Skeletons, Pig's Brain, Eyeballs, Starfish....

I organized a trip with some other homeschoolers to the community college to see the human skeletons in the biology department. We also got to see a pig's brain, a cat's nervous system, a starfish, and models of the human eye, ear, heart, brain and the inside of a frog, a starfish, and some other cool things. E has an ongoing facination with anatomy and biology, so I knew she would love this. There were several real skeletons that had been there for 75 years, as well as a model skeleton that the kids got to touch and move.

I told the teacher that I had dropped out of her anatomy and phisiology class when I was 17, after trying it for 2 weeks. It was too hard to remember all those terms! But now that I'm learning alongside E, it's so much easier. Together we identified the ribcage, femur, carpals, metacarpals, tarsals, metatarsals, clavical, skull, patella, tibia, fibia, radius, ulna, and vertebrae. Some of them E remembered and others I helped her with. We saw a whale's vertebrae and I showed her the size comparison between it and a human vertebrae. We talked about the nervous system and how the eye and the ear and the brain work. She got to see the development of a real chicken, from egg to a chick ready to hatch.

Her favorite thing was the starfish. There was a real starfish and several models of the inside of a starfish. The teacher told us how the starfish turns it stomach inside out to grab it's food and then pulls the food inside it's body to digest it. E thought that was really cool, so when we came home, we looked for videos of the starfish eating. It was hard to find any good ones though. Most of the videos show the starfish from the top and we couldn't see what the stomach was doing underneath. I'm going to keep looking though and if I find a good one I'll post it.

Say Yes More- Day 2

Yesterday was Day 2 of the challenge. Saying yes lead to something pretty fun for the girls! First we made rain sticks with paper towel tubes and rice and aluminum foil on the inside. Then they wanted to play with just the rice.... YES! So, I let them do it in the kitchen where it was easy to sweep up. I gave them both a bowl full of rice and they had a blast. It ended up all over the kitchen floor, but they had at least a half an hour of fun together playing all kinds of pretend play like saying the rice was food for their chickens and dogs and chasing their animals back in the pen. And I got to do the dishes while they played! Well worth a few minutes of sweeping that needed to be done anyway.

We also read some books. E is really into princesses lately, so she enjoyed a fairy tale book we have with stories like Beauty and the Beast and Aladin. I don't think this version is the original stories, but they aren't the same as the Disney versions either.

An hour long appointment took a 4 hour trip, as our car is broken down so we had to ride the bus. The girls think the bus is a pretty fun novelty though and we had lots of good conversations. At the appointment, they got finger pricks to check their iron levels, so E and I talked about iron and blood. Because her blood was a bit thick, we talked about drinking enough water in this heat. She also was pretending to breath a flower all the way up her nose and into her body, and that led to a conversation about oxygen going into our lungs and then into our blood stream. So many things came up yesterday I can't even remember them all! Bus etiquette, lots of pretend play, and all kinds of questions and answers about where we were going and what we were doing.

I showed E how to play Solitaire yesterday and we also played Go Fish. Then D showed her how to play Poker.

Looking forward to seeing what today brings!

Shark Body Parts

My mom bought this model shark for E, and she's had so much fun putting it together and taking it apart. It has the skin, muscles, spine, brain, arteries, liver,reproductive organs and digestive system. One side is clear so you can see the insides once it's all put together. E thought it was quite interesting that sharks don't have many bones other than their spines and skulls. And they don't have very big brains either.

Arasa the Mouse

One of our residents brought us a live baby mouse today to let us know that they are in his apartment. At first, D was going to kill it, but it was so cute we couldn't do it. We tried to feed it some rice milk in an eye dropper and to keep it warm with a rag in a box. E really liked it, she named it "Arasa" and called it her baby. It looked like it was doing ok for a while. It slept some, and then perked up and crawled around the box. We held it a few times. It was hard to tell if it was drinking any of the rice milk, but I thought it might have gotten a little.

I thought about pumping some breast milk for it, but I didn't make it to the shed to dig out the pump soon enough. It died this evening. I don't know if the breast milk would have helped anyway. The whole day was probably just too much shock and trauma on it's little body. I'm sure it was still nursing, so being away from it's mommy was just too much. Poor little baby! E was a little sad when it died and held it for a while. At first she thought it was going to come back to life. I told her that it's body was still here, but it's spirit is in heaven with Yeshua.

Then she started asking a bunch of questions about it's body, it's bones, it's heart, it's skin. So, call me weird.... I asked her if she wanted to dissect it. A few weeks ago she saw a deer get skinned after being shot, and she did really well with that. I was a little hesitant about the whole thing, but we explained that we only kill animals to eat and that it wasn't in any pain. She was happy to eat the meat when we got home, so I guess she wasn't traumatized.

She said she did want to dissect the mouse, so we looked at it's intestines, skin, bones, heart. For the record, I never even dissected the frog in high school, so this was all new to me. It was slightly disturbing for me, but really fascinating for her. She's been interested in everything about the body for a while now. She's been watching DK Eyewitness movies- the Human Machine and Skeletons- over and over.

Ironically, we had just watched the movie Ratatouille this morning.



