Did You Miss Me?

I don't even have any good excuse, I just somehow haven't managed to blog lately. So, the mother of all catch-up posts, in no particular order:

• We've been to Sesame Place a couple times already this summer. Little Bit LOVES LOVES LOVES the water! She has NO fear! She happily wades out into water up to her chest, when it knocks her over and she gets a face full of water, she just laughs.
• Little Bit is less impressed with "rides". She just kind of endures them, so we don't take her on many.
• The big girls are beginning to realize that the reason Sesame Place puts upper age limits on some things is because they're boring for big kids. This is a good thing (last year they were still very upset knowing they would soon outgrow some things).
• The first part of May I went to the CHAP homeschool convention. All three girls stayed with Daddy. Little Bit did FINE! She seemed more excited to see the kittens when she got home the first evening (Daddy took the girls to Grandmom's for the day) than to see me LOL. As always, I loved all that I learned and all the shopping I did at the convention :-)
• Other running around we've done in the past month or so includes the Baltimore Zoo, the MD Sheep & Wool Festival . . .
• Things I don't remember if I've already mentioned here or not include: Valley Forge (the CD driving tour they sell in the gift shop is AWESOME! And, as always, the Jr Ranger program is a hit), Historic Philadelphia, an Alpaca farm . . . and probably other things I'm forgetting.
• In school we've been having fun gardening, including adding a butterfly garden, but it was really hot & dry right after we planted it, and I was having trouble w/ the hoses so I'm not sure if any of the flowers will make it, we'll see. . . . the girls also decided they wanted to learn cursive (or curlicubes, as they insist on calling it) so we've been working on that.
• One thing I learned at the CHAP convention was about learning styles, and that both As are kinesthetic learners (learn through motion). A2 is also an auditory learner. I'm a visual learner, and extremely low auditory, which is why I'd always dismissed her complaints about various noises distracting her from doing her copywork. So . . . we've made some changes to how we do school. One thing we did was bring the yoga ball up from the basement and they often bounce on it while they're doing memorywork & such. We also got silly putty for them to play with when we're discussing things or listening to things. And we got inexpensive mp3 players for each of the girls so they can listen to classical music to drown out other noises when they're doing copywork and such. I've also been downloading the free tracks from Blue Behemoth which often includes a single animal track from the Jonathan Park cds. I hadn't been sure what to do w/ them since they're only a few minutes long, but now I put them on the girls' mp3 players and they LOVE them.
• Their reading continues to improve. Though A1 still enjoys reading for fun more than A2 does. (A1 is now reading an Eric B Hare book)
• A2 is very into cooking right now. She loves it when she can prepare a meal all by herself, we've been eating lots of salads & grilled cheese lately LOL.
• And I'm sure there's a million & one things I'm forgetting, but campmeeting starts tomorrow so I must get busy!