Jonathan's birthday is Saturday and he wants to go to the Baltimore Aquarium. In keeping with his chosen theme, he picked out a book about great white sharks today at Costco. It's a pretty cool book. As you open each page, a system of the shark's 3-D body is exposed and the page is all about that particular system (like the dermal system, the skeletal system, the nervous system, etc.) He's been devouring it all day.

He also wants to play pin the tail on the donkey on his big day, so this week, during Nicholas' naps, we'll be making a donkey and a bunch of tails.

He wants strawberry cake, just like last year, but I've given up on trying to make one from scratch. Mine haven't turned out well with any of the many recipes I've used. I think I'm going to get an angel food cake, slice it into layers, cover it in strawberries and whipped cream, and layer it over and over again. It will be very pretty, and I think he'll like it.

Hmmm, what else? Oh, he wants to go to Chuck E. Cheese for dinner, and after that we're supposed to open presents and eat cake and ice cream. He has everything all planned out. Now I just have to make it happen.

He made a list last month of all the Bionicles he wants, so we got him some of those. I picked up some new jeans for him, as his are fading fast. I picked up a Jimmy Neutron book for him since he's been running around squealing about Brain Blasts for the last several months. I got Benjamen and Nicholas Blue's Clues and Maisy videos, respectively. I have some tree blocks but I can't decide whether I want to give them to Jonathan or if I should save them for Benjamen's or Nicholas' birthdays which are coming at the beginning of May and the end of June, respectively. We also have a Radio Flyer wheel barrow that we've had in reserve for years, now. I think it's time to bring it out for someone's birthday, now that we're going to have our own house and yard.

I dunno. I think it will all come together somehow. I'm just going to have to do a little hustling to make it all happen the way he's planned it. I think it's going to be a long day.

In the mean time, it's going to be a pretty unstructured week with all of the house stuff, the birthdays (mine's Friday), and the general craziness of packing. I have no plans whatsoever with regard to homeschooling. Rightly enough, when I make no plans for learning, we inevitably experience a spurt of interesting and meaningful lessons.

We're making Valentines, constructing dinosaur LEGOs, decreasing TV watching from 2 shows a day to 1 (no small feat when we can't go outside b/w the weather and the ickies), playing scads of computer games to make up for the TV deprivation, I guess, putting together puzzles, making banana pudding, eating Ranger Rick up (Jonathan informed me that we can't move to the country because it would cause sprawl, which would cause wildlife displacement and water runoff from all of the roofs and pavement, which would cause erosion and flood the streams. :::Sigh::: All of my dreams of a country home dashed.), playing board games, learning more about chess, reading, reading, reading. Jonathan's still doing that weird multiplication/division stuff in his head; Benjamen has started taking an interest in more letters and what they look like; Nicholas' vocabulary has exploded. Instead of keeping track of the words he does say, I've realized it's almost easier to keep track of the words he doesn't say. And he's been singing for the past month or so. I love that stage in babyhood.

In other words, we're all still learning and playing and growing, despite mom's preoccupation with the telephone, taking and receiving calls all day long from realtors and lenders and lawyers.

Still house shopping, so Jonathan's mostly learning on his own. We did some activities for Groundhog Day, though. First thing this morning we checked to see what the weather would be for the next six weeks and Jonathan was delighted that Punxsutawney Phil had seen his shadow. He hasn't gotten to make a snowman yet this year, between the sparse (and not snowman-buildable) snows we've had and his being too sick to go out in the one snowman-worthy snow that we have had. So yeah, he was psyched.

We read about the history of Groundhog Day, fog, and a bit of meteorology. I printed out a word search for him and we colored some groundhogs, some who had seen their shadow and some who had not.

He's been freaking me out with more spontaneous multiplication and division, mostly using his LEGOs:

Mom, if I make these cells out of these individual molecules, and there are 4 molecules in each cell, and I only have 20 molecules, then I can only make five cells. Weird.

FYI: molecules are individual LEGOs, in case that didn't come across.

He's mostly over this latest bout of ick, and Benjamen's a couple days behind him, clearing up, but still snuffly and coughing alot. Nicholas is in the thick of it, complete with nose bubbles that put Bazooka to shame, a deep, wet, chesty cough, but his spirits haven't been dampened, and he hasn't had any fever.

So, between the ickies and the house hunting/lender wrangling, I've not put alot of effort into planned activities. Jonathan's doing tons of self-directed stuff, scads of reading, and loads of playing, though, and dragging Benjamen along for the journey, so it's all good.