This was after it died- it was a lot cuter when it was alive. I'll try to remember to take pictures of the burial tomorrow.

Busy, busy

Wow, we've been so busy I've hardly posted lately! Then we were sick last week- yuck!

Let's see... we went to the Janzten beach carousel with some friends. It's beautiful and E had so much fun!

Our garden is producing massive amounts of tomatoes and cucumber. I love both of those, but there's only so many salads and sandwiches a person can eat!

We went to Powell's- the world's largest book store. I only got to browse the kid's section, since D's brother was visiting and I let them do their thing while I watched the kids. When my mom visits, I want to go back and check out the rest.

E found a book there called ALIVE and it's all about the body. I'm hoping I can find it for her at the library. She can't get enough of body books right now. We got a bunch at the library, but they aren't nearly as good as ALIVE. We've been talking about bone marrow, ventricles, cells, neurons, platelets, tibia, radius, ulna, skull, dentricles, carpels, intestines..... I explain some things in simpler language, but a lot of times she just wants me to read the books.

We've discovered some new favorite movies. E really likes Balto since it's about dogs (another current favorite thing), and we just discovered Harold and the Purple crayon. It's cute! She's also enjoying the Signing Time movies. They are sign language movies that show the signs for different themes. And I have the Wonder Pets song permanently imprinted on my brain- "It's Seweus!" lol

She got to see some new dogs too. I cleaned a house for a friend who has two dogs and E came with me. She's always pretending to be a dog complete with howling like a wolf. She calls all her food dogfood, and I'm just waiting for some stranger to think I'm a horrible mother when she asks for her "dogfood" in public. :)


This morning E discovered that one of her coloring books has letters in it that are the kind where the lines are broken up so kids can write over them to learn how to make them. She thought the was really cool and wrote E, H, I over and over. And she got to go swimming today at an apartment building managed by the same company that we work for. We've had an open offer to swim there all summer and D and E finally did it today. We'll have to take her back a few times again before it's too late.

L is cranky every morning until she gets a morning nap. I think she needs more sleep in the mornings, but gets woken up by a wet diaper and the rest of us moving around. Then she's too busy playing to go back to sleep, but too sleepy to really enjoy herself. Not sure how I'm going to help her with that.... for now I've just been nursing her a lot all morning long. Maybe I'll start wearing her more- she's happy if she's in the carrier and maybe she'll fall asleep that way. And she's climbing non-stop. On the chairs, the table, IN the kitchen drawers. Pulling stuff out of the drawers and turning off the tv. It's the age of perpetual redirecting... But she's SO CUTE and so much fun! She has two all purpose words "Ow" and "Ah Oh." She walks around all day "Ah oh! Ah oh!"

So, that's all I can think of that's happened in the last few weeks. I have some new projects in the works, but nothing I'm ready to share yet. Still, they have been taking up time. And I've been doing more meditating and mindfulness practices, which I'm going to do a different post about.

What are our bodies made of?

E has been asking a lot of "what is ______ made of?" type questions lately. When I told her that our bodies are made of water, blood, skin, bone then she wanted to know what's skin made of? What's blood made of? and so on. I took an anatomy class in college and promptly dropped it after about 2 weeks once I realized that another science class would meet the same requirement. So, I was stumbling trying to figure out how to take my limited knowledge and break it down for a 3 year old. And she was NOT satisfied with simplistic answers anyway.

I did some google searching and came up with The Body Systems website. It has a compilation of links that show how all the body systems work. Most of the links were too much reading and not enough pictures for her. But a few of them had good animations.

We spent a lot of time last night looking at those links. Then we ended up on youtube watching a video about angioplasty. That led to other youtube videos including some homebirth movies. It was hard to find any good ones though. Laura Shanley's are my favorite, but they are always getting removed for being "too graphic." It's easy to find videos of hospital births where all you see are the doctors and the woman's legs, and hear her screaming and machines beeping and some misguided husband yelling PUSH. C-section videos are easy to find too- like a baby being ripped out of a woman's stomach isn't graphic?! But they take down all the good ones that show beautiful, peaceful, calm births with- Oh My Gosh- Vaginas!

Sorry, rabbit trail.... back to E's questions. She likes watching birth videos. I started showing them to her before L was born, so she'd know what to expect. The other day we went to the library and I found one movie called In the Womb which shows the baby's development from conception to birth. The other one we got is called Living Body. I was surprised how long both of them held her attention. She didn't really listen to anything they were saying, I think because the vocabulary is over her head. But she kept asking me "what's that? Why is it doing that? How does that work?" so I was able to explain it in easier language. We talked about cells, platelets, veins, bones, baby's skulls fusing, ear drums and balance, and all kinds of other things.

It's funny because the whole "where do babies come from?" question is pretty much answered all ready, and it's never been a big deal. The only piece she's missing is how the sperm gets inside the mommy. I think right now she thinks it's already there like the egg. I'll just keep providing her with little bits of age appropriate information as the questions arise.

Tonight she asked "mommy, did someone build my body?" And I said "Yes, God made your body in my tummy." She said, "Oh, that was really nice of him!" Yes, I think so too. :)