One of the most exciting adventures of this year has been the construction of our new house in Rockville.  It started out as a small, old home originally built in the 1940's.  Most of the original structure was in good shape (except for the electrical!), so we were able the retain almost the entire original home and simply expand it to fit our family.  Since the kids are always asking me if our new house is ready yet, I thought that making a paper chain would be a good way to help them see how much time is left.  We will remove one link each day as we count down the days to the big move (about 90 days from now, give or take).

The kids had a lot of fun making this project, which took us about an hour to complete.  Jillian (age 4 1/2) was meticulous in her cutting, and opted mainly for pink and purple paper.  Peter (age 7 9/10) sped through his part of the project and used a palate of mostly red, blue and yellow.  I was very surprised by Miranda (age 3) who was amazingly dexterous with her scissors and learned to cut straight lines very quickly.  They also all enjoyed using the stapler (with some help, of course) to make their paper strips into circles.  Isabella (age 3) wanted nothing to do with this craft (as usual), so he just sat at the table with us cutting colored paper into confetti sized pieces while consuming large quantities of Trix yogurt (a product which I am beginning to suspect is not actually yogurt, but simply moist, pink sugar).  Even so, she shared her siblings' pride in the end result.  It was a fun project to start this rainy day with!

So now it's nearly 10:30 and I suppose it's time for me to change out of my pajamas and do some "real" school work.  Or not.  I'm seriously contemplating scrapping the regular curriculum for today and seeing what else we can do that is educational.  I picked up a great book from the library that leads kids through solving a crime by using math (since my son is always asking me why he needs to know math).  It appears to be at about the 2nd-6th grade level, but they give you help with the harder math questions at the end of the book.  Decisions, decisions....