me to see him working hard on this stuff.

Graham meanwhile, didn’t want to paint his. He decided that his outline of a dinosaur looked like it was wearing a spacesuit, so he gave it a jetpack. Then he drew more dinosaurs and gave them jetpacks too.

Then he announced he was going to invent his own kind of dinosaur, not using any bones to start with. What can you do? There’s a reason they don’t have kindergarten for three year olds. Because teachers would die from the cuteness of stuff like this:

On Friday I woke up needing a nap. I couldn’t figure out a way to watch Walking with the Dinosaurs or any other documentary but YouTube provided us with enough clips of Dinosaurs that I was able to sleep for 30 minutes while my children presumably learned a great deal.

Then we read about fossilization and did some of those Flash games showing how fossils are formed. Oh my goodness, have you ever studied this stuff? It’s a wonder any fossils are ever formed at all!

Afterwards they wanted to make their own. I didn’t have any plaster or access to a natural river basin and a dead animal so instead we pressed dinosaur footprints into bread and then toasted it. Hey! Fossilized footprints! Or something.

Bless my children’s low standards. They thought this was the coolest thing ever and went on to experiment with different toaster settings to determine how to get the maximum coolness without burning the toast.

That afternoon Kevin was off work, so we all went to the science museum. The boys immediately pointed out which skeletons weren’t dinosaurs based on the shape of the legs. Yay, learning! We looked at the teeth, took in the insane scale of these things, and rocked the children’s fossil dig which was way easier than extracting blueberries from a crumbly muffin.

That was the week. Rawrr! Though really, dinosaurs have spilled over into the weekend and we are still talking about them now. This week we are moving on to the rise of mammals. I’m still putting together the plan for the week, so if you have any suggestions for teaching about mammals and their many adaptations, please share them. Oooh and! Next week is early humans so – same deal.

I’m behind on posting these so there will be two this weekend. LAST week was all about the very earliest life on earth. This lead to a wonderful week of discussions about cells, DNA, and other teeny tiny things that we are all allegedly made of even though they frankly seem a little too small to actually exist.

On Monday
To start off the week, I asked them what’s the difference between things that are alive and things that aren’t?

Then we looked for examples of each: Is this salt shaker alive? No. Is that bug outside alive? Yes. Is this glass alive? No.

Then I pointed to the wooden table. Is this alive?
Graham said no. Nicolaus said “Yes! I mean… NO. I mean… No.”

They held a quick meeting and told me we need a third group: things that used to be alive.

Ah-ha! They had hit on something very cool. The need to define organic vs inorganic. This is the kind of thing that we can instinctively identify I think, all they needed was a name for it.

Next we talked about dogs. We spend a lot of time at dog parks so they have seen all kinds of dogs. My question was: What is a dog? How do you know when an animal you see is a dog and not something else? And: How does a DOG know when he sees another animal whether it’s a dog or not?

Every time one of them came up with a defining characteristic, the other would counter it because we’d seen a dog that didn’t have it. The result was something like: Dogs are pets that have four legs and are sort of like wolves except they don’t really always look like wolves. Some do, but a lot of them? Don’t.

The answer of course lies in something that we can’t see, but that we can somehow recognize: DNA.

So based on what we learned a couple of weeks ago about molecules, we started talking about what DNA is and what cells are, and what the first life was like. At some point Kevin mentioned that it was a holiday, but whatever! School is too much fun. We spent the afternoon reading and question-answering-looking things up.

Then Graham wanted to practice numbers, so we did.

On Tuesday
Kevin and the boys gathered different things to look at under the microscope. This was partly successful. Our microscope is surprisingly powerful considering that it came from Toys R Us three years ago and we’ve never changed the battery and Nicolaus carried it around with him for a long time as a conversation starter.

BUT. We didn’t have any good slides or coverslips. Still, we did our best and the boys were able to see some actual cells.

In any case, that afternoon when I took them to the dog park Graham ignored the dogs and continued his search for things he wanted to see under the microscope.

Wednesday
We did a little online biology flash game about the three main types of cells. They love simple flash animated learning activities — the ones where you click and drag things to where they go. They always remind me of colorforms.

But then my inlaws showed up and almost no school work happened after that for the afternoon. As they were leaving, I was pulling out muffin tins and dropping cupcake papers into them. My mother in law said “Oh! You must be going to bake cupcakes.”

What? Bake? No! We’re doing a project. I shooed them out the door and we set to work creating our own cells.

We first put all kinds of materials in muffin tins, then I propped up a little $1.29 teacher-store poster that shows the parts of the cell.

Then I gave each kid a tupperware bowl and two gallon-sized ziploc bags.

For each part of the cell, the boys picked an object out of the muffin tin buffet that they wanted to use for that part. As they did this we also had fun saying the names and talking about what they do, even though learning the terms is 100% not the point. The names are just funny sounding, so they liked hearing them.

Once they were satisfied with their selections, we dumped their cell parts into ziploc bags, poured in water/cytoplasm, zipped them up. Then put the water-filled bag inside another bag to prevent giant leaking messes.

Oh my holy heck. You should make your own cell models this weekend. Even if you don’t have kids! This was so much fun. I’m going to annoy you with lots of pictures now.

And the results!
This was a plant cell that one of them made…

Here is a prokaryotic cell. Note that there are fewer components and the DNA yarn isn’t contained in packing tape.

Thursday and Friday
They showed off their cells to Kevin until one sprung a leak. (cell model, not kid. Which isn’t to say that Graham hadn’t peed but just that I don’t specifically remember that he did. Whereas I do specifically remember the messy cell.)

Rushed all to the bathtub where they still reside. Need to throw them away one night when the boys aren’t looking. Shhhh. That day we also…
* watched Swiss Family Robinson
* ate helix-shaped pasta
* Graham showed me his chart of the human body with different kinds of cells. Very confusing that they put a picture of a fetus so close to the different kinds of cells.
* watched Julia Child talking about the primordial soup. AWESOME.
* generally talked a lot about cells, how they came together, how they joined up to make more complicated creatures. Graham still doesn’t believe that NOTHING more complicated existed back then.
* Painted our own primordial SOUUUp

That night we painted messy pictures of the primorrrrdiallll soup. After the pictures dried the boys added lightening. They really love the idea of chemical SOUP. The dinosaur guys could really take a cue from whoever came up with the term primordial SOUP. I haven’t seen Nicolaus work this hard on a painting in a long time.

On Friday they used Sharpies to add cells to their paintings.
Nicolaus was eager to fast forward to more complex creatures…

I highly recommend Prang’s glitter watercolors for painting primordial anything.

So that was it — early life, how it made the jump to form animal and plant cells, what’s the main difference, cells have parts and contain instructions called DNA.

This week was more complex life leading up to dinosaurs. RAWR!! DINOSAURS! But before I can post that I have to take the dog to the vet. RAWR! VET!!

I’m not going to bed. I’m not even sleepy! I’m just going to go lay down in my bed and read for a little while before I get back up and do the dishes and all.

It’s okay to wear overalls once in awhile. Nobody will really pay attention or judge me for looking like a dork.

Alright, we’ll eat in the car this one time. But no fast food.

And if we DO give in to fast food, we won’t leave the cups in the car.

And if we DO leave the cups in the car, it won’t matter because I will clean the car out in a day or so anyhow.

My Rocket Dog shoes don’t make my feet hurt.

That wet spot on the floor? That’s not pee.

This meal is all organic, so it must be healthy.

My diet aimed at curing my stomach problems is more than ad-hoc system of superstitions built up over three decades. Because honestly, what kind of scientific-method based diet would reveal that a person is supposed to live off of rice, corn tortillas, brocolli, and peanut butter?

By the time he is four, Graham will stop peeing everywhere all the time.

And so will the dog.

This thing I’m buying is a good bargain, and definitely won’t clutter up our house.

We live in a house.

Of course I have time for another project!

My hair looks cute this way.

I will fold these in the morning.

It will only take 15 minutes to make a quick trip to the grocery store.

I’m only going to hop online for a minute.

It won’t hurt to let the boys use my art pens just this once.

I will remember this awesome idea in the morning.

I’m just putting this stack of stuff over here so we can clear it all off the table while we eat. I’ll go through it all and put it away after dinner.

I’m going to use this package of ground beef to make something besides tacos.

I am going to hit publish before I fall asleep.