Over the past couple days we've done so much just relaxing at home and not having to rush anywhere! We've been watching the Olympics and talking about all the countries competing, and the girls have been checking out some of their Top Secret Agent books on the different countries and making the criminal cards into a trading card game.

Yesterday morning Emily wanted to play with the Magnetic Poetry set we recently purchased, so we were all sitting together on the floor, making up a poem about the Superheroes. It was difficult trying to find specific words we wanted in the huge sea of little magnet letters, so we ended up sorting them into different categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions and pre/suffixes.

This morning I was working a crossword puzzle next to Julia, keeping her company while she was coloring her mozaic patterns. She started asking me questions about the puzzle and eventually asked when crosswords were invented, so we researched all about the history of crossword puzzles and found out they first appeared in a New York publication in 1913.

The kids have spent most of their days playing with our neighbor, who's been at our house pretty much non-stop since he moved in. They're having fun playing legos, neopets and pokemon, but primarily they spend their time playing an elaborate pirate game where they explore, trade treasure, sail the seas and battle one another, best I can tell. They do a really great job playing together and working things out--he's a really nice kid.

Today, we got some wicked thunderstorms in the afternoon, so the kids all climbed up into the loft to tell scary stories--some were a bit too scary and I ended up with Julia and Sam crying next to me. But, I think even they were having fun; it just got to be too much. The kids were also playing with the wooden tangram blocks, making elaborate geometric designs all over the living room floor. My job was to keep Boo, our pupppy, from careening into them and scattering them everywhere.