I tend to pick the worst days to go grocery shopping.
Somehow I didn’t know we had a snow storm coming our way today.
I would have postponed our shopping trip, but we were out of many essentials and nearly out of many more, like bread, oatmeal, half and half, milk, etc. In fact, I mixed the last of the half and half with the last of the milk this morning for my girls to have something to drink with their breakfast.
Anyway. We were out of lots of stuff. I had to go to the grocery store. Because of the crazy weather, it took me much longer than it normally does. Okay, truth is it was the weather plus the fact that I didn’t make a list so I had to double back to the same aisle at least three times because of forgetting something.
My point? We had little time for school this morning.
We did our calendar, sang our groundhog song (Groundhog Day is February 2!), read our groundhog books. And that was all we had time for.
I was kind of bummed, but it happens and we roll with it. I have three days left to do the rest of our letter G and Groundhog Day activities.
When Miss came down from her “rest time” (she no longer takes naps), she saw one of my husband’s professional books lying on the chair next to me. The book is titled “Atlas of Vascular Anatomy.” She wanted to look at it, her sisters were still sleeping, and I saw a golden opportunity. So we dove in. She was naturally more interested in the color illustrations in the book than the more frequently occurring black and white angiogram photos. She stopped on each and every page that had one of these color pictures, pointed at the things she saw, and asked me what they were.
Now, obviously this book is totally over my head in its detail. However, I was able to tell her what each of the pictures were in basic terms (heart, spine, brain, lungs, arteries, veins, etc.). When I wasn’t sure about some of the specifics, I just looked at the captions. I pointed to the different parts of her body where the organs we were looking at are located. We got into some basic physiology too, like what the heart and lungs and brain do, the difference between arteries and veins, and so forth.
She was so interested, so I just kept talking. She asked tons of questions. I was able to answer almost all of them.
Incidentally, this was a lesson that lent itself to lots of tickling. We had so much fun!
When the girls get older, my husband will definitely be able to give them much better anatomy and physiology (any type of science for that matter) lessons than I can. But for now, I can handle anatomy on a preschool level.
Back to groundhogs tomorrow!
