Look, I found the kitchen counters!

Scott bought some shelves yesterday. He had to trim them down to fit the cabinets, but once he did, I started excavating. He had to go out to Lowe's again to find something to plane the sticky doors, and when he got home he said, "Hey, when did you get someone over to install counters in our kitchen?"

Moving out

We got to eat a pineapple from our backyard before leaving South Florida.



If April showers bring May flowers, what do Mayflowers bring? Furniture!



We made it all the way to St. Augustine the first day, and spent the next morning sight-seeing.



Next stop was Savannah. Our hotel was in the historic district and had a pool on the roof. We all had a good time spashing around on the first afternoon. Day two, we explored the touristy shops along the river and met my high school friend Beverly and her goddaughter for lunch and a tour of the Juliette Gordon Low house. Mary got a special pin and patch to wear on her Brownie uniform that you can only get when you visit the house.



The next day was a long drive from Savannah to our new home. The movers came the next day. They unloaded pretty quickly and were done by 1:30. Here's Scott the human trash compactor.



Here's the kitchen on the first day. It looks better now. At least, all the boxes are out. There's still a lot of stuff on the counter because we haven't figured out where to put it. There are only two upper cabinets, and they only have two shelves each. We tried to get lumber cut at Home Depot to make more shelves, but their saw was broken.

Grackle feeding another grackle

Reinvent the Wheel

Our new science unit is Inventions. We're using a book called Reinvent the Wheel, and so far we've reinvented the wheel (naturally), the shadouf (an ancient Egyptian device for watering crops, and a catapult.

First, we invented the potter's wheel, but I didn't take any photos. Next, we had to figure out how to use the wheel to make it easier to transport our cartload of goods to the marketplace. Dragging a travois over rough ground (okay, carpet) is a real drag. Our cart wheels were kind of floppy, so they didn't roll smoothly, but we were able to stablize them a little bit with some Play-Doh (I'm sure that's what the ancient Mesopotamians used as well).

We couldn't find a good forked stick for our shadouf. That's one of the problems of living where there are mostly palm trees. So we used the handle of our handy dandy pitchfork. The lever stick didn't swivel easily to water the crops, but the rocks taped to the stick sure made it easy to lift a heavy bucket of water -- just imagine the little paper cup is several times bigger.

-------Photos coming when Blogger isn't being so SLOW-------------

We built the catapult on a day when Scott stayed home sick from work so he could play with it, too. I don't mean he stayed home so he could play with the catapult. He was home, so we decided to build the catapult that day instead of the next day. Our farthest launch was 9.5 feet with a mini-marshmallow, and 5 feet with a large marshmallow. Science that involves marshmallows is always fun!

Butterfly Gardening

Here are some pictures of the new additions to our butterfly garden. First, there's Mary helping plant milkweed. Audrey loves using the watering can. She even watered the insides of her boots! They were very squishy when she was done, even after dumping the water out. When we went out to water the plants tonight, we found two caterpillars on the milkweed, a big one and a tiny one. We brought the big one in for closer observation. Pretty soon we'll have a monarch butterfly.

Spider eats dragonfly

Yesterday morning when I went out to get the paper, I saw a dragonfly stuck in a spider web. Mary and I watched the spider climbing around on its prey for a while. This morning, there wasn't much left of the dragonfly, and the spider had rebuilt its web.

Making connections in Greek

Today we were listening to this week's new vocabulary words, and the first one was biblion, meaning book. Mary said, "Hey, that sounds like the Spanish word for library!" It's neat to see her make connections like that. And it's amazing how many words that came into English (or Spanish, obviously) from Latin, came into Latin from Greek. Studying Greek instead of Latin makes me feel like we're looking back further into the history of language. I'm still convinced our word dowry is related to the Greek word doron (gift) from last week's vocabulary. I can't find a direct link in any online etymology site I've visited, but it seems they both come from the same Indo European root.