Family portrait

For those of you who are curious, this is what we look like.  Thank you, Bug, for the lifelike representation.

Earth science at age 5

I've really got to hand it to the Bug's teachers this year.  She's learning to read (I mean, really read), along with all kinds of other things.  Math word problems, spelling tests, book reports... in kindergarten?  I have loved their social studies-type units: France, Asia, American symbols.  And their current unit, Weather, is clearly making an impression.  She came home from school yesterday and made this:

After correctly describing evaporation, condensation and precipitation, she then (also correctly) called it, "The Lifecycle of a Raindrop."

Bring out the elves!

For the curious, I've circled the elves in the two pictures I posted yesterday.  That might be enough to help you spot 'em!

Detectives in the museum

On Sunday we went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to check out the Mammoths and Mastadon exhibit, which showcases the incredible fossils discovered recently at Snowmass.  It's a pretty incredible exhibit - lots of hands-on, videos and things to keep the kids interested.  The life-sized models of all the Ice Age mammals will blow you away.

Perhaps even more interesting, though, was something that we learned about the museums' permanent collection.  Apparently in the 1970s, diorama background painter Kent Pendleton hid tiny elves or leprechauns in his work.  This has inspired the appearance of other elves (in video and ceramic form) throughout the museum.

The visitor's information desk has a list of where these are located.  I'm sure you could try to find them unaided.... But believe me when I tell you they're hard to spot!  I bonked my head on the glass four times trying to find one for which I had the precise location in hand.  The kids loved them... almost as much as the adults did!

See anyone riding the dinosaur's back?

Can you spot one napping on a branch?

P.S. Want to see the "answers" tomorrow?? 

Self portrait with sister

The Bug has pretty much always been into art: coloring, painting, sculpting, whatever.  And she's pretty good at it.  One of the things she's been working on in school is attention to detail.  Her teacher wants to know the setting (Is the sun out?  Is it night time?), what the characters look like, that sort of thing.  [N.b., As part of her animal report about black panthers, she had to write/draw about what it eats.  She drew a smiling deer next to a smiling black panther... I guess the deer didn't know what was coming.]

All of this is pretty easy for the Bug - she envisions all of those details, and translating them to paper is intuitive to her.  She also enjoys making pictures for her sister, Mommy and Daddy, Mima and Boppie, Aunt Jessie, the baby cousins, etc., etc.  They don't always make it into the hands of the intended - she's always adding detail, and cutting them up.  I was able to snag this card to the Bunny before it was too destroyed.  Inside she wrote, "I love you [Bunny]. You r the best.  From [Bug]"

As you can see here, the front of the card depicts the Bug (on the left), the Bunny, a smiling bumble bee, dragonfly and butterfly, an ant hill, and an owl in a little tree.

Shanghai Girls

I read Lisa See's Shanghai Girls for a friend's book club, which will hopefully be my new book club, too.  First meeting is tonight, so fingers crossed.  Anyway, it's not a book I would have chosen on my own - the cover depicts two beautiful, smiling young Chinese women.  It looks pretty chick-lit.  Yeah, I know, you can't judge a book by its cover.  Except that sometimes you can.

The novel follows the lives of two sisters, our protagonist Pearl and her younger (and very much beloved by everyone) sister May, as their privileged Shanghai life crumbles before their eyes.  Their father has gambled away their fortune and arranges marriages to two American brothers to pay off his debts.  As the girls attempt to escape this fate, the Japanese army invades Shanghai as the Second Sino-Japanese War begins, and they ultimately land on a boat to the United States with the goal of reconnecting with the husbands they've only met once.

As their journey unfolds, they are hit with a series of tragedies: the brutal murder of their mother, a vicious gang rape, an unplanned and secret pregnancy, the discovery that their American husbands are broke, a struggle against racism and for American citizenship. 

The plot is actually intriguing, and See has done an incredible job of researching this book.  There are times when the women's story seems only to serve as a structure within which See can show off her knowledge of Chinese-American history.  In addition to the Battle of Shanghai, the Angel Island Immigration Station figures prominently, as does the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chaing Kai-shek, the rise of Mao's Red Army and historical figures from Los Angeles's Chinatowns (there were a couple of them) in the 1930s-50s. 

Unfortunately for See, her writing is not up to the ambitions of her story.  The book is told in the first person, present tense.  There are rare successes in first person, but I can't recall ever reading anything of substance in the first person present.  It's painful at times.  Further, she can't resist rubbing your face in the lessons of her novel.  For example, she wraps up a hundred pages that demonstrate the at times tense, always strong bond between May and Pearl with a lousy paragraph that states exactly this point.  Or she sticks a crummy paragraph about the perceived strength of men versus the inner strength of women in the middle of a book that shows exactly this. Also, the ending is completely contrived.

Next up: Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, translated by my favorites, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.  A neat, old hard copy - a gift from a friend one Christmas - has been sitting on my shelf for years, but as soon as I learned these two translated the novel, I picked up the new version. 

Hearts and hats

Valentine's Day happened as scheduled last Thursday (but it was followed by yet another extended weekend - four days off - so no time to write!)... And as scheduled, I was in charge of the class party.  Unfortunately, it was also a grand success, so I fear being called upon again.  Thanks to everyone who sent me suggestions!

We landed on the following:

• Craft #1: newspaper hats for the kids to decorate
• Craft #2: salt-dough ornaments for the kids to paint
• Game: plucking candy hearts out of a bowl of rice... with chopsticks
• Snack: red foods

Three hours and a bottle of wine later...

The salt dough ornaments were actually really easy.  2 parts flour, 1 part salt, 1 part warm water.  Mix, knead, roll, cut, bake.  The Bug's unstoppable sweet tooth led her to taste the dough, which looked to her like cookies.  Do yourself a favor and don't ever do that.  This is pretty good craft, too - the kids did a lovely job painting them, and they really didn't take me that long to make, all things considered.

The hats were hysterical.  I made them the night before, and it took hours.  No joke.  But it's kinda funny to have a bunch of privileged kids wearing newspaper on their heads. 

The game, also pretty funny.  A couple of the kids were big cheaters.  A couple absolutely could NOT get the hang of it.  Generally, though, they cheered each other on, they had fun, they weren't mean.  Plus, easy to set up.

The snacks.... who knows?  The punch looked horrific, the fruits looked pretty tasty.  But I missed snack center entirely trying to monitor the game. 

In other news, the Bunny's little class of 3-year-old boys + her voted on what they wanted for their party.  Basically, the boys agree with anything she suggests.  So they had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with strawberries.  Whatever will she do when she's not the only girl in class and therefore no longer pulls all the strings?

So, yeah, back to the party: total success.  Will I do it again?  Hopefully not.  But if I do, expect to see the New York Times plopped on your kids' heads.