Games, Genes, and Gizmos

Today was down day galore! We played games, watched movies and just hung out. Ok, I did take most of the haunted house down, but only because A wanted to get stuff out of the library and she needed the cobwebs off the shelves. We browsed, finding a bug sticker book my dad had given them for Christmas, I believe. The girls played with that for a while, but the spiders were freaking A out, so she moved on. She even had me turn off the tv when Steve Erwin was holding a deadly spider later in the day! Anyway, they both played with this geography toy that has different games/quizzes. They like the one where you press the country and it plays some of the music of that land. When the game shuts down, it goes through all the countries, with a voice saying "good bye" in all the languages. Japan says, "saonara" (sp?), of course, but not like we usually hear it (si YO na ra). They say it the way they say it in Japan, si OR na RA, very fast. So, I was saying that over and over, just because I like the way it sounds. A asked me to please stop, I was being annoying! I guess I deserved it. Or maybe she was just sore that I had beat her in Go Fish. She really wanted to play Cadoo some more, but with C at work and neither of them reading well enough, I could only be the card reader with them playing against each other. It really is too far beyond E's abilities, so she could not hold her own and it just frustrated her. We had to put that one aside till daddy can play with us, playing on teams, one kid, one adult. So the cards came out and A and I played Go Fish. She is just now getting good at holding the cards in her hands, and very proud of that, so I see more card games in the future here.

At one point in the day I was trying to answer A's question about a scene she had seen in the Goblet of Fire trailer yesterday. She wanted to know if the beautiful girls in blue were Veelas. I said no, that they were the students from Beauxbatons and that Fleur Delacour' grandmother was a Veela. She said, so she is half Veela. No, she is only one quarter Veela, at most. Then I tried to explain that you could only inherit 25 percent of your genes from any one grandparent. She said that she had no idea what I was talking about. My first desire was to find a better way to explain it, but I realized that that would do very little good, since she did not care enough to absorb it right now. I'll have to keep Mendel and his peas on the back burner a tad longer, I guess.

We got the movie Robots from netflix today, so we had a movie night tonight, snuggling in my bed to watch it. What a cute movie! I really loved the message, "you can shine no matter what you are made of". Sounds like unschooling to me